Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Slowly but surely we are shooting the scenes for our first feature film. With our schedules and family, we shoot on Fridays or Saturdays and occasionally, both Friday and Saturday if our schedules permit. In our last session, we were able to shoot scenes twenty-three and thirty-four.

The film has approximately eighty-two scenes. We finished shooting scenes nine, eleven, twelve, twenty-three and thirty-four. That is six scenes down and seventy-six to go. :-). We have most of scenes ten and fifty-five shot. We have a minor reshoot to do in scene ten and one minor segment to shoot to finish up scene fifty-five.

For the scenes that have been shot, the rough edits are done for scenes nine, ten, eleven, fifty-one and fifty-five. We have some minor voice-over work to do for scene nine. The rough edits have not yet been started for scenes eleven, twelve, twenty-three and thirty-four.

Slow and Steady

Although our schedules with work, family, and life prevent us from putting in eight hours or longer days we have been consistently meeting almost every weekend to work on the film. Most days we meet we film another scene or part of a scene, some days we put together the rough edits for the scenes we have filmed, other days we sit down and try to figure out if we can figure out how to do the special effects we plan for certain scenes.

Regardless of what we work on when we meet, every time we meet our feature film gets a little closer to being completed, and this is what is important. We finally have a great routine with this film, and this routine will produce a feature-length film.

A Learning Process

As a self-taught editor, I still have a lot to learn, especially in the area of special effects. Quite often I will play around with small clips of what we shot previously and try to accomplish an effect we want. Youtube is a great resource for learning how to create special effects, and I try not to let it get to me that as a man in his forties, I’m learning how to do some cool Final Cut Pro X special effects from some twelve-year-old kid on Youtube.

As for learning my tools goes, Apple Motion 5 is on my to-do list of things to learn. I know there is a lot more that I can do with Motion, I just need to force myself to take the time to do so. So the easiest way for me to do this will be to make my learning process into a blog series. Expect to see future posts detailing my learning process for both Motion 5, Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X and Compressor.

Winning the Race

When the film is complete, the slow and steady pace that we needed to use will have ultimately been worth it. We’ll have a feature film under our belt instead of simply staring at multiple scripts wishing we had the budget, actors and time to shoot them. Of course, once you complete your first big project your second big project becomes much easier to complete and the same for the third and so on.

We are very happy with the results every time we complete another shoot or another rough edit. We may be taking a slow and steady approach to our first feature film, but once everything is complete, we are confident you will enjoy the results.