How to deal with surprises in the edit

There weren't too many changes in the edit that really surprised Jacob Wills (the editor) and I. We knew from the production itself where most of the problems would be, the café scene being the most obvious.

The major problem we ran into was actually the retirement home scenes, both the lounge and the bedroom. This is primarily because these scenes are mostly Frank orientated, and Cynon being the weakest link of the film we needed to cut around him as much as possible. Even if he was an amazing actor however, the pacing was still slightly off. There was too much time being dedicated to these scenes that inherently upset the pacing (as we noticed in script development) and we had to cut around Cynon as much as possible due to the performance. One of the most painful edits was removing a very nice dolly shot that took us a good two hours to get.

This was another lesson learned from me. Attention should always be on the story, and if it deviates it’ll simply waste time. The scene as it was didn’t make sense for the pace, too much time passes without Joe being in the film, the supposed build up from the previous two scenes lose their momentum to carry the story forward if Joe doesn’t show up for a while.

In my mind, the next scene’s awkwardness would make it interesting enough to carry the story on properly, but it ended up being very slow. Too much space between lines meant it was incredibly tedious to get through and it didn’t translate at all. That’s fine, I expected the pace to change a little bit in the edit and it came out well in the end, but a line was removed that I would have prefered to stay in.

Originally Joe was going to scramble to find an excuse not to go out into town. I wanted to drive his unwillingness home, but in the end, it didn’t contribute enough to extend the film by the seconds it took up. Again, it’s a small lesson learned about the importance of lines: do they warrant the time they’ll take up in the film? It’s something I haven’t really thought about. Usually, it’s just “do they contribute to building a character and the story?”, but film length is a relevant question as well, not only for films with time constraints but overall pacing as well.

As mentioned earlier we removed a scene. It consisted of two shots and the eye-lines were way off. We had planned the shots well but the car itself was far smaller than we imagined and ran into space constraints. In terms of the edit this looked terrible. But story-wise it didn’t contribute too much in the end, and wasn’t a painful sacrifice. It was designed mainly to show Frank that something was wrong with Joe as his car was filled with empty alcohol bottles and takeaway containers. Perhaps in a longer film where Frank has to figure out gradually over time that something is wrong with Joe it would have worked, but for 12 minutes it doesn’t make much sense to keep it.

Aside from that, it was bog standard editing, just fine-tuning shot length here and there and shaving off frames wherever Jacob could to make the whole thing flow as best as it could. We always knew the edit was going to be fairly simple due to the simplicity of the film itself, so the edits weren’t too shocking or different to what we had planned.

#filmmaking #RoadtoNowhere #editing #directing #fixingmistakes