Oy, the pain of filmmaking. It’s hard to believe all the problems that appear on film when you start editing. Camera angles are slightly off, actions aren’t the same from take to take, lighting changes as the shoot progresses, colors are funky, sound levels don’t match, helicopters and planes fly over, dialog deviates from the script at random, there’s no good alternate take, the boom mike dips in the frame, the lens is dirty, the characters now seem funny when I thought they were serious… on and on, all supposedly to be fixed in editing. I’ve now spent 4 or 5 sessions editing my film, Roadside Realizations, and I’m feeling like I should re-title this project ‘Film School Realizations’! The problems of turning a story into a script and a script into a film are now becoming blindingly clear as I traipse back and forth through the footage I shot, trying to find the gems and put the pieces together. It’s as if someone gave me a puzzle of a thousand pieces, but the puzzle parts come from many different puzzles and don’t really fit together. I’m also wielding Final Cut like a blunt machete as I try to figure out the best way to hack the film together, but our brilliant Final Cut Jedi master, Sharif is guiding us and hopefully I’ll one day be handling this thing with finesse. After 4 hours of editing today, I finally had to stop, mainly because I just couldn’t stand to look at and listen to it anymore (a common experience amongst my classmates and likely, most film editors.) Now that I’ve taken a deep breath and had a little break from it, I can say that this part of the filmmaking process is a huge learning experience and I’m just starting to understand what it’s going to take in future projects to hone the script and get great film, so that I have something worthy to edit. Editing really exposes the art form. If we can grasp it, we have incredible power in this media to mess with the viewer’s emotions and take them wherever we want them to go. The most fascinating aspect is that you can’t really tell what the full effect is going to be until the final cut is screened for fresh eyes. That’s a mystery that awaits us all.