Filmmaking… It’s Not Always Glamorous

I’m sitting in our editor’s room right now watching her edit. I’m not in her editing bay, I’m in her bedroom. I’m actually sitting on the edge of her bed.

She lives in a 2 bedroom apartment in Studio City and her editing computer is in her bedroom. Good thing we were friends first, right??

Filmmaking isn’t always glamorous, my friends!

5 Days of Editing Non-Stop

We are currently in Day 5 of editing a Pioneers in Skirts teaser. We have pulled early mornings and late nights, but it’s looking good! Why such intense editing, you ask? We were invited to attend the White House Summit on Working Families in Washington, DC at the end of June and knew we needed to premiere our teaser for this event – but it’s about 2 months earlier than we were planning to premiere.

It was time to power through 14 hours of footage to make a 4-minute teaser. And we did it. Well, we are still doing it, but by the time you read this, it should be done.

I’m from the future to share the teaser with you! Watch below:

[ylwm_vimeo]98785658[/ylwm_vimeo]

Finally for you,

5 ways to survive a marathon of film editing:

  1. Drink plenty of water. We noticed that after 5 days of barely sleeping and forgetting to eat – your mouth gets dry. Like, really dry. We started to think there was a conspiracy in Studio City making my editor’s tap water cause dry mouth; but no, it was the exhaustion. (I’ve been drinking from a water bottle the last 24 hours just in case)
  2. Go home. Yeah, I could have probably slept on her couch to then begin the process all over again the next day, but you need that sense of an “end” so you can sleep. You need that little ritual, so you don’t have a “too anxious” sleep. Maybe I only slept for a few hours, but it let me recharge and prepare for more decision making the next day.
  3. Prepare to not do anything else. I regret not doing my laundry before this 5 day marathon began, but I did clean my dishes, and that has made all the difference.
  4. You better like your editor. Shannon, our teaser editor, and I have been in the same room for 72 hours and we still laugh and get excited! If you don’t think you can spend that much time with your editor, then you better enlist a buffer person or you will kill each other…well, metaphorically.
  5. Skype Screen Sharing. This feature allowed us to share the cut and receive notes in real time with Producer Lea-Ann Berst. Working coast-to-coast is simple when you have technology like this. (You are welcome.)

skype screen grab

Here’s a screen capture from our Skype Screen Sharing. You can see me and the editor in one square and Producer, Lea-Ann Berst in the other watching the current cut.

This has been an amazing experience but editing marathons should be few and far between…I hope!