Done and Done!

Did you notice? The change made to my project tracker, over on the right-hand side?

I’ve had to switch from calling it  “Writing Project Tracker” to just “Project Tracker,” and yeah… add a section for completed films.

Last week was a huge deal for me. I finished the novella on Thursday, which wound up being a very emotional event. The ending turned out quite different than I’d originally planned and definitely more upbeat. It’s funny, since I’m generally a very upbeat person, that my writing is usually pretty dark. This novella was no exception – but it uncharacteristically took a turn for the best, right at the end.*

Then, on Friday, after eight straight hours in the editing lab and with only fifteen minutes to go until the DFA closed for the night, I finished my short film. (Let me just note that editing is a VERY addictive process – you could literally just go forever and ever if you wanted to.)

Now, I realize that I’m living in an age where a lot of people, and a lot of kids younger than I am, know how to create short films. It’s the era of YouTube, when anyone can post a video. But, in my case, despite being born into a technology-prone generation, all this stuff has always seemed like Greek to me. Last Friday, I achieved something I wanted to achieve since I was little, something I put off for years and years, always finding excuses not to try.

And now it’s done. I made a film, and I know all I need to know about making another. And I will make another.

I. Am. Elated.

Is it perfect? No. Will I probably make some changes before it’s screened? Probably. But it’s a tangible, finished product that taught me everything I set out to learn about film-making… and made me interested in learning even more.

*As far as writing goes, of course, I’m now eager to start a new project. However, I received some words of wisdom from my husband this past weekend: “perfect the one you have before starting something new,” and this is advice I plan on taking. Starting tomorrow, after this mini, three-day breather from projects, I’ll be diving into revisions – with an aim to get the novella submitted to prospective agents by June.

Almost There!

So, I am into the home stretch with film class! Final, edited short films are due this Friday.

It’s been thrilling to watch the film take shape, and has made me look forward to the next short I will do: mainly because, having filmed in Grand Central Station, I had very little control over things like light (we weren’t allowed to set up lights) and sound (acoustics varied greatly depending on how the mike was pointed, making sound editing pretty choppy).

           

I have really enjoyed the editing process, though. Yes, it is incredibly time consuming: I averaged about an hour per minute of edited film just to get a rough cut, then who knows how long I spent scrubbing the footage even further. Now that I’m involved in editing, I’m noticing continuity mistakes even in my favorite movies that I probably never would have noticed otherwise. Overall, I think my second short will be much better than my first, not just because I’ll have more control, but because I’ll better know what kind of coverage I need to get in each shot to help make editing an easier process.

One thing I find funny is that, at first, I actually ‘over-edited’ – there were more cuts back and forth between my actors than there needed to be, sometimes cutting right over an emotional moment when I just needed to rest for a beat and let things sink in. I find this funny because I think I’m a bit like that in life – rushing to fill a pause or a silence when, really, it’s ok to have them – and that it translated into my film editing. Now I’ve gone back and removed some of these cuts, and overall, am pretty well pleased with the editing. What remains is adding music, recording and inserting a short voice-over, and continuing to do what I can do to smooth out the light and sound issues.

Almost there!

In writing news, I am almost finished writing the first draft of a novella I started on February 15^th. (Well, if I can still call it a novella now that it’s about a hundred pages and counting.) I have two ‘scenes’ left to write and expect to be done by either tomorrow or the day after, depending on how I balance it with my time in the film lab. This novella, for me, marks a return to prose writing after recently focusing more on scripts. It has actually been a very soothing and encouraging process, and hopefully is the beginning of balancing script writing and prose writing on a regular basis.