9th day - Post-producing

This day was completely practical, we sat in front of a state-of-the-art-one-million-inch-wide-screen Mac computer in order to edit, sound mix and colour grade our films with the useful help and suggestions of both NJ and Simon.

 My colleagues editing. No photos of my edit. All censored. I can't tell you why because that would bring this blog down.

I really enjoy editing even though it is also kind of an overwhelming job: you can build an infinity of completely different films with the same footage. But as I usually know very well what I'm looking for, my first coarse edit flows very easily. My trick is to never question this first attempt too much, because if you start wondering and asking yourself "what if", you will end up being swallowed by an neverending spiral of alternatives and you'll most likely go mad, being unable to figure out which one is the best as you start getting too involved, too contaminated, incapable of seeing the film with fresh eyes as a person who's watching it for the first time.

Thus, I do my first edit based on intuition and on what I'm trying to convey and then I just refine it.

I had a problem with my performances: they weren't as slow-paced as I intended and I had to fabricate the pace I was looking for through the edit. I thought it worked out fine, but NJ told me you should never do that because the audience will notice that something is fishy when you cheat the natural reaction time of the actors.

Once again I think I wasn't seeing clearly on the day of the shoot. This keeps happening to me and I can't prevent it. I try to be focused on the performances but there's too many things to control at the same time, a schedule to keep up with, technical issues to deal with, stress, fatigue (which was very present as I've been sleeping badly and my shoot was the last of the day) and all of this distracts me of what I should be concentrating on.

I guess I shouldn't be concerned with all of these things, that's what my crew is there for. But I'm not used to work like that as I usually have to accumulate a large number of jobs in my productions and have to worry about everything at the same time. I have to stop doing that if I want to direct decently - and this was my first experience as a real one-job-only director - they actually wouldn't let me deal with any of the small stuff, which felt quite strange at the time, but is making a lot of sense now.

Overall, I'm not exceptionally happy with the final result but I never am anyway and as my bright colleague Tiago Inácio said, "a bad film can be a great lesson", and this one definitely was at least the latter.