Deadline. Deadline. Deadline... Rest.

Tools for frantic editing

Deadlines are a good thing. With deadlines come pressure and a sense of urgency. Pressure and urgency not only get things done; they inspire creativity. However, if not managed well, a deadline too tight can lead to frantic decision making.

I’ve been editing on my first feature documentary since July, a music documentary about Brooklyn-based folk singer Ana Egge. The director is Jesse Lyda, the producer is Jason Wehling. Jesse followed Ana on and off for about two and a half years, capturing somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 hours of footage.

Our deadline was to have a decent rough cut by November/December. That’s five to six months to cull 140 hours down to a feature length run time. An editor we sought advice from told us she spends three to four months watching/logging/marking up footage, then a month of hardcore editing to get to a first assembly on a feature doc.

We needed an assembly in half that time.

July and August was comprised of me exhaustively watching footage, using markers for notes and transcribing interviews (the hard, but cheap way). As I logged, the three of us would meet and draw up scenes on notecards. We’d make connections, consider what’s happening in a scene and how it might stand in for more universal truths, started to place notecards on a board, looked for order and structure and story.

In August I began to edit to complement my watching and logging. Pretty quickly I was editing whatever I had seen. Fall was around the corner and I needed to have watched enough from each phase of shooting to start constructing a cut that we could react to and start making decisions about.

This is that frantic part of the process I was referring to earlier. It felt strange to me to cut when I hadn’t finished seeing everything yet. This led me to fumble the ball a few times along the way to our assembly cut. But the more scenes I assembled, the more it freed me up to look at anything that had been left unseen.

We had a long assembly in September. By October we showed a two hour cut to some friendly “first eyes.” That cut was still an assembly even at a reasonable running time of two hours. I called it the “clutter cut” or the “vomit draft” - more than we could possibly need to tell our story in the cut, in roughly an order we thought we liked, packed too close together like a subway car at rush hour and no room to breath.

The next cut was about slimming down and creating space at the same time. That was two long weeks that took us up to Thanksgiving break.

The day before I left town for vacation I put in an 18 hour day, packing in two days’ worth of work into one. I was feeling the flow. As the night wore on, I realized no one would be calling me and we weren’t having any meetings, so if I powered through I could get to everything on my notes list and still be able to head out of town the next afternoon.

Pressure and urgency give way to creativity. The more notes I crossed off, the less anxiety I might feel about the timeline we were on, the more space I created to see new connections, new motifs, and find solutions more quickly.

During Thanksgiving, we gave ourselves a generous five days away from the cut. I didn’t watch the cut for those five days, but the cut was on my mind. I was visualizing moves I had made and moves I would make when we got back.

When the vacation was over, I felt rejuvenated and re-focused. I feel like I accomplished more coming off five days’ rest than if there had been no holiday to force us all to take time off. When you’re working on an independent film under tight constraints, holidays can be good for that.

We had another feedback screening for a cut running an hour and forty minutes the week after Thanksgiving. People connected with our character and found her experience to have relatable themes, but there was still some DNA leftover from our clutter cut.

Another couple of weeks of both shaving and adding new material. We hit a target running time of 90 minutes just before breaking for Christmas.

Deadline met. A submission to somewhere made sometime during those fall months (sorry for being vague, but we’re still in the middle of this journey).

(I will say something I think assisted us immensely: Editing in Final Cut Pro X. I really hope I can continue to edit in a program that gets so much technical BS out of my way so that I can focus on telling the story.)

Christmas: Now I have time away from the cut, even more than I had during Thanksgiving. I know I was vague on details about the process. There’s only so much of the curtain you can pull back while you’re still editing a movie. I think, in an unspoken way, as editors we’re not allowed to pull back the curtain much further than that even once the movie is finished. Audiences have to be able to enjoy the meal without knowing how the sausage was made. Editors guard that process closely.

But I wanted to reflect on the important balancing act that is deadlines and rest. You need them both. Circling a date and doing everything you can to meet that date keeps a project moving forward. The pressure makes you more alert, which can lead to epiphanies you might not have had if you had the luxury of time.

Or it can force you to make a move. You’ll figure out whether you liked the move later. For now, at least you moved.

Rest

Rest leads to reflection. It creates distance. Rest allows all the studying you’ve been doing for months and months to fuse via the electrical charges in your brain. Rest provides much needed perspective which is so necessary and invaluable in this craft.

Set deadlines. Meet them. Rest.

Repeat.