Death by a thousand cuts

...Or in this case maybe life?...

This is basically a 'Part two' post from last week in a way. As I mentioned last time, we have been putting together a few rough cuts. As well as the edits that myself, Don and Dan had been working on, Vincent and Michael had also put some cuts together. Feels like everyone wants their own cut! I was a bit skeptical about having that many people influencing the edit, but I think we were fortunate in this case as once we had done a bit of a collective analysis, we found that each of the edits had good elements that solved some problems. Myself and Vincent have been working on compiling all of the best parts into a 'Master Rough Edit' (!) which should hopefully mean we won't need to do as many pickups.

A bit of Nuke magic to reframe some shots

More reframing...

Ultimately though, I think there are some things that can't be solved from the edit suite and it will be a case of sitting down with the HODs and making a call on what needs to be re-shot and what extra shots we will need. We are planning to have a catch up on Tuesday to run though this. I actually think it will be good to get back out to Sandy Point anyway - last year we ran out of time and money so we didn't get to do any pickups, and I think that affected the end product a bit. Most films these days are scheduling and budgeting for pickups as standard practice. You never know what can happen on a film shoot (it rarely ever goes 100% to plan), so I think it's a wise move to plan for pickups. I was thinking we would need to get the cast back out to Sandy Point at some stage anyway to get some publicity stills, so this will kill two birds with one stone (unfortunately, our photographer on the last shoot could only be on set for limited hours, so we didn't get a chance to stop and get publicity stills). Stills photography and BTS are things that often get over-looked (or in the majority of cases, dismissed as a "nuisance" - a peripheral distraction), but they are crucial for the overall success of the film. There's no point making a film if you don't have a way to market it. Stills and BTS are two areas that often don't get the respect they deserve, and that's something I've aimed to address on this year's project.

I found a fantastic blog post by Chris Jones which really opened my eyes to the importance of stills photography in the marketing of films. It was something that I just haphazardly stumbled across, but it really stuck with me. It seems slightly ironic that marketing and publicity (often seen as the "glamorous" side of  film) is the area that many film makers tend to think of last (although there is the flipside of this as well - the film maker that thinks of marketing and promotion first above all else... I'm not sure I would necessarily want to be that type of film maker... But regardless, publicity does need to be considered carefully).

An email to Anuka, our awesome BTS stills photographer

Essentially, marketing and publicity is the next stage in the pipeline for the producers (Lee and I), so we would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn't make sure that our stills and BTS team got some attention.