Let us begin this blog post with a block quote of an earlier blog post. Imagine a world where it is early March, the weather is still threatening snow, and Steve and I are tirelessly clicking the enter button on his wireless number pad. A bold decision is made:
“We’re also planning to do some creative reusing of a few of the angles we’ve shot so far. In a few weeks, we should know whether or not we have ingeniously saved hours of work or confused the shot sequence so severely that only hours of additional work can sort out the wreckage. Exciting!”
-Mike
Fast forward to present day. We made a mess for ourselves.
What have we learned? Make notes. If you plan on reusing footage, make it apparent where the cuts should be. Write down frame numbers, descriptions, draw a picture. Do something to remind yourself later instead of, you know, not doing anything and assuming it’ll all work out fine.
Here are some things I’m hearing Steve say as he edits the scene and I write this post:
- “This doesn’t make any sense.”
- “We filmed the dog out of sequence; that threw me off for a little bit.”
- “Yeah, it’s too… maybe a little further.”
- “What’s this shot?”
- “Winona reaction face. But there’s a lot of talking there!”
- “I’m assuming that comes after what we just did. [sigh]”
- “I really don’t know what we did here. I’m gonna move on.”
Next time things will probably be perfect. I’m pretty sure.
-Mike