The winter solstice is coming, and Christmas. Pagan, Christian, Viking Yule, The Hopi Soyal, the Asian Dongzhi: all the northern hemisphere folks get into the solstice act. For me it means saying goodbye to college students that I’ve really just gotten to know. Emotions run high with finals stress, the prospect of seeing parents, obsession with likealittle.com. But this isn’t the Christmas column—this is the ROWS trailer first-cut column.
ROWS is a scary feature film I’m shooting summer 2011. I wanted to test some things out, so we shot some stuff last August, when it was 91 degrees. Now it’s 19. Yes, it took me a long time to get a cut, but I had other things going on. Plus I had to upgrade my mac and re-learn Final Cut Pro. In all the films I’ve worked on, there has always been a real editor. This time, it’s just me (though I have a lifeline to my friend and genius editor Scott Chestnut).
I was eyeing some nice new machines at capitol mac (capitolmac.com) in Fell’s Point the other day (did you know they take trade-ins on older machines and use them for parts?) I really need to be into Snow Leopard and Final Cut 7. My Leopard/6 is cursed, I think. There are certain audio glitches I cannot make go away, no matter how many ways I try. You’ll hear them when you watch the ROWS video embedded in this column (example – music drops out over the main title “ROWS” at the end). If anyone has sage advice, please let me know. I also welcome comments on the trailer. This is the ”long version,” at 3 + minutes. I know it will be more effective at 90 seconds, but I wanted a long version anyway. I’ll get there.
It was so hot last summer. We were shooting in a cornfield, in the rain. Drinking gallons of water. The girls were wearing no more than two ounces of clothing. Now we’re all Michelin men. The power went out twice today (while editing), so I’m piling wood in the fireplace. But you relive moments when editing: the heat, funny moments, humiliating moments, mistakes. You get to know actor’s faces extremely well, much more so than by being with them on the set. You get a little obsessed, hearing those voices, words and weird sounds repeated a thousand times.
What if I wrote a screenplay about two girls trapped in an infinite cornfield, because they are under a curse, but in doing so I provoked a real curse, ancient and inexorable, freed like genie from the bottle, from a box Pandora, and the curse is now in my computer, causing mysterious sound glitches, and slowly driving me mad? Jack could just as easily have been editing a film, rather than a novel, at the Overlook Hotel.
David Warfield
