#113 Abiding by Murphy's Law

Day 2 & 1 As a result of excellent feedback from Linda, my wife, I've made some significant changes to the order in which speakers are introduced. I had begun with discrete, self contained blocks, where an individual presents themselves. Of course I intended to mix individual's comments together where they touched on the same topic as the film progressed, but it was made clear to me through Linda's perspective that I could begin that earlier, so there wasn't an obvious transition from one person speaking at a time to many people speaking. It was a real structural problem for me and I'm grateful for the insight she provided. You know, I know what I want to do and could have acted alone, but I had nagging doubts that my perspective was too inside, too familiar to be trusted as far as how much I could ask the audience to accept as they were introduced to the film's characters and ideas. Things such as the pacing, I'm using a lot of rapid cuts. It really pays to have someone you can trust who can offer concise, intelligent comments. Day 1 ends and I still don't have the film transfered to tape. I spent a number of hours but between working with HD footage in Avid and moving it to HDV tape, or SD for that matter, there were lots of unresolved problems. And I lost a lot of editing time in the process. Not that this isn't my own fault for starting late in the first place. I mention a number of suggestions made by one of my constant instructors, Howard Phillips, for enhancing the movement of the story and I did a poor job of explaining J & L cuts, so follow the link to find out a little bit more. I've added them throughout the film to ease the audience from one cut to another. It's a subtle thing. The difference it makes is not so much what it adds, so much as what it removes, which is often an abrupt, gawky cut between two speakers, or scenes. Another point I missed in the excitement of reciting my day, is that the 90 second segment where I introduce a new character and I thought I was going to have to scrap it because I didn't have B-roll to cover several jump cuts. I forgot to mention the solution, which was to use dip-to-color between the cuts. It's only a second where the clip fades in, then out to black, but it heals the jump cut wound quite nicely. Now, I know how to do this and had used it sparingly in other parts of the film, but I thought it was too much in your face, it would be too jarring to the viewer if I did it several times within 90 seconds. I was assured by people whose opinions matter that it was fine and acceptable. I don't know if they meant in general, or under the circumstances of the looming deadline, but I gladly accepted it like a get out of jail card. We'll see how people react at the screening.