Trailer is up!

Post-production... HUGE UPDATE!

Hello everyone.  It has been a while.  I do apologize.  You never realize how easy it is to leave your normal life to go shoot a movie for a month - only to suddenly be forced back into reality a few short weeks later.  Reality is definitely not as fun as being on set.  But let me fill you in on what has been happening lately.

After we wrapped, Dan and I took a few days off to catch up on sleep.  And then began the editing.  Now, I am not one who really likes to edit.  The task seems way more daunting to me than actually getting the film in the can.  The thought of having to go through about 50 hours worth of footage and dragging it down to an hour and a half is just absurd.  This is why I am not the editor.  

Dan finished the first rough cut of the film in about 3 weeks.  For those who don't know, this is ridiculously fast.  Most films take about 3 months to get that far.  Basically, what this entails, is just getting the movie together.  The scenes are edited, and that's about it.  There is no tweaking of the audio, no real music is laid down, no sound effects, and no coloring.  I'll get into what each of those mean later on.  Basically, this is, as the name implies, the rough edit.  

We showed the rough cut to a few people.  However, this one is usually kept buried pretty deep.  After making a few notes, Dan then goes through and starts to really tweak the project. The rough cut was just under 2 hours.  This is running a little long, so it is important that we can find some scenes to cut from the movie that don't take away from the actual story.  This is where you see the "deleted scenes" in some of the extras on dvds.  It's really hard to cut some scenes - most of the time, they are well executed, acted well, and just an overall good scene - but it can be taken out.  So they're gone!

The second and third edit were more of the same.  We would make notes on the film, take some stuff out, add others, rinse and repeat.  Last week we actually had our first focus group screening.  This was the first time to show the movie in front of an audience that is not directly connected with the film.  The edit is a little further along.  We've done a few more tweaks and some quick clean up of the audio.  Bubba, our assistant editor has done a fantastic job helping in this area.  Once Dan had done the major editing, Bubba was able to come in and really clean and tweak the footage.  The best part about getting it ready for the focus group, was laying down some temp music for the soundtrack.  We got to play around with other film's soundtracks and lay them under the edit.  It's amazing how much a scene can change just by adding music.  

Anyway, back to the focus groups.  We had two screenings, each with about 15 people.  Overall, the film was pretty much a success in their eyes.  It's a huge sigh of relief to know that people were not falling asleep midway through it.  It's always a good sign when people laugh when they are supposed to, and don't laugh when they're not.  Always a good thing.  We had a discussion about their opinions and took notes, and now this week we have been taking those notes and making the necessary changes.  We hope to lock the edit in the next couple of weeks.  Then we can send it off to other people to add music, fix all the sound, and color it.  

Oh yeah.  We also have been working on a trailer.  I say we... I mean Dan.  Once we finish it, we'll post it everywhere for you to be able to see.  

So, that's basically it for now!  Thanks for hanging in there with me while I've been slacking on the whole blog.  Let me know if you guys have any questions about what's been going on.  And, I promise that the updates will be more frequent now.  Seriously.