Thursday 15 March 2012

Hellalujah!

Ah – now that’s a full glass-and-a-half of the good stuff.

What an extraordinarily fabulous week this has been in Charmed Central. And yes, I am aware that I have been known to slightly over-shine the Zombie Resurrection experience in past postings, but believe me, today I am full of the milk of human kindness. Our Charmed cup runneth over, and not in the bad needs-attention-from-a-Jeyes-cloth kind of way either.

Because we now have a cut of the movie that we can show people without needing a long list of caveats about where it sucks.

Well, not the whole movie, but the first 35 minutes (and, for anyone that has never edited a movie before, these are always the most troublesome). This week, St Marcelo has been staying in Winchester, liberally conveying his editing guile, insight and Final Cut Pro short-cuts to a rapt audience of two.

In his normal London adobe, St Marcelo can count Thandie Newton and Cillian Murphy amongst his neighbours, and so this was a rare outing to our provincial backwater. But, lured by the promise of the Best Pub in Britain and as many cigarettes as he could eat, he kindly made the journey down on Tuesday with a big silver box stuffed full with his latest cut.

St Marcelo had already made two passes on the edit, and then incorporated as many of Jake’s and my poorly-explained refinements as he could understand, so by the time he arrived we were already in pretty good shape to finesse the hell out of it. And three days later we sent him back home with big smiles on our faces and a first half of the film that was acclaimed as delicious by mutual consent.

It’s going to be a while before I can shift this stupid grin.

At this point in the edit, it’s all about those tiny moments. What is the exact beat between an action and a reaction that makes it funny? How long do you need to hold a shot on a character to exact the maximum amount of audience empathy? What combination of cuts will best show both Becca’s embarrassment and her father’s beautifully-understated and unspoken shame when told that there’s 'no more dining at the all-you-can-eat pussy buffet'? It’s a left and right brain exercise, and it has left me mentally exhausted. God knows how mashed poor Marcelo’s psyche is tonight.

And the best bit – if we’re excited about the film now, think how much more bouncy it’s going to get when the tidied dialogue starts arriving from Glen-the-sound, or the bits of score come in from Dale-the-tunes, or we get proper sounds from Tom-the-foley? I mean, we haven’t even stuck in the noises of the zombies yet.

In any case, it’s a week off before we can start working on the next 35 minutes, as Jake and I count down to exteriors-Friday and re-shoot-Sunday. But, it’s fair to say that if you see me in the Best Pub in Britain around the end of March, I’m a safe bet to buy you a pint.

Just don’t ask me how it’s all going, or I might just tell you. I’m sure I have much more entertaining anecdotes when it’s all going to shit. Serene.

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