Episode #50 Movie

I just got an email from Justin saying how much he liked the Episode #50 movie, which is such a relief. If you don't know, I do all the documenting and editing of the webshorts for the website, and I'm always late and always under deadline and over the next month my life will get a whole lot more deadliney. I used to just get Stephe whatever I came up with, the day it was due, but now I actually have to tell the group ahead of time what I'm planning, which really negates my luxury of having no plan (I hate that), so ordinarily when I have a grand idea (like the Episode #50 webshort) and at the 11th hour realize I'm never going to complete it, I'll just cut-bait, grab a single-shot clip from the production of the show and slap opening and and end credits on it. But this weeks since the text for the newsletter was set stating that it would be a montage of moments from the radio show, I had to stick with that. The problem is, montages are a time vacuum, to get ONE random moment for the montage takes 15 minutes, the raw tape must be watched and a precious moment must be found, then put on the harddrive, then put in the timeline as a raw clip, this must be done over and over until you have a full timeline of bulky, long clips that don't sing at all, then if you want to make it easy on yourself you have to find a song to put the whole thing to. In the case of Episode 50 I never did. It was 3am and I stilll needed about 15 more clips in order to pick a song that had a reasonably fast tempo to it, but I didn't have that time, so I kept editing, lopping the excess of every clip down to their essence and putting them in an order that hopefully would suggest a song, which it never did. Also when your editing, especially documentary editing, you don't always have an idea of what the final will look like, by putting the clips together and lopping them off and mixing them around in different orders your hoping to "find" the film, and if you build up enough instinct as an editor you can find a new film and a new emphasis constantly, I'm not that good yet, but better than I was a few months ago. And I never found this film.

As a sidenote, there's a lot of reference to "Such Great Heights" in this weeks episode, it's us making fun of how popular that song is with the 20-somethings. So I initially put "Such Great Heights" as the music track, but you get a WAAAAAAY different movie, it began with a Justin pep talk first thing in the morning about that days recording and then went into slo-mo as we all walked out to the mics, beautiful...and a much better film than I had time to make in three hours. It will show up someday, but i had to decide early on that THAT was not the film I could make with my time. S at 3am I stuck "Happy Go Lucky Me" from the movie Pecker under the movie I had roughly edited thus-far because anything goes with that and his has the pace to support the paltry number of clips I had. It had to work because it was now 4am and I had to get up for work the next morning, so, very embarrasedly I sent it to Stephe, so flustered that I incorrectly called it Episode 49 because I made no short for 49 (which prompted Stephe to call me because he couldn't find 50 on the server...my bad).

I was waiting for the big thumbs down, but then Justin loved it, that was a huge relief, and the one compliment he had was on the one teeny little shred of the movie that I "found", the one element I found was showing the numerous arenas the show takes place in, almost every clip is in a different location. That was the only story element I found, and that was the only detail Justin mentioned. That feels good, it's still the worst film I've made for the site in two months, but for your worst to be passable is a good place to be as an artist.

Oh, and once again, the very last edit made is my favorite thing in the movie, the cold opening with Sandy and Kate is the best part of the whole thing and the last edit I made right before I exported it. The last edit made in Beautiful Intrusion was the shot of Martin Mull that shows up at the end, which is the best part of that movie. A decision I made, once again, RIGHT before export.