I've always found it very humorous how much the show "Entourage" informs the ideas my friends have about how Hollywood works. That film projects just "happen." An actor shows up for a few weeks, the director screams and yells and BAM there's a movie. It's nice that we have this venue to sort of lift up the curtain a little bit on the nuts and bolts process of a movie.
On that note Tucker and Nils have me working on three things at the moment: the first being a sequence in the film that I'm trying to assist them with (inasmuch as I can with 25 seconds of film to offer opinions on); I'm also putting together another screening which actually is more time-intensive than you might imagine; lastly I'm still going through the hundred hours of footage for the eventual DVD release.
I met up with Tucker and Nils at the edit bay to go over all of this and immediately noticed the film has changed in very concrete ways since the last time I saw it. Of particular interest to me was watching Nils bring up his list of "notes" on Google docs. This lengthy list of changes to be made to the film includes notes from Tucker, Nils and even notes from David Zuckerman. The ever changing document at some point down the road would be a superb roadmap to how we found our way to the finished film. It looks something like this (and by "something" I mean that my example pales in comparison):
Tucker: We need to get Drew a better line here- do we have any other takes? Will this affect his exchange later in the film with Tucker?
Nils: We'll ADR in lines later. We don't have any additional takes to work with. Bob doesn't like the lighting.
Tucker: Okay. Do we even need this scene? Is it repetitive?
Nils: Found a better solution. Dropped the line about the strip club and rewrote ADR lines for Jesse to record. Check them out and let me know what you think.
And it goes like this for EVERY scene. The strip club scene alone has pages and pages of exchanges between Nils and Tucker. This sort of high tech collaboration is streamlining the editing process. Online documents, video conferencing, high speed FTPs are changing how films are completed in post production. Big budget, small budget, it doesn't matter. A unit could be shooting in Africa, another in New York and an editor could be uploading a cut for the director to approve in New York. The interconnectivity of the film world is going to really fundamentally change the Hollywood paradigm. Of course, Hollywood adapts about as slowly as is humanly possible, so we'll see.
The conversations in the editing room continue to be interesting to listen to. As the film starts to take shape, many hours are spent considering mere seconds in the film. I watched a scene written as 2 pages be whittled down to 6 seconds of film today. And the film is better for it.
Jeff, Sean and Nils are still pulling 10 hour days in the editing room pouring over every detail. Tucker, in addition to his editorial duties, is setting up a second screening for a completely different demographic than the college-aged kids I'm targeting (I think he's going to write about this after it's over). Not to mention he is setting up all the nontraditional marketing plans (which include this website and the premiere tour the movie will go on), which require months of work to plan, organize and roll out.
To the outsider it may seem like things are slowing down on the film.
We're just getting started.
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