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.