Finding Flow: or Shut Up and Get to Work
I’m only two scenes into editing MirroLantern but I am feeling much better now than I did a few days ago. That might be because now that the sorting and merging of clips is finished (all 497 of them!) I can sit and actually start the real work. Not that file management isn’t real work, it’s just that it isn’t very satisfying work. Finding sync points when the auto sync tool isn’t behaving is beyond tedious, requiring far too many steps and resulting in incredibly annoying clutter. But now I have that stage of the edit behind me, I find myself falling back in love with the process of editing.
I don’t remember which filmmaker said it, but there’s a well known quote that goes something like “editing is the final rewrite of the film,” and I fully agree. I don’t think I fully understand a film’s story until I take the footage into the editor and watch the scenes and cuts back to back. How do two shots feel next to each other? How do scenes interact when you put them in the same living space? I think this is where flow comes in. I mean flow both as “flow state” but also in reference to the edit.
Finding flow both in the artistic process but also in the edit is paramount. Each project requires a different approach, and you have to get yourself in tune with the material. Our previous film, Those of Us Left Behind, required a very different approach than MirroLantern. If TOULB was an elegy, then MirroLantern is a sonnet, the former a mournful reflection on the intransigence of certain memories, the latter a Shakespearean verse about the troublesome origins of legacy. MirroLantern is fundamentally a story about characters uncertain what to do with information they never should have been privy to that simultaneously recontextualizes and destroys a family’s identity.
The flow of MirroLantern’s edit, the rhythm of it’s cuts is only now slowly revealing itself to me. A certain structure is emerging, and I feel at points that I am just along for the ride, letting the footage take me where it wants to go.
Anyway, back to editing.
xoxo
