Film Progress
By tomorrow morning, we'll have cut The Horse Boy down from around 65 hours to under 15.
Not bad, huh?
It's so exciting, the assembly-to-rough-cut phase. Stripping the fat. After one viewing, so many things are so easy to slice and dice or to ditch altogether. After two viewings, we'll be down to the bare essentials plus things we like, each for our own subjective reasons. Michel likes when Rupert calls himself a fat bastard, Rita likes the animals, I am quite partial to any time Rowan sticks his face up in the camera and babbles.
But we're getting to the hard part. The second rough cut will involve giving up entire chunks of the film, and then? Then it's on to what is called The Killing-Your-Children Process. Sometimes it's hard to even know which bits are just your Children, unconditionally loved, and which bits are really necessary to the movie. Killing Your Children means accepting the unimportance of a scene or a shot or a line even though you absolutely adore it, and then cutting it. I think the era of DVDs made killing children easier, because now, for comfort, we can say, "Well, it can be on the bonus disc," the way people say on set, "Well, we can fix it in post." It might not be true, but it's optimism when you're out of options.
Only metaphorically related, I have my first proper personal training session tomorrow at noon. I think I'll be working with him twice a week for a month. I'm looking forward to it. I need more things in which to immerse myself.
Not bad, huh?
It's so exciting, the assembly-to-rough-cut phase. Stripping the fat. After one viewing, so many things are so easy to slice and dice or to ditch altogether. After two viewings, we'll be down to the bare essentials plus things we like, each for our own subjective reasons. Michel likes when Rupert calls himself a fat bastard, Rita likes the animals, I am quite partial to any time Rowan sticks his face up in the camera and babbles.
But we're getting to the hard part. The second rough cut will involve giving up entire chunks of the film, and then? Then it's on to what is called The Killing-Your-Children Process. Sometimes it's hard to even know which bits are just your Children, unconditionally loved, and which bits are really necessary to the movie. Killing Your Children means accepting the unimportance of a scene or a shot or a line even though you absolutely adore it, and then cutting it. I think the era of DVDs made killing children easier, because now, for comfort, we can say, "Well, it can be on the bonus disc," the way people say on set, "Well, we can fix it in post." It might not be true, but it's optimism when you're out of options.
Only metaphorically related, I have my first proper personal training session tomorrow at noon. I think I'll be working with him twice a week for a month. I'm looking forward to it. I need more things in which to immerse myself.