Editing begins

I have been putting writing this post, probably because the beginning of this process is filled with such ups and downs.
When it goes well you just want to continue editing. When it goes badly the last thing you want to do is write about it.
What has been done?
First the tedious but necessary task of capturing all the material. Of course I have not finished shooting yet so there is more to come, but so far there are 8 DV tapes worth of material, equating to around 8 hours of footage. Logging and capturing this material took around 5 days.
Then the editing starts. I have divided the project into three logical segments. Segment 1, which is for the most part incomplete focuses on Claire's life with Paul. Segment 2 begins when Claire moves into her sister's place and her relationship with Nick. Segment 3 consists of the Norway section.
Once the footage was captured then I had to face the question in the room, how do I edit this? What is the strategy? Where do I start? And then there was the urgency of the upcoming October shoot: what might be missing that I could pickup in October?
For this reason I began by editing the second segment. If there was the need I could do some rewrites and pick up the new material or reshoot material that didn't turn out. On the other hand if I was missing something from Norway I wouldn't be able to do anything about it until the spring.
Where to start? Well the most critical parts of the second segment, the end, where Claire overcomes her fear and makes her way into the forest. I assembled this roughly and I quickly found that I did not have the material to fully develop these scenes. Essentially there is not enough detail. So, tomorrow I off to the forest again with the video camera to shoot some test segments which I will be able to incorporate into the edit. When we begin shooting in October I should have a pretty clear idea about what else we need to pick up.
So I finished the second segment on Friday morning and started the Norway segment in the afternoon. Now this gave me a sleepless night. As I roughed it out I was most worried that we did not have the footage we needed for the long coda segments, that is the those shots of the landscape that stood above and behind Claire's story. When we were there I struggled to think how they might be structured and now I was seeing the results. At the time we simply went out and shot as much material as possible, and also repeated some of the same shots at different times of the day, thinking that in all that some concept will make itself apparent. But this morning after some long thoughts I came up with a possible solution which seems the most obvious, but that the structure must be simply the relationship of each shot as part of a location, eg. a series of shots around the beach, around the mountain, etc. So link together the shots that were geographically linked. I am not sure if this solves the problem but at least this afternoon there seemed to be some coherence to the sequences.
I have also found some other segments that are missing detail, for example the scene where Claire's goes swimming. The idea, that she is immersing herself in the environment does not come across. Can I cheat some new shots here in London and insert them into the edit?

David's photos from the Dalston shoot

And now some photos of the last shoot, most of which took place in and around Dalston.













Here Sophie (Lucy Richards) visits Claire in the flat she shares with Paul.
She has never been invited here before.














With a little help...This time around I had Joana as a production manager and Will as a 1st AD. This meant that pre-production and production went a lot more smoothly and I could spend some time actually thinking about the story. Here I took advantage of some extra time and wrote a number of new small scenes. Here Claire is in the back garden, looking up to the trees and then into the house. Is Paul waiting there? Perhaps. I have not decided where this scene will sit or even if I will use it. I have repeated the image of the treetops here.














Then one day Claire watches Paul leave for work...














She washes the sheets. He won't find her odour here that night.














And not only does she remove her clothes, but she rearranges his so that it is as if she were never there...














...and closes this chapter.














In the latest outline Sophie makes a number of appearances throughout the story. Here, late in the second segment Claire and Sophie visit an art gallery where the work of her favourite photographer is being displayed. Of course these photos are David's, from a project entitled Nationale 7.














But they have a different reaction to what they see. Just as their relationship will end shortly.

And then some us in action...













A comfortable chair, a moment to myself.














Azahara and Lara give the walls a touch-up, to give it that white-walled gallery look.














David had the added stress of hanging his photos, and then...I guess JC must have taken this one.














Rob sets up the camera for the series of shots along the wall. Here Sophie and Claire go over the photos in the gallery.














Fabiano prepares Lucy. He stood in for Beth who could only make the Monday.














Joana and Fabiano.














And now the photos are mounted, the wall is painted and we are ready to shoot.


And in Dalston...












How many of us can you get in a bedroom? Cameron on the right, prepares the wardrobe for the scene.




















Rob being overlooked by Monica.
















































One moment one when Will wasn't moving us along.














Marc, in the background, tries to keep the boom out of JC's frame.

What was done...and not

So, finally a report on this past week.
A small disaster. Flora became ill and we had to cancel the first three days of the planned shoot. As she is in every scene there was not a lot we could do without her.
When she recovered we managed to juggle a few things and shot approximately 2 1/2 days. We covered all the scenes which include the character of Sophie.
Most of this involved shooting in my flat, which stood in for Paul and Claire's flat. As days are getting shorter and with some delays that meant JC was doing a small amount of lighting here, something we try to avoid.
Besides the flat we also had a few locations to cover as well.
Towards the end of the second segment Claire and her friend Sophie visit a gallery as part of Sophie's birthday. Here David did double duty. He was there to take photographs of the production, but the character's also came to see his own photographs. I didn't want to have the characters go to a gallery and just see whatever happened to be on display there. We found a place where we could do a little hanging and painting and put up something that would add another layer of meaning.
David did a project a number of years ago titled Nationale 7 - Le route bleue. Nationale 7 or Highway 7 used to be the main highway from Paris to the south. In August millions of Parisians would embark on road to begin their holidays, but now the road has been bypassed. Now the culture along the highway is crumbling. What I became interested in these photographs was the sense of loss.
http://www.davidboulogne.com/photoproject.html
We also went back to our Holloway Road location. Sophie drives Claire back to Natalie's flat, where she is staying. We were trying to capture the end of the relationship, with two shots, one inside the car, a strained and empty conversation about nothing, and then the car pulling up and Claire stepping out and waving goodbye to Sophie. Sophie's part is small, but I wanted her role to be more than a support for Claire. She has her own journey which is similar and contrasts with Claire's. What could see in her as she watches Claire step out of the car and wave goodbye? Well, all our work was for nought as we found we could not see her face clearly through the windscreen. We were left with a vague shape in the windscreen and the indicators on the car. This might work. If not, we will need to rethink the scene.
We ended the shoot at the pub The White Hart on Stoke Newington High Street (http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/43/4360/White_Hart/Stoke_Newington). This takes places at the end of the first segment. Claire has just come from seeing Natalie's flat for the first time and meets up with Sophie to tell her about it. Sophie, here already has an inkling that her relationship is falling apart and is not much interested and has trouble following what Claire is talking about.
I also introduced another actor to the production, Fred, who will play Paul. We shot one scene with Paul, Natalie, and Claire. Here Paul discovers Natalie, the sister that Claire has never spoken about.
Where are we left? We have to shoot all the scenes with Paul, plus a few new scenes I just wrote. This will all have to wait for October, as JC just left for China for six weeks.
Next, David's photos...