Filming: Road trip is complete! We are back at BlinkWorks’ HQ, and starting the very long process that is editing. After the 102 days on the road, to date, we’ve conducted 42 separate interviews totally over 200 hours of some pretty great material.
The crazy thing is, we actually still have more shooting to do (yikes). We have a few more people we’d like to talk to and include. Plus, there will be some additional shooting near the end of the editing process, in order to notch up the production value and take the film to the next level.
Editing: For the past two weeks, we’ve been doing what we refer to as ‘processing’ the collected footage so far. This is basically a process of
- Encode the footage from it’s native H.264 codec to a more edit friendly version of PRORESS
- Sync the DSLR footage with its appropriate audio
- Sit and watch EVERYTHING
- Make notes, and do some preliminary cutting of EVERYTHING (basically we take an interview on the FCP timeline, and ‘chunk out’ the interview into notarized topics/themes and thoughts.
- Record each topic/theme ‘Chunk’ on a physical notecards.
Once we’ve gone through all footage, we sit down and put together an edit-script. Something to guide the actual edit. We should mention that we’ve had a script since the inception of the project. It’s a loose script to be sure, and one that, to date, has been re-written 5 times. The current version bares very little resemblance to the original script. It’ll be interesting to see how close the finished product is to the edit script.
Timeline: This is a pretty big project. The size of which is somewhat magnified by the fact that it is indeed just two people working on it. But, so far (knock on wood) we are right where we thought we’d be. Jan/Feb is going to be spent ‘processing’ footage and gathering the last few interviews. We then are doing a hard push for a rough cut by April 30th. From there on, it’s edit, graphics, audio and pickup shots.
Overall, we’re looking at a fall, 2011 release. We’re insanely excited for that time to roll around. We have a ton of fun ideas for getting this film out there. But alas, lots more work to do before then :)