…until scene 102 again. That section is still too long. All the drug talk just doesn’t work. Well, moments work. So we need to concentrate on those and let the rest go. Nobody seems to be able to pull it off, including the writer or director (me). So that sequence has to be pared down to the bare minimum. Sometimes the answer is simplicity. The other Big Notes:

• The opening with Dave still feels uninspired. Seeing him in the first scene trolling is intriguing… but the rest of his sad sack life feels generic. I can see having to totally restructure the opening to get him to the studio before he meets Candace. That’s number one with a bullet on my ‘explore’ list.
• Shortening the opening works MUCH better and when Candace appears it feels natural instead ‘who’s this chick?’ The movie starts working when the two characters are talking and being charming. We realized last night that they stopped being charming after the ecstasy sequence. We’ll see if shortening stuff and a slight restructuring helps. Otherwise, we may have to write a new scene to keep the focus on them.
• Scene 102 to 123 needs to be whipped into shape. Right now it’s a series of ideas and not *a scene.* I’ll need to break it off onto its own timeline and just Have At It. Blow out the walls and rebuild it. Think outside the box. Take the tiger by the tail. Edit like a kid in a candy store. Cut it so every rose has its thorn. Make it less like a screen door on a submarine and whatever other metaphor I can come up with.
• Lots of the stuff about Dave’s job has to go. It’s too inside baseball. It started out as the A story, and quickly dropped to B in the assembly, and now it feels C-level. It can’t compete with their relationship, nor should it. In particular, scene 34, when Stanfield calls and tells Dave to ‘buy a better car,’ is dead weight. The parrying that the dialogue requires isn’t there. It feels flat and listless and… yeah, kill it. Same with scene 89. Who cares? We got the joke and the conflict in the previous scene outside Antigua Coffee. It’s shoe leather.
• We have two ideas for pick up scene that might address certain story issues we may or may not have as we fine tune the cut. We’ll make a note, and if need be, add it to the pick up shoot. But for now it goes on the long finger. It doesn’t worry me; I have yet to edit on a movie that didn’t go back and shoot new material after a few cuts. It’s part of the process and nothing to be afraid of.

Those are the big notes. Up to now have been the easy notes, when the scenes that need to go are most obvious. There’s a lot that worked though, so it’s a process of honing now. It'll start to become surgery soon, fine detailed knitting that puts every line under a microscope. That's when the choices get difficult. Time to roll up my sleeves and start sharpening the editing knives.





* On a big budget movie the ‘assembly’ is really a string of the director’s noted takes and dialogue selections. On a low budget job like this, the assembly is really the first cuts of every scene.



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Tags: editing