It's often said that a film is only abandoned by a director, that it is never truly finished. Yesterday, we began locking picture on Running America. This is a tedious, detail-oriented process of creating files, double-checking audio cues, making last-minute changes, and so forth.
Michael O'Brien, our editor (on a sabbatical from The Carson Group) took on an army of footage and conquered it, crafting scenes out of nothing and finding things I didn't even know existed. A great editor makes possible something that would not have been possible without them. Mike is such an editor. I believe he's taken, oh, maybe 3 days off in the past 4 months of editing. His dedication has been astounding.
Early on, my director of photography, Andreas von Scheele, and I discussed how this would be Ansel Adams meets FSA photography. Gorgeous vistas punctuated with portraits of real people and their struggles during a time of change in the country. When I go back and look at the mood and tone book we created at the outset of the project, I can actually point to photographs and say "we got that" and "we definitely got that." This is incredibly satisfying. Our interviews with Americans yielded moments of great insight and emotion, and we met people who surprised and enlightened us along the route.
We charted our edit of the film like we charted the run. "We're in about Nebraska..." "We just crossed the Mississippi!" "Oh, looks like we have to go back to Colorado" and so on. After 4 plus months of editing, so many late night sessions, roundabout discussions about scene directions and sequences, we pushed through many "I don't know what to think anymore..." moments to arrive at realizations we knew would help the film.
And it was about that moment when we felt we could not ingest any more caffeine, that the talented Michael Seifert at Ante Up Studios played us some ideas for the score. This jolt of energy was better than any shot of espresso. This Wednesday, a session band will be in place - pedal guitar, acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica - for a tracking session that will probably go into the night. Then, on to sound mix.
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