Production Journal #6: Editing... enough said.

Stress is a word. It's also a word to describe my life currently. Fun how that works.

I've been in the editing room for most of the week, and I think last week. I'm not really sure. The editing room has a weird effect on ones mind. Time doesn't exist. It's like the clock in the head is busted. Minutes feel like seconds, hours feel like fractions of that time. The simple process of cutting and taping film onto reels isn't as quick as you normally perceive. I spent an hour (I think?) just re-taping a scene and razor blading the edges to it goes through the projector better.

Yes, it takes time. No, I'm not just a shitty editor.

It's kind of weird to talk about editing, so I guess before I attempt to, I'll give a quick lesson on editing. Not sure how well it'll work. Also, my camera takes bad pictures, as you'll see, so please, bare with me. If you don't like it, fuck you, buy me a good camera.

Here we go.


First, this is the spindle thing we put our reel of film on.


The film goes to this rather dark spindle on the other side. Another reel, known as the take-up reel is placed on there. It takes up the film


This is the Movie Scope. The film runs from the spindle through this to the other spindle. With this, we can see an image.


See? Sorta...


Here's a drawing that pretty much describes what I just told you.

Now, lets say we found a shot we want to use. Well, we take it and attach it to this


That's the guillotine cutter. It cuts the film for you. We then take the bad footage and put it on an OUT roll. An OUT roll is stuff that you either don't want/need or stuff that turned out like crap. You save it for later. An IN roll is your current film or shots you want to use. Usually you assemble all of your good shots at one time. I don't. I just jump in and edit scene by scene and grab the stuff if and when I need it. It works for me.


Guillotine cutter in action.

When we want to attach the new footage to the good reel, we put the two pieces of film in the middle of the guillotine cutter's base.


Once there, we can put tape over the middle of the two pieces to attach them.


We just push the thing down and it attaches the tape and cuts off the excess. If there is still some tape, you just take a razor blade, Exacto Knife or any type of blade and clean it up.

That's editing. I've been doing this for days. It's so time consuming. I'm a perfectionist. I'm trying to get my match-on-action all right and trying to cut out excess time and frames that aren't needed. Plus, inter-cutting footage is a bitch as times. I love doing it though. I wish I had more to say. The days are running together. I can't really tell you about any experiences. Sorry. Perhaps next time I won't wait so long to post. Thanks for reading.

As a special treat, the Indelicates new album has been helping me in the editing room. Fits the feel of the film well. Here's a song from it.

"Europe" - The Indelicates


and another one...

"Flesh" - The Indelicates


Enjoy