Momentum is a critical component of any creative endeavour. Without it, your project is doomed to languish before completion.
I lost my momentum.
After returning from London, it took me weeks before I got around to editing together the exterior scenes we shot. I’m not sure if it was general apathy towards the project or just working around my pre-existing schedule, but it took until almost Christmas before I had anything to show Chris and Bobcat.
The biggest issue to tackle in the edit was the scene transitions. As written and shot, the movement of my character, Ted, through the bar door would carry us from one scene to the other. However, when shooting the exteriors we didn’t have access to open the door all night, so we had to shoot around the actual entrance except for the last scene.
Added to the complication was the dialogue — it was designed to start on one side and finish in a new context on the other. By shooting the scenes 9 months apart, we lost the connective tissue to really sell that idea.
The most significant change to the film was made fairly early on - we removed an entire scene.
Originally the film started with the exterior of me banging my head against the wall, went inside for Christmas, then returned to the exterior for Halloween. This lacked punch, as the opening scene had far less production value than the interior, so by dropping the Halloween scene, we could start in the inside, go out to the head bashing scene, and return for New Year’s. It took some work around to get the transitions to smooth out, but it works substantially better and gets us into the film in a faster and funnier way; in hindsight it should always have started in the bar first.
Once we finally had a decent rough cut, the real problems started to emerge.