Editing

For the past several months, I've been meeting with my editor, Ricardo, to work on the film edits. It's been going very slowly because he has a full time editing job and agreed to work on my piece of Love 10 to 1 at a reduced rate. So we try to meet once a week, when we work together on the edits, though recently, given both our hectic schedules, it's been more like once every three weeks. Usually he has already put together a rough cut of one scene, and then I would have some suggestions and we'd work on it together.

Of the three stories, I think my vignette probably relies most on having a great editor, because I'm looking for good comedic timing (rather than a "romantic" story, I'm going more for comedy). Last night Ricardo and I worked on the "Silverlake Party" scene. During production, I was worried about our shots because we were using a stedicam and had problems with boom shadows, among other things. Also, I had wanted to convey a sense of "party" when we didn't have a lot of extras there to convey a party feel. So it was a bit scary to see whether we were able to get enough coverage for Ricardo to put together a cut. I was pleasantly surprised by what he put together-- in fact, this scene is turning out to be one of my favorites. Shireen's husband, Eddie Mui, did a fantastic job as "Smelly Francis". He actually ad-libbed a lot of the dialogue, and he's so good both Ricardo and I still laughed at Eddie's lines even after we watched the footage over and over again.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of having a good editor. Unfortunately most filmmakers spend so much on production that when it comes to post, the money is all spent and they cheap out on the editing. We happen to fall in that category, but luckily, we were able to get good editors for great rates.

We've also been asking around for good post houses to do our sound mix and color correction. Stay tuned for that update.