Friday, August 04, 2006
NEARING THE FINISH
Forgive me, for it has been nearly a month since my last posting. I have just finished piecing together the latest rough cut of Cleveland's Screaming. And, by Gosh! It looks like a movie now!
The process of creating any artistic product (product? item? thingy....?) is always interesting. The answers to your various problems are always incredibly obvious. Yet it can take ages before you finally notice them. In the case of the movie one of my biggest hang-ups is that, as a musician and songwriter, I hate to cut anyone's songs! Yet, for reasons I cannot really fathom, you really can't get away with more than about a minute of continuous music in a movie. There are exceptions, of course. Musicals do it all the time. But that's a different form. Some movies carry it off well and it works. My friend Norman England's movie THE iDOL (see link) has a long musical interlude that works. But in documentaries, you really can't get away with it. Finally I broke down and cut all the musical interludes to 60 seconds or less.
It's lucky that many of the songs I've used are under a minute long anyway. Of the four Zero Defects (ODFx) songs I put in, I only had to cut one of them. The other bands were not so fortunate. But I promise I'll make sure the movie gets issued as a 2 disc set on DVD. The second disc will have all the complete performances. Plus I want to put on a big chunk of the video shot by Vicki Sprague back in the early 80's.
Now that I've got a rough cut I'm happy with, I'm gonna start shopping the film around. There are still 2 more interviews I want to do, which I'm hoping to do next weekend. So it's not 100% complete. But it's 90% complete and the main structure of the movie is all there.
Now I better go & do some real work....
The process of creating any artistic product (product? item? thingy....?) is always interesting. The answers to your various problems are always incredibly obvious. Yet it can take ages before you finally notice them. In the case of the movie one of my biggest hang-ups is that, as a musician and songwriter, I hate to cut anyone's songs! Yet, for reasons I cannot really fathom, you really can't get away with more than about a minute of continuous music in a movie. There are exceptions, of course. Musicals do it all the time. But that's a different form. Some movies carry it off well and it works. My friend Norman England's movie THE iDOL (see link) has a long musical interlude that works. But in documentaries, you really can't get away with it. Finally I broke down and cut all the musical interludes to 60 seconds or less.
It's lucky that many of the songs I've used are under a minute long anyway. Of the four Zero Defects (ODFx) songs I put in, I only had to cut one of them. The other bands were not so fortunate. But I promise I'll make sure the movie gets issued as a 2 disc set on DVD. The second disc will have all the complete performances. Plus I want to put on a big chunk of the video shot by Vicki Sprague back in the early 80's.
Now that I've got a rough cut I'm happy with, I'm gonna start shopping the film around. There are still 2 more interviews I want to do, which I'm hoping to do next weekend. So it's not 100% complete. But it's 90% complete and the main structure of the movie is all there.
Now I better go & do some real work....
