Revisiting

It is odd going back to a piece you think of as "finished". I am currently reworking "Reframed" for our show at Monkey Town (Dec 6th, catch the fever!). Now, when we presented it at the Berkshire Fringe Festival back in July, we knew that there would be further changes. As they say, films don't get released, they escape. We needed to show it, so it was done.

Now we need to show it again, and in a different format. At the fringe there were 4 screens which could all be seen simultaneously, at Monkey Town there will be four screens, but at opposite ends of the room, so you can only see 3 (really just 1 and parts of 2 others) at a time. To convey the story of the piece, we need to mix it up a bit.

This entails creating what is essentially a different screen. Which means going back through all the old footage. Editing is like sculpting. You begin with a large chunk and whittle away until the piece is revealed. We ended up shooting at a 15:1 ratio, so for every minute of screen time there were 15 minutes of footage shot. The end result is a 13 minute film on four screens which gives us 52 minutes. Cut down from around 9 hours of footage. Every cut, every shot that was included at the expense of another, was done for a reason. At this point I don't always remember why I did things. 3 AM decisions, cuts made after trying 10 different things, requests and suggestions from other SPINE members, all these things are more or less opaque now.

So when I dig into the piece, I have to trust that those decisions were correct as I muck about and try not to mess it up. Almost like I'm working on someone else's film. Once it is finished ("finished"), the choices I am making now which are based on half-remembered choices made months ago will become codified, canon. Then I get to make the trailer.