BACKROADS post production update (November 6, 2007)

Mark and I are almost done with a rough cut of the film.  We worked Sunday and this morning on the dialog scenes, and it's exciting to see the film start to take shape.  A lot of the other scenes that we have edited don't have a lot of synched sound with them, and thus are hard to imagine in their final form without sound or music.  You cut for picture and do your best to imagine what sound will accompany the images.  Sometimes it's actually a good restriction, as certain temporary sound effects can effect your judgement when pacing a scene, but cutting without sound allows you to establish a certain visual rhythm that you can then expand and enrich when you add sound. 

Cutting dialog is a bit different, where you have all of their words, but in an unpolished and uneven form.  When you cut from one shot to the next, for example, your volume level or room tone, road noise, etc. can jump up and down and make the scene feel less fluid than it actually is.  The editor does his best to make a temp mix of levels by making minor adjustments just to help you feel out the scene.  If the scene works with the little volume pops and shifts in background tone, you can be pretty darn sure it will work even better once a sound designer gets hold of it.

I'm going back over to work with Mark, who is continuing to edit while I'm away, a little more tonight and we'll hopefully have the complete rough cut.  Then we'll really start to dig in.