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November 23, 2006

One Cut Down...Again

Yen and I made our first round of refinements to Ciao the other night, and also added in the typing graphics that open the film (a series of e-mails between the lead characters). As we added the first few sentences, which one-at-a-time type their way onto the screen, we began to get nervous: were they too slow? Would audiences be put off by having to read so early in the film? Would they throw off the pacing of the film right at the outset? We immediately began to brainstorm ways to fix this potentially disastrous problem, throwing around ideas like confining each e-mail to its own static title card or chopping all but the two or three most pertinent sentences out; we even considered dropping the e-mails altogether. Somehow, in the midst this problem-solving maelstrom, it took us quite a while to realize that we should go ahead and give the original idea a try. And what do you know? It worked perfectly, exactly as planned. We'd been pretty good with not second-guessing ourselves until then.

Later that night, I did a rough sound mix (including some Arvo Part temp music) and then burned a few DVDs of revised cut. DVDs which at this very moment are with Yen, on a plane, en route to Hong Kong for Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated note, here's a belated link to Dennis Lim's excellent NYT story on Wong Kar Wai, who just finished shooting My Blueberry Nights.

Posted by David Lowery at November 23, 2006 11:54 AM

Comments

Posted by: Yen at November 25, 2006 7:09 AM

Posted by: jmj at November 25, 2006 11:34 AM