It may be a while before we hear from Mark again, seeing as how every spare minute of his time is now taken up with editing Little Things, so I’m taking up the blogging reins again. A lot of what follows is a second hand account of the editing process, but I think it’s interesting enough to post anyway.
Mark’s been in pretty close contact with me about how the editing is going and thus far it seems mostly positive. The catalyst of today’s post is the completed rough cut for the opening.It’s a montage sequence showing the life of the main character across a couple of days leading up to the beginning of the story. A few scenes of him at home and working late, culminating in him waiting in the park for a friend he’s meeting.
I wasn’t present for the shooting of these scenes as they were done after the manic weekend shoot, so this was all new material for me. Mark filmed these snippets of Leonard’s life with a minimal crew (i.e. just him and Chris the lead actor) and they turned out very well.
Pacing of the film very much came into play however. When Mark first cut the sequence together it came in at about four minutes, which is quite a lot when you consider that eleven minutes is the target maximum for the whole movie. So instead Mark started cutting short ten to twelve second clips out of the scenes and cross fading them over each other, which has worked very well. In under two minutes the main character is introduced, the loneliness of his everyday life is revealed and we see the setup for him meeting his friend in the park.
As a placeholder the sequence has been set to “Mirrorball” by Elbow, which fits the tone of the opening very well, low and melodic but punchy enough to keep pace with the quick cuts. I’ll be showing the clip to Kevin from I Phoenix this week to showcase what Mark has done so far and the tone that he’s hoping for from the score. Hopefully I’ll have more to say about scoring next week.
Overall I’m personally really impressed with what Mark has managed to achieve with meagre resources, finances, sense and sanity. We’ve included some screenshots from the sequence with this post, but because Mark is hoping for eligibility for festivals we can’t post the whole sequence yet. However for those of you in Dublin I have it on my phone so feel free to accost me in the street[1] and demand to see it.
That’s about all for the moment. Check back for some more updates on scoring and editing.
If you do accost him in the street, don't ask him to show you footage, because he's not fucking allowed to show you footage. The rough cut sequence is for production purposes only, so if he is showing them to you and you are not a) involved in the production in some way, b) a blood relation or c) holding a fucking knive to his throat, he's in some serious fucking trouble.
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