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POST-PRODUCTION
a few production stills here Stills from the movie here.
The first moment is always the worst: is the stuff actually on the tape safely, with sound and everything - and does it look and sound at all like you thought you were getting during those long, hard days (however much you enjoyed them)?
Luckily the answer to both of these was a yes for Oxford Park.
Rather than dump everything on disk, I look upon the capture process as a way of getting a first look at the material, and of making a first selection. Often, most of the material still ends up on disk, but it's a useful process to go through, creating a batch capture list of all the sections you want and giving them sensible file names of your choosing - including the scene number, for instance.
The first thing I did was to cut together a 90 second trailer, which is now on the site - links to versions for different speeds here. It might seem odd to cut a trailer first, but I wanted to give the cast and crew something to see before the main film was ready to look at - which might be some weeks away. Initially it had a temporary library music track, but the music on the current version was specially composed by Nick Graham, who continued by scoring the music for the complete film.
The actual editing didn't take that long, though it was delayed by the need to earn some money doing other things. A first cut came to about 15 mins 30. It was fine, but the pace lagged a little in places - partly because I was trying to keep in too much detail, and partly because I was leaving space for the music, which was yet to come. Rather than cut pictures to music, this was being done he other way round, with music being scored to pictures - like a grown-up movie.
A second cut, trimming a number of seconds here and there, and a couple of larger chunks, cut around a minute and a half from the overall length, and the whole picture felt much tighter.
Meanwhile Nick had finished the trailer score, and I'd graded the pictures to dirty them up a bit.
Finally, the movie is finished - and up on the site.
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