Director's Diary - Meeting Deadline

I handed off the footage to my bestest, bestest editor, Fernanda Schein, she assembled the footage, organized it and synced sound and then handed it back.

I know AVID well enough to edit, but golly gosh, I felt GREAT RESISTANCE in diving into this edit, so nervous that people would see my work and then judge it, thinking that I am such a novice, that I don't know what I'm doing... yada, yada, yada.

But I ain't got time to feed that inner voice, because like it or not, I've got less than two weeks to hit the first Film Festival submission deadline - Sundance, Sept. 14th, and I don't like setting goals to make excuses to miss them.

So I dove into the edit. Lauren came over and we reviewed all footage, making notes on what we liked and why, catching mistakes and laughing at the unexpected facial performances that added another layer of delight to the project.

Then I dug in deeper. I sat for two days dropping in scenes that I liked, I dropped in EVERYTHING... so that I could walk away for a bit and then return to KILL MY DARLINGS.

Yeah, sometimes I'll hold on something, whether it be in writings or in my edits, that I absolutely LOVE, like it becomes precious... I've learned to step back (or away) from it, to return and ask, "does this actually help the story progress?" Most of the time it's no. With some distance, I can see that I am cherishing a line of dialogue, or a scene, simply because of how much time was spent generating/creating it.

Finally after 5 days of non-stop edit, I got down to the best 10.5 minutes and handed it back to Fernanda for a clean up.

"The more important a call to action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be." Steven Pressfield