News from the Cutting Room

I just spent 4 hours in a dark room with a Steenbeck flatbed editing machine and a grease pencil. My whole life I've always cut my films using Final Cut Pro but the manual nature of editing real film is very different. It requires a lot of organization and a lot of balls because once you make a splice, there's no ctrl+z to get you out of it.

I was nervous at first but I have to say, after an hour or so I actually enjoyed editing on the flatbed much more than editing on a computer. I imagine it's mostly because a computer screen generates a lot of light and tires your eyes out but the flatbed displays only a dim analog image taken directly from your film stock.

The film is looking really good and if everything goes well, I'll have a rough cut by the end of the week. In the meantime please enjoy these secondhand digital photos I took of the flatbed viewer. What you're seeing is my film lit by a small bulb and turned around by several mirrors and prisms until it is projected on a piece of glass. They're not the best quality due to the fact that they're essentially pictures of pictures but perhaps they'll be good enough to make everybody want to see the real thing in its full glory. You'll just have to trust me when I say that it looks much better when projected on a big screen.

From Ten

From Ten

From Ten