It’s barely three months since production wrapped on NEW, but I’ve been looking at photos of the cast & crew on location and it seems like another era to me. Or an alternate universe, maybe. The noise and hustle, the focused effort, the long hours. The fatigue. The fun. The stress! The people, many of whom I barely knew when we started and who I missed so much when it was over. And now it’s just me, alone in a room, hunkered down with the footage. Trying to piece together hundreds of angles and takes into 28 scenes that tell the story. That’s editing.
Last week we made the big deadline, the one we’d been working towards all year: we sent out NEW for its first film festival submission. The film is not finished – what went out was a work-in-progress – but even at this point it’s looking pretty awesome.* Much of that is thanks to the concerted efforts of the VFX team: Clayton Douglas, Alejandro R. Torres, Michael Rosen, and team supervisor Skot Christopherson.
So: the effects are looking cool, the cinematography is gorgeous, and the performances are uniformly strong. This is really mine to screw up. I’m feeling that pressure.
As I continue to refine the edit, the VFX team will keep feeding me shots, filling the last of the holes. Once we lock picture, there’s color correction and final sound mix. Plenty to keep us busy. Simultaneously, more film festival submissions will be going out. And if all goes as planned, NEW will be a complete and finished film sometime in January.
*I am from California.