This weekend coming, I will be running my weekend masterclass at Ealing Studios, and probably, the last one for some time. Every time I run one of these classes, I spend time beforehand reflecting on current trends and shifts in film making. Of course, I still have last weekends premiere bouncing around and I am still high as a kite! So that’s skewing my perspective.
During my seminar, I offer a number of what I would call rules, guides and principles. When I made Gone Fishing I was resolute that I take my own medicine, and I am delighted that adhering to all my own rules paid off. One of those rules is shooting 25 frames per second in the UK – and I feel more than ever, even on HD, this is the way to go (if you have a limited budget). Without getting too deep into techy jargon, the main reasons for shooting 25fps and not 24fps are all technical. But there is one counter argument I hear regularly from people who shot 25fps and then watched their film at 24fps in a cinema. They can sense the drop in speed of 4% - the movie is that little bit slower and voices that bit deeper. To my ear, that pitch drop is better than a pitch increase, which I now have on GF (and I know that it’s possible to re-pitch these days, but that comes with its own set of problems too). And as for people noticing their film is slower in pace, I think that has much more to do with it being slow film in the first place, and perhaps a movie that has not been cut as tight as the narrative dictates.
One regular problem I see are films being screened that are really not complete. There is still work to do. I believe this is also a rule too. I believe it so much that when Guy Rowlands, one of the writers who did a polish on Gone Fishing, came to me with a re-edit idea AFTER the premiere, we tried it out. Eddie Hamilton did a recut to accommodate this idea, emailed me a QT, and we watched it. In many ways this recut worked, but I felt it interrupted the narrative and was also slightly disingenuous (it was a flashback that implied a certain story ‘truth’ that was in fact ‘not true’.) So we didn’t use it. But the point is, we did try, and really gave it a good and credible attempt. So thanks Guy for pursuing excellence with us all.
Of course, all films have to be completed at some point, or as James Cameron says, ‘all films are abandoned…’ but you want to do that when you have exhausted every possible alternative and idea. I felt I owed it to everyone involved – cast, crew, contributors, audience, and of course myself, to know absolutely that the film we end up with is the best that it can be.
I also got notes from a few other film makers which were fascinating, but often veering off into personal opinion, or likes or dislikes of certain aspects of the film (some people like the wobbly cam of the ‘Bourne’ films, some don’t - it’s not right or wrong but a choice…) All fascinating stuff and good to get different perspectives from people whose opinions one trusts.
Onward and upward!
Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com
So we locked the picture edit at 1.45am last night. Editor
Eddie Hamilton and I made a huge number of tweaks that at first glance, are
fairly minimal in impact, but we both know that they made a big difference
holistically. At one point Eddie stopped and looked at me grinning and
commenting that ‘it’s so good, and so rare, to get the chance to come back to
an edit after a short break, to make these small but important changes…’ I knew
exactly what he meant.
Last night also included making all the deliverables for the sound guys – exporting all the audio, making a QT files with time code, and adding an academy leader. It was when Eddie added the Academy leader (the countdown clock at the start of a film) that I got goose bumps, mainly because I heard the ‘plop on two...’ This is a one frame beep that sound guys use to sync the film up (of course time codes and such usually take care of all of this but it’s nice to have this old school rock solid backup). And it’s the plop that for me is synonymous with sitting in the final mix, in a dubbing theatre, and watching the magic of sound mixing bring your film fully to life. I was giddy as a schoolboy!
We have been editing, testing, editing, testing… and getting great results and feedback in these screenings. In some ways we are now slipping into analysis paralysis on some points, but on others, we are really having to fine tune the edit. For me, great movies stretch the credible right to the very edge. You take the viewer right to the very limit of plausibility, but never past that point. Hollywood movies tend to do this very well. 
Last night I worked until 2am with editor Eddie Hamilton as we fine tuned the third major recut of the film. This third cut is really a long series of tweaks rather than a re-cut. I think we had the structure nailed in the last edit. This edit was all about adding the shots we filmed last week, and also the ADR I recorded with Bill Patterson yesterday. 
Last night I worked with Eddie Hamilton and we did the second cut of the film. This was to generally tidy, trim and make neat and perfect all the cuts in the movie. Also to add storyboarded shots that we will be filming next week in a pickup shoot day, and finally to tackle the story problems we isolated in the fist test screening last week.
