Friday 15 January 2010

Pre-score edit of IAZM3 is done...

The other day I finished the edit of IAZM3, and it's now gone off to Brian and Gary to get the music done over the next few weeks. I've already heard one sample for one of the scenes, and it kicks ass already. I'm really looking forward to getting all the music into it and putting it online when it's done.

The film clocks in at 9 minutes and 58 seconds, so I was successful in sticking to my strict 10 minute running time, which was at times a tricky thing to do, but it was also kind of fun to solve the puzzle of how to edit shots down to make them as quick as possible while not losing their point of existing, and how to economise on the number of shots to tell the story of a sequence. It really makes you look closer at your editing, and you sometimes get down to trimming frames off of shots so that they cut when you'd naturally expect them to.

While editing this I would look at the time line and find myself going "8 seconds long? How indulgent!" during certain sequences. Indeed, some parts of the film have a slower pace, while others are as tight as ... something very tight ... and are frame-specific in their pace. So yeah, the puzzle was solved and all extraneous fat was trimmed, so I feel it now really barrels along at a fair old pace - which is a much better place to be with a short. It's better to feel it go by fast and to want more, than to be sat there waiting for the next thing to happen as it drags along.

But such is life and how you learn with each film what's important and what isn't, and how to make each and every new one better than the last.

While I will no doubt continue to refer to it as "IAZM3", indeed it is the third Zombie Man film, the only title on the film itself is what was originally the sub-title (but which is now just the title) - The Inevitable Decomposition of Zombie Man.

This further ties in with what I wanted to do with it - to make it capable of standing alone, but continuing to be a part of the series.

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