New edit one week away

So I have enough time with the edit these past two weekends to see where I am.
First, the new scenes? Well, I made some mistakes. The club/bar scene is missing a few shots, but of course we were short of time - 2 hours less than I had planned - so that is to be expected. As I have discovered with an edit, it is not that it needs to be longer, rather that you need to have choices, and I don't think I will have many. That would be the down side. Still, I can probably manage something with a few well planned interstitials, and also I have to keep reminding myself that I am still missing the music. I think in the scheme of the whole film I think you have to accept that you will find disappointment and I will probably be the only one who notices.
With the other scenes I am closer to what I had planned. Yes, I also made mistakes in the girl's night in scene, where I forgot a few transitions, but I can manage to get these fairly easily with a few pickups and music. Music in the scene is an essential part of the texture, just as it is in the club/bar scene.
On Sunday I already shot a few of the transitions and sound effects I need to complete the edit.
Onto the edit itself. Other than cutting in the new scenes I have been first trying to give the film more shape, first by deciding where it will be fast and where it will be slow. Fast and slow are relative terms of course. This film never clips along.
So I have been rather mechanical about this to start, but that would be the nature of the edit up until now, which was in some ways just an assembly, with the view to seeing the overall picture. Now I have gone to trim, deciding where I will make it tighter, cutting as close as I dare. I know I will need to work my way up to this, but it is start. This has been more successful than I imagined, as I have trimmed 6 minutes from the length just by this crude method alone.
I was especially happy how I trimmed the second segment. I had decided months ago that the part between moving into Natalie's, and the realisation Claire has in the forest needed to be be shorter and tighter. The incidents were simple, did not require a lot of contemplation, but also they needed to be shorter so that the bookends, moving into Natalie's, and the scene in the forest, when she overcomes her fear and enters the forest, could be longer. Now a shape is becoming clearer, and new ideas, especially around sound and music are arising.
I have included a kind of non-music, provided to me by Roland, since last spring. This was perhaps not a temp track as such, but it was just an idea. Now I can see that in the sequence where Claire enters the forest, before her trip to Norway, can hold more of this non-music, as a way of giving an emotional layer to Claire's internal shift. Next I can begin to think how I could start to think about the nature of this music or non-music.
I am missing a few ideas about sounds in the first and second segments, in the same way that I discovered in the third segment. More on this for the next post.
Next weekend I will finish shooting the new video pickups and then it will be time to show again. Now the true editing begins.