Shaping the Movie

When someone asks me what my favorite part of the filmmaking process is, I generally take a long time to think about my answer. It's all equally stimulating to be honest. Getting the spark for a story, writing it all down on note cards, finding the damn point or reason for why the events happen, writing the screenplay, finding the actors, locations, directing, editing. It's all fun and challenging, but it's certainly in the editing process where you can see it really come to life. It's really your third pass at the film, so when you get to edit it all together, it's such a big relief. First pass: writing. Second: shooting.Third is editing.

As of a couple days ago, NICOTINE is 77 minutes long. At this point I think the movie could be 2 hours and 20 minutes. I'm fine with that, but I'm really trying to keep it under 2 hours. All along the way while shooting, we even took little things out here and there, stuff that I felt would be redundant to a certain extent. The film went from 100 scenes to about 80 scenes. We also re-wrote some scenes and added a couple scenes in that weren't originally written, or extended some scenes out.

Right now I'm not trimming excess material. I will wait until the whole thing is assembled, then I'll see what can be trimmed. Some of the footage that would be considered "filler" is exactly what I wanted, and what I want the movie to feel like, in some ways. It's that random, sort of nothing fluff that makes everything so interesting in life. Yet it's a movie that essentially needs to "entertain" the audience. That's a whole different subject though. Maybe I'll be the only one to find the movie interesting. I'm not sure.

I'm not too worried about the running time, but at the same time I am worried. Why? Originally I set out to write a movie that would be 90 minutes. Somehow that managed to get away from me.

Movie goals for myself: Make a 90 minute movie and write a comedy. Both goals will be incredibly hard.

I will spend a good 6 hours editing on Wednesday. I hope to get to at least 90 minutes.

That's all I have for now.

DONE

It feels great to be done shooting. Yesterday Jeff and I completed a couple simple scenes, plus a some random pick-up's. Those are the best, but the most time consuming. You set-up for twenty or so minutes, you shoot it once or twice and blamo, you're done.

Why the shooting of the film last longer than expected was mostly due to us unable to shoot in a gas station. You're probably sick of me talking about this gas station extravaganza, but it's the real reason. 21 or so gas stations were looked at, Holiday and BPs to smaller locally owned ones to stations that were a few miles up north or down south; I spent an afternoon many weeks back scouring around trying to find this place. Nothing. For the most part the employees were kind and thought it would be great, but upper management had issues. Issues that were never actually brought to my attention, and I've never been able to pin-point the exact problem.

Because this scene wasn't going to be shot, Wednesday afternoon I wrote out a new scene that would fill in that void. I sort of wrote it. I supplied the idea of what the scene was going to be, but Jeff came up with the core. It's different than what the gas station scene was going to be, but it will work and we even hit on a couple "plot-points" in the film with this new scene. There are times while developing a character when you discuss subtext and the reason a character will behave a certain way. I love this stuff, because it gives life to a character's motivation, but most of the time when these things aren't verbalized or even suggested in the subtlest of ways, the subtext becomes entirely lost to a point where the audience member just doesn't understand it. So, we touched on one or two subjects that are on the back burner through-out the film, but not too much. Whether this new scene will work as a whole when the entire film is cut together, has yet to be determined, but as an individual scene in the privacy of Paul's car, there's certainly an undeniable amount of realism. I think it's great.

That's another topic of discussion through-out the making of this film: who's to say what is or isn't realistic when two characters are talking in private, or who's to say what is or isn't said out-loud when a character is alone? This is tough, and hopefully we did it right. I think we did.

___________________

I've been working at my real-world job a lot in the last three weeks. It's been nice. I haven't worked this much since July. I've been such a financial bind since August (because of the movie), that Jenn's been having to help me a bit more. I'm thankful she's been able to. I owe her a nice big check, which she'll get on Monday. I also need to thank Corey and Dave for working whenever I needed to do my movie stuff. Right now, as I edit my film and get it ready for festivals and as I'll be able to help more with making Wedding decisions for mine and Jenn's Wedding in September, I've been getting more stressed and sleeping less. Not because of the Wedding or really my movie, but because of my future employment at the theatre. With Digital Cinema going in sometime in the next few months, there may not be jobs for traditional 35mm projectionists -- so what do I do? I have no idea. I've been apart of Willow since I was 5 or 6 years old, and have been employed at the theatre for 10 years on January 2nd, 2012. Where do I go from here? I'm worried, but I'm almost optimistic about what comes next.

I'm going to get back to editing. I'm about to cut a pretty fun scene together. Super fun!