Something to prove

Just did a tally after a good 3 hour editing session.

I'm at least 100 minutes in. Maybe 105ish.

And there's a good 20 minutes worth of script left to cut. Which means the rough cut will be 2 hours. Which is crazy. I never thought it would be that long. I felt like I worked really hard just to get the script to 90 pages because I just remember having a 75 page script for "Making Of" that ended up being 65 minutes long. But now I've got a 110 page script that's 120 minutes long.

But it is a rough cut. So chances are I'll end up shaving about 10 minutes or so rounding it out to close to what the script was.

It's really weird to have that much movie though. I'm really eager to push through these last few scenes so I can have it and watch it. I keep going through waves of excitement and disappointment. I'm dying to know what the end product makes me feel like. My hope is that through experience I've just set myself to expect the worse and set my expectations pretty low. I've built up this defense mechanism against failure, which is a good thing to have, but it can make you overly cautious and skeptical sometimes. When I'm not editing and not in the mood to edit, it's almost like I can forget about the project as something I've done. Like giving up on it, assuming it won't be more than it already is. But then somehow I get myself to work on it and more often then not working on it gets me really pumped about it and I'll edit a sequence I'm really proud of or I'll discover some really nice shots I had forgotten about.

Maybe I'm just scared to let myself get too excited about it because I don't want to be let down if it sucks...but maybe...and hopefully, it'll actually be what it's supposed to be...which is something good. And then I can rest easy knowing that I am in fact a good filmmaker and I can safely move forward with proof in hand.

I've always felt with past projects that I've been on track to be a good filmmaker, but never actually was able to prove how good I wanted to be or thought I was or thought I could be. I may have been aware of that, and have been able to channel that to get me to keep making things, but I've always wanted that piece of evidence. I really hope this is it.