THE FIRST SCREENING

THE FIRST SCREENING

At the time of the first screening of our work, I knew I had a lot of work to do, I had more or less captured all the footage that I had wanted according to my planning, but it was clear that  the assembly was a bit muddled.

There was certainly potential, the jokes seemed to hit their mark and the performances seemed to work. The two central characters needed to be seen as delusional idiots, people who appear to have lost their perspective on reality. The horror footage came across as authentic, no less aided by the rather wonderful soundtrack given to me by Neil Rose and Cafe Concrete.

I think the film lost its direction when I decided to include lots of still photographs from other sources to try and fill the gaps where there was narration but no visuals to accompany them. Although they did get some laughs from my peer group, I think there was concern that I had lost sight of my original intention, which was to try and set this in some sort of reality, i.e. a fictional documentary. This idea could only work if I were to treat the content of the film as a real thing, I needed to give it its own sense of Verisimilitude.

This meant that whilst the dialogue was highly absurd , the film footage ridiculous, the voice over somewhat pompous, the documentary had to be presenting these element as if they were real and the content of the film had to obey those rules.

I don't think that this really occurred to me until the second screening, by which time I had written an opening and closing statement for the film to try and give the audience an bedrock on which they could anchor themselves and also provide a more fitting coda for our characters.

By including these additional elements and not changing anything else, holes started to appear in the flow of the project.

The voiceover delivery was stumbling at some points and missing the mark on others, I realised that my direction of Guy could've been a little more developed. The opening scenes were taking too long to get into the story and I felt that there could probably be more footage of the " The Very Dead ".

I Realised very quickly , that I had become too close to the project to really be able to edit it objectively. After all, I had more or less been steering the ship on my own , so to speak, perhaps the benefit of having others involved in the creative process was to let me know where changes could be made  and to give advice as to what could be done to maximise the potential of the film.

So I decided to do several things

1. Remove most of, if not all, stills from the film

2. Shoot more "horror" footage

3. Cut down some of the scenes , especially near the beginning, with the intention of including the new "horror " footage against the interview dialogue a bit more, if just to give the audience something more interesting to look at.

4. Cut some of the voice over where I felt it was becoming garbled and misleading

5. Enlist the help of another editor to give advice and make additional changes, this person would be an external party away from the production, so as to give the post-production a fresh perspective.