Exhausted and drained from the days exploits, the team dispersed after a quick dinner. In front of us loomed the monster: Editing!
A quick shower, pots of coffee, and matchsticks in the eyes were the order of the day, or in this case night. In between editing, I had to shoot a scene from the balcony of the traffic. Somewhere along the way, I decided to forego sleep for that night. Again, in hindsight, that may have been a wrong decision. If I had managed even a couple of hours of shut-eye, I would have been in a far better frame of mind come deadline. I was simply mortified by the possibility of over-sleeping and having too much to do once awake to allow myself to sleep.
By the by, our final figure for cast and crew was now 21, out of which 20 were on screen; not to mention the families and friends of the cast and crew that constantly chipped in during the process with tons of help and support.
Come morning, and the rough edit was complete except for the scenes from the night before that were to be intercut with the scenes yet to be shot. The edit did throw up one nasty surprise though: A crucial shot in the establishment scene with the mother and baby had not been recorded! This, in all likelihood, was because the @#&% shooting the scene had forgotten to press record. I mean, how daft can anyone get? It’s that big red button on the screen, dodo. No prizes for guessing that yours truly was behind the camera at the time.
Frantic calls were made to the poor Mother who we had accosted on the street and who had so graciously helped us out. Basically, erm, could she be available again, at the same spot, in the same clothes? I mean, if it isn’t too much of a bother. Wonder of wonders, she agreed!
On to the shoot: There were two locations, one in the parking lot behind our building and one on the terrace, not counting the re-shoot of the pram scene, which was in an altogether different place. By noon, we wrapped up all the shots as per our schedule. Only the re-shoot of the pram scene was left. A team went off to shoot that scene as I started to wrap up the edit.
By the time the satellite team got back with the rushes, I had the edit almost ready. The music was being worked on simultaneously, but we ran into major hassles with transferring data across computers. The music was being worked on a pc, the editing on a mac. Getting the two to play nice with one another became a nightmare.
Editing got done around five in the evening. The first edit, predictably, had many crinkles to iron out. I was hopeful that we should be done by six, but there was still the music to bring in and the sound to be cleaned. In about half an hour, we realised that things weren’t moving fast enough. A mad scramble to get things fast-tracked simply made things worse. Renders were skipping frames, clips were getting mixed up; it was just crazy.
Even if we got done, there was still the drive to the hand-over point, in traffic. It slowly started dawning on us that we weren’t going to get done. Our sound was in deep trouble and that would take some fixing. The edit was done, and if we rendered it as is, we could still make a mad rush to get there in time. The event organisers had announced a half hour grace period. So there was still hope.
This was the crucial moment. We had to decide then and there what course to take. For me, it was more important to be happy with the finished product than to submit it half baked. Luckily, the team agreed. And we decided to finish the film properly and hand in a late submission. At least it would get screened for the audience polls, even if it would be out of competition.
A few hours later, all our attempts at fixing the sound proved futile. Our initial decision to not record live sound was fatal. At around ten in the evening, we gave up hope of even a late submission. In my mind, the film had to be how we had visualised it; otherwise it would tantamount to belittling the effort that so many folk had put in to the film.
And that was our 48 Hour Film Project experience. Harrowing, but enlightening as well. Will wrack up the nerve to put the film up online shortly.
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