This is easily one of the more dragged out periods in the editing process: from trascoding footage, to naming, to dealing with freezing, more transcoding, organizing and working out technical issues. All of this takes an extraordinary amount of time before you can even start thinking about your first cuts.
Moving beyond this set-up period, we bring ourselves into the primitive stages of editing the opening scene of our film. At first it feels a bit weird to move into it this quickly. Ideally I'd like to take some more time and filter through every shot and pick out exact moments I like and slowly forge an edit around those moments. However, so far we have been progressing along in-the-moment.
Luckily, I spent some time creating a very rough edit over winter break so I have already encountered many of the issues we need to work around in the opening scenes. Performance issues, sound problems and continuity have all already been worked around once before so I have a pretty good understanding of what we have to work with and how we can cut around any faults we may want to leave out.
Though my early edit will certainly help us as we begin to cut, I do not want to be tethered to what I did over break. I think I was able to develop a style and tone in the rough cut that I want to maintain but there needs to be something more that what I did over the last few weeks. It needs to be sharper, more thought-out and effective in intent. I think, for now, slow and steady wins the race... each decision now will set up a progression for the rest of the film, so we need to stride in the right direction early on.
