Distracted

I'm lucky if I get in 3 hours of editing a week. It's not a number I'm proud of.

This Monday night thing is working out pretty well for me except I skipped last Monday.

The weird thing is that when I think about editing, it's something I want to get done, but can't make myself do. I still think it's just that since I know I can't knock it out in a couple of days it feels like it's a never-ending project and so I don't ever feel close enough to the end to get excited about showing it off...and I think that's usually my motivation with projects. I get a good idea and then I can't wait to complete it. This is so incomplete right now that I don't feel compelled to complete it.

But almost everyday I think about it and how I want to see it finished really badly. Some days at work I actually get really motivated to work on it, but can't because I'm at work...and by the time I get home, I'm worn out and not in the mood. And when the weekend comes around I want to relax and have fun. I always end up doing too much of that and then the weekend is over (not to mention art school put me onto 3 day weekends so this 2 day weekend crap is hard to adjust back to) ...Hence editing Monday nights...but I just don't have enough time to really get into it. So I'm only editing little pieces at a time.

The good news is that it's looking good. I cut together the scene where Neil comes home and finds his mom dead on the couch (spoiler?), which is one of the oldest scenes I wrote. It's been in my head and a part of this story for a long time. The day we shot it, I was sick, and we were pretty rushed and I felt like I didn't do it justice, but I just cut something very promising and dare I say dramatic, and I'm really happy about that. It was nice to cut a scene that didn't have any dialogue, but also wasn't a montage. It's like the purest kind of storytelling, and accordingly I shot it in a very different way than I shot most of the dialogue scenes (i.e. more shots and cuts, more traditional).

The more I complete, the more eager I am to see the entire project as one piece. I'm really enjoying rediscovering these little scenes we did that just got lost in the greater mess of the production. My head was in such a different place when shooting and it's very interesting now, 3 months later, to kind of see what I did with a clearer perspective.

I wish my computer would just assemble footage and sync sound while I was at work so I could just come home and do the artsy part of editing. In the future, I think I will end up hiring an editor, so I can just oversee the process and not have to do the nitty gritty stuff. It's just too daunting of a process for a feature film.