From the moment my Director of Photography hits record and I begin to get a sense of how a sequence will come together, scenes become like friends. You sit with them, you form them, they may even form you. I sit in the editing suite and log footage and begin to discover if this will just be an acquaintance or something more. After piecing together a rough edit these scenes are like old friends that I get attached to.
Yesterday I learned (once again) how it’s hard to say goodbye to old friends. I have a tight deadline on Thursday afternoon so we’ve been flying through changes in the Round Trip Missions project. As I began to slip clips around the timeline I started to make bigger and bigger changes. Soon my old friends were dissected and some were gone and it gets a little emotional. Now to be clear, I am not sitting at my desk weeping as I hit “delete.” In the end, the final product is better. I guess this is why it’s best to have a director and an editor working on piecing together a show – they can slap one another when relationships become inappropriate.
