Late nights with your editor

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Seriously, how many monitors do I need on my desk to work?

Last night was round 3 (I think) of changes to the 'Bite' edit with Chad Archibald (director) sitting in on the session. How late did we go? Well...I saw the sun come up as my head hit my pillow.

It helps when the director comes with a list of changes and then we spend time going through them right there. No trying to communicate back and forth via an ever-growing email thread. Just tackling all of the changes immediately and discussing them as we went.

Only occasionally would we have to pause and talk about a certain change to the timeline that he wanted. It's healthy to have a different point-of-view looking at your movie. We would chat about how to re-arrange some scenes to make the entire movie flow better, using alternate takes of actor's performances and look at which moments of the movie were no longer needed and belonged on the cutting-room floor.

There's more work to yet be done once the movie gets seen by other pairs of eyes. Until then I could really use a strong, kick-in-the-face coffee.

The Last Day on Set of Bite

The end is in sight! Today is the last day of principal photography on Bite and also my last day on set. But the work doesn't end there.

EDITING PROGRESS

• Scenes cut: 48
• Total runtime: 50:11
• Number of crew birthdays celebrated on set: 3

Assembling the rough cut of Bite while here on set has been so incredibly smooth that I cannot believe the amount of progress we've already made. The cast and crew have worked TREMENDOUSLY hard to make this all happen.

There will most likely be pick-up days and I will get each day's footage delivered to me and will finish up the first cut of the movie. That's when things will get really exciting. Working with the director to finesse each scene, experiment with the arrangement of the scenes and trim the fat off of the entire film to get it to our goal running time of 83 minutes.

Updates will continue to be posted here as work. And I may have some video content to put up that goes more into depth on editing Bite during production.

In the meantime, be sure to like the Merc Media Facebook page to follow updates as they come out.

Achievement Unlocked! - Day 12 of Editing Bite

Just look at that big, sexy timeline! As of yesterday we've passed the halfway point of our estimated film duration (The distributor has us aim for 83 minutes. That's their "magic number" for total runtime).

EDITING PROGRESS

• Scenes cut: 34
• Total runtime: 44:27
• Average number of hours spent on set each day: 14

44 minutes edited. And we're on Day 11 of production. By this rate the director will be watching his movie by Christmas.

Once this week finishes I'll be excited to pack up and bring my edit suite back home to set up and finish up a few projects on my plate from the year (Bite, Antisocial 2, and a myriad of commercial projects).

Plus rest. There will probably be some rest in there somewhere once the holidays hit.

Just wanted to share this achievement with you. I'm feeling pretty awesome by the progress made on this production. It sure is a helluva way to cap the year off.