Where to start?
I have just begun pre-production for the final phase of the shoot. There are two great pressures. First there is the of course the issue of the time of year, the daylight and the weather. The sun is going down around 6pm, and we are losing around 3 minutes of daylight per day. Scheduling this means I have a lot less time to play with and 4 day shoot in August is now a 6 day shoot in October. On top of this is the weather question. Now, I know that there isn't a month where you can't assume rain here in London but those risks are increased when you combine it with the lack of daylight. If I have to cancel a day because of rain then when do we pick it up? The days are not getting any longer or warmer.
A more interesting issue is what the edit has thrown up. I have already written about how I have added detail with video, and now I have to plan to shoot these new sequences on film. This means a complete re-shoot of scene 42 so that the weather and light matches together. This scene follows on from Claire's break-up with Nick, and details her entrance into the forest and her confrontation with her fears. It precedes the Norway segment and at this stage is one of the most important scenes in the film.
And then there is the edit. So much to say. David saw some of the segments last weekend and had a lot of comments and suggestions, which to me was very positive. I felt there is so much work to do, but we have something to work on. What I showed hung together.
Which brings us to sound. I have just begun to really play with the sound as another dimension.
It was especially interesting to hear David's comments regarding the long blackouts I included in second segment. Now I had arbitrarily set these to be 20 seconds long which I thought might seem like an eternity, but in the viewing felt like 2 seconds. To be fully developed they can be a minute long. How to develop them? That is what is so much fun. I have begun sampling sounds from other parts of the film, voice, odd sounds that happened in by accident, pushed the volume down and chopped off the top and middle frequencies and then mixed them with some of the atmos tracks that Roland recorded. It is fantastically suggestive. Now I can't say what I am getting at yet, and I wondered if I need to know. Could I just approach this idea instinctively? We'll see...