Editing monologue

Sometimes writing your thoughts and experiences out helps you put them into perspective.

I'm currently in the thick of editing my second feature documentary. It's quite an undertaking, what I imagine birth to be like! Once it's over and you have a beautiful baby, you forget how hard or painful the process was of getting that baby out.

I've blocked out how difficult it was editing my first feature, but even as difficult as that was, I still always knew "if it didn't work out, it didn't work out, no big deal"... I honestly didn't have that high of expectations for my first film. Surprisingly, it was well received.

And then I made a short 10 minute film for a film contest. I knew about the contest for 6 or 7 months, and I defiantly procrastinated starting the project until the last month. I worked up a psychological sweat, and beat myself up trying to finish in time. 14 films made it to the finals, and I ended up taking the 2nd place cash prize. What I thought was going to tip me over the crazy person edge ended up being the best financial blessing I could have had.

Now, having two successful flukes, I'm in a position where the bar is set much higher. We have thousands of fans anxiously awaiting this film's release, but what's far more taxing is the personal expectations on myself. I know I can do better than the first two projects, I've learned so much about what plays well in theatres, what distributors are looking for, what audiences are expecting and wanting to see in a film with a particular subject matter, it's all so much clearer to me now. I can't pull an idiot savant rabbit out of my hat anymore, I have to perform with purpose, knowing exactly what I want the outcome to be. I need to know my audience, I need to know my distributor, I need to know my ideal film festivals... and sometimes the goals counteract. Maybe I know that I have a faithful audience from this group of people, but where I really need to change people's minds is in this other group of people. Do I make a film that the LGBT community will love more than anything, or do I make a film that will change the 'non-believers' minds? Will they even see the film? Or is there actually a diamond pin-point of the perfect balance between making the LGBT community happy and also convincing the anti-gay rights people that they were wrong?

I used to think that 90 minutes was a lot of time to fill, but now I'm thinking "how could I ever pack everything important into just an hour and a half?" I personally love documentaries that give time for the moments and the glances and the breaths and the hesitation of words.... I think that's what makes us human and not robotic, but I've learned from my first film that sometimes when you give the interview subject a lot of time to speak, it makes the film seem slow, and the audience gets restless. I have so much footage for this new project, and so many points to make, that I think the best thing to do is take a more (what they call the..) "MTV approach": fast cuts, creative editing, music, graphics, get to the point, make it fun, funny, and informative, and then move on.

This project will be like a new genre for me. The first doc was slower, seasoned with funny, but mostly intense, and sometimes depressing. This new one will be fun, entertaining, hopefully enlightening, sometimes funny, but overall: hopeful. Life is beautiful, love is beautiful, and humans loving one another: gay, straight, bi, transgendered... it's all pure.

We'll see how it goes...