Here we go…

May 30, 2008

Here we go… a guest post by Graeme Bachiu

I was about to pour myself a glass of orange juice at about quarter after eight in the morning…the Saturday morning Eric Van Allen and Paul Thompson were due to show up at my apartment at nine a.m…when the phone rang. I suspected it would be Nick, my camera guy, running a bit late and giving me a courtesy call. As a good producer is wont to do, I built in some extra time in our schedule which could allow us to be late if need be.

It turns out it was Paul on the phone, an hour early. I guess the orange juice could wait; we marched down to Horton’s for the harder stuff to kill some time.

Nick, luckily, showed up a bit early, too. And he came with two coffees in his hands; one for himself and one for me. Sheepishly, I looked down at my own two coffees and wondered what the odds were that we’d buy each other a coffee at the same time. Evidently those odds are pretty good.

What happened next was a whirlwind of fifteen or sixteen hours of shooting that took us from the wilds of Welland, Ontario and Niagara College to Ajax and Pickering and along the way we jump, dove and sometimes stumbled through our memories and experiences. Nick, he of the sore upper body at the end of the day, did a masterful job of shooting in a style that often leaves editors frustrated with a lack of quality material, something Nick deftly avoided. Eric and Paul were great, too…even picking up the guitars to play a couple of times through the course of the day.

To paraphrase Stephen Stills, now begins the task I have dreaded the coming of for so long. Well, not really. I’m actually ahead of the game in terms of conceptualizing the final product. The primary version of what I’m calling Ten Years Gone will be approximately 15 minutes long in order to comply with the restrictions for a short documentary festival I plan to enter it in. Of course, the due date for this is the 20th of June, which is fast approaching.

The first step in achieving this 15 minute cut is to log your tapes, which you do after a couple of days of recuperation after your long shoot. In the old days, this would involve a VTR, your tape, a pen and a pad of paper and about 2-3 hours per tape, logging timecode numbers for good interview clips, sound, shot sequences and so forth. This was traditionally called the paper edit because you’d begin to assemble your edit (a script, actually) in a theoretical sense before you had to pay for editing time.

Non linear editing has blurred the lines of the old production model in a lot of ways, and the paper edit is one of them. Non destructive editing allows me to be less organized and more creative by trying things in the editing process. I’m actually still rather organized; instead of logging all of my material on a pad of paper I do it directly into my Mac now (at work we call this the ingesting stage) and after a few hours of this I can begin to do rough edits. The downside is—and this is where the quote from Stills is pertinent—the process can get hopelessly stretched and extended when you’ve got a fluid deadline and millions of options available to you…which is the point at which I now find myself.

With June 20th fast approaching I quickly built a few sequences I thought were of interest, quickly amassing nine minutes of my total run time without touching on the last half of the raw material. So while I may be ahead of the game as far as the concept is concerned I’m behind the eight ball when it comes to brevity and squeezing the most out of every frame I can.

To illustrate my points, here I am as my video alter-ego explaining some of the other distractions present in day to day life and giving an example of one of the sequences likely—hopefully—to make the final cut of Ten Years Gone. As always, comments are appreciated at old.north.prod@gmail.com.

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Here we go…

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