Dear all,

We made it!!! 3 years in the making (I know compared to other films it may sound reasonable which is true), but still… for a no-budget, low budget, first feature film, kinda thing… quite grueling… there were times we really didn’t believe we’d finish it… as you may tell there’s been a huge gap between the last blog post and this one ;p. Because we’d actually lost all of the edited material in the summer of 2006, and tried our best to salvage those feisty nasty hard drives but just couldn’t… more on this a bit later in this post ;).
As I’m writing this, we have just shipped our first batch of DVDs for film festivals all across the world… So watch out for us!
Randy, our great webmaster and cinematographer/sound recordist for the movie, asked me to share some views on the whole post-production process… so here I am attempting to do so :).

I recalled reading an article about 2 years ago when Miranda July talked about her experience of making “Me you and everyone we know” (I’m sure some of you have seen it and liked it, I did ;) and more specifically on how she and her editor just spent an entire month or so locked in their studio/house to finish the edit of their movie… I thought, man, this must be something! and I was somewhat scared at the thought we’d have to do this… especially given that, well, we just didn’t have either her budget to afford a full-time editor, nor the connections to find a really good editor for that matter.

Anyhow… after our data loss incident, the project was on standby for quite a while… I guess we (the crew), all had to move on with life after the movie production was on a standby… Randy aka cinematographer moved to San Fran after film production, Anne aka art consultant left the country, Avisheh aka co-director suffered a terrible loss, Julien aka “Mister I help anywhere I can” (camera operator/assistant editor/morale support) was busy with a new house, and Sebastien aka “Mister I love the blues” was busy searching for job…

So after the project was paused for a little over a year, post-production editing resumed at the start of the year 2008.

Because such a long time had gone by since then, it was an awefully daunting task to go back to it. But since I had just left my corporate job on new year’s day pretty much, I had nothing else to do but focus on this movie ;)… and this turned out to be a good thing… especially given that I was just out of a very serious relationship ;p… so really focusing on something helped me keep things into perspective… enough about this… you can watch the movie to understand what I’m talking about.
For the technical people, we had basically ingested all the raw footage on mainly 3 disks, about 1.5 Terabyte worth of information all in all… because unlike a feature film, the documentary exercise consists of well a lot of raw material that’s neither scripted, nor easily transcripted… more on the lessons learned later of this whole exercise.

All the raw material (over 100 hours to go through) batch captured was done on a PC to my greatest lament… because in the past year or so, I had switched from PC to MAC platform for all my editing works. So it was somewhat of a stepback to have to go back to PC instead of using Final Cut Studio.

But well, we just had to do it. Because editing is a process that could last forever, we had to set ourselves a goal. And because my brother came to the rescue of this ailing project, I had basically no choice but bite the bullet and prepare things for his 3-weeks of editing presence to help finalize a rough cut for the movie, by batch capturing more, picking out scenes I wanted in the movie, etc.

Thanks to his direction and precious help, we were able to get a rough cut in those 3 weeks time, spending days and nights just about, in our newly created office room where I live focusing on the story layout and going to the essence of things. Me mostly picking out the scenes I wanted, my brother helping with directing me and letting me know whether it was really meaningful to keep this scene or not… then working on picking out the interviews we wanted, the concert scenes too, and weaving the story first, before attacking the visuals… This was especially challenging because I was so used to creating both layers together as editing goes on, but given the timeframe, the former process was best… I wished I had all the time in the world to create the kind of all encompassing work that we wanted to have at the start of the movie, but it was just not possible in the timeframe set forth, and this was a good thing. Following the preliminary rough edit, a small series of screenings were made amongst friends to hammer out the things that worked and didn’t work for the movie.
I can tell you, it’s really daunting to show your work in the midst of editing to a crowd of attentive, friendly yet critical friends… in the end, we were able to get the best out of everyone’s thoughts on the edit seen… clarifying things out, taking things out, adding other things in… to create a final product that is as clear as possible, yet keeping hopefully a good and compelling audio-visual rhythm throughout the movie.

Throughout the whole editing process, many discussions pertaining to the screenplay in general, helped us really push post through, and I gotta thank my brother for helping us on this part, even though it was hard for me to just let go of my visual and artistic inclinations and rather make sure that the narrative is making sense.

So I guess some of the lessons learned and wishes are:

- Editing is just not editing, but a lot of talking before hand to make sure that what you edit will make sense in terms of narrative. I am one of those so used to short edits (like music videos) that I’ve learned to tame myself a little in terms of making too many things all at once at the expense of losing the audience… still I like to let myself loose once in a while (see what was done for the trailer… haha… pretty speedy)

- Next time, if I do, make another documentary, get transcripts generated right after each shooting day… that way, it’s so much easier to sort through the raw material in post.

- I wished we had a 35mm adapter at the time we shot our film… those things are freaking awesome… though I guess in low light conditions, it would have pushed us even more at spending time setting up lighting for it.
- Hammer out the screenplay as we go through our days of shooting… I guess we just all were busy at work, and so given all this, it is pretty amazing we completed the movie still!

Voila, I could go on and on… on this whole editing ordeal… but I guess I will leave out some of the mysteries of it…

At this moment, we are focusing on the promotion of the movie to get it showcased at film festivals, etc. Please WATCH THE TRAILER IF YOU HAVEN’T YET and HELP US SPREAD THE WORD :))). I’M SURE YOU ARE AS EXCITED AS WE ARE NOW THAT YOU’VE WATCHED THE TRAILER ;).

Great news already, we’ve got two festivals lined-up already… one in Chicago and one in France… awaiting for more… Until then,

Lots of love and gratefulness to all the people who’ve made this movie happen, and have contributed in one way or another at making it all happen… from the dear crewmembers, to the characters that played part in the movie, to the public, friends, and family support.

Let’s continue our journey… someplace… anyplace… as long as we keep on going, we might just all get somewhere… and if we stay with it, don’t quit it, we might just get it ;).

Love,

Kai

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.