Topic: Makin' Movies
...not of God...of a film.
After a few long sessions, I got a relatively complete assembly of my unfinished short film Flight Control together. The shot choices aren’t final, as I need to review the footage again, but it’s the first time I got all the dialogue shots together and can play the whole story.
Looking at it, it’s impossible to really gauge if it works as film, because most of the footage is of my actor... this might sound weird, but the way the film was intended to be done was that a lot of what you’d see were the various readouts that the character—a flight controller—was looking at as he got information from and gave instructions to a pilot we never see or hear.
The only way I’ll get a real sense of how this would work is to have those readouts and displays...most of which I haven’t made yet.
One thing that is obvious is that I can’t use all the dialogue. I deliberately over-wrote the script so that I’d have dialogue to explain pretty much everything that is going on, in the event that the readouts didn’t make matters entirely clear. The rough assembly is clocking in at about 11.5 minutes, and I was really aiming for more like 8. Since I over-wrote, there’s a lot I can cut, starting with the professional technical jargon that sets the scene but isn’t essential to play out throughout.
This is going to be an interesting exercise... albeit in some ways a painful one.
