Cutting Complete!

Yee-Haw!! Finished cutting all of the footage into clips shortly after lunch today. 3 hours and 26 minutes of footage turned into who-knows-how-many-hundreds of individual cuts for a final film that will probably be 30 minutes long. Still have a lot of "day job" stuff to do though, so this is probably it for today. Tomorrow I can start putting this thing together. The plan is to begin with the jungle planet scenes first. I KNOW we have plenty of stuff for Clayton's cockpit scenes. Reshooting Stormy in her cockpit is not an option now that Nicola Rae is no longer in the state. We must make that work one way or another. So the only section of the movie that may require additional shooting is the stuff in the jungle.

We did a few minor reshoots for Nyoka and I suspect we may have to do a couple for this film as well. Nothing major. There's not a lot you can do without your lead actress, however, where we most often miss things is in the little transitional stuff. For example, in one shot Nyoka may be on the ground and in the following shot she's on her feet...but we never filmed her actually GETTING UP! So the solution is to cut away to a shot of Crimson Skull, creating an interval of time during which the viewer can understand that "oh, she must have stood up while the bad guy was talking". THIS is the reason why we prefer our bad guys to have full face masks! Pierson, our new bounty hunter, is ALSO out of state, but we can put ANYBODY in that costume and still get any transitional shots we may need. I made a cameo appearance in Nyoka as the Crimson Skull in 3 quick shots for the reasons described above. I may have to be Clayton the Bounty Hunter if we are missing similar shots this time... but there's no way to know what you might have missed until you start putting things together.

Below is a shot of the lovely Nicola Rae in her spiffy styrofoam cockpit! This is how it looks before we modify it, but once we add a bit of color correction, sound effects and the cool floating viewscreens, the cockpit takes on a new life and becomes much more visually interesting.

...but with legs like that onscreen, if you're hung up on the cheezy cockpit, I can't help you. :)

Later,
John