We’ve shot 451.44 GB of footage which translates, at 14.92 GB/98 minutes, to 49.42 hours (49:25:20 h:m:s) of footage shot. Our goal for the first month is, as Ashley mentioned, to shoot 75 hours of footage, 40 of which should be interview and 35 of which should be active. While we don’t know the breakdown of interview to active footage shot, that means that we’re 25 hours short of our goal, with 5 days remaining to meet our goal until Ashley goes home to Oregon for a few days for Christmas. That means 25 hours in 5 days, which actually should be attainable if we’re diligent: just 5 hours a day. After all, we’re at TVN from 10am to 8pm every day on average anyway, so we should be able to get there! Just need to ramp it up a little.

Our original goal for January, then, is to shoot 100 hours. To give y’all a sense of perspective, for our previous version of Life’s Waltz, we shot 28 full tapes (42 minutes each) of footage that we cut down to a 16:30 minute film, which boils down to about a 71:1 ratio of footage shot to footage included in the final product. Given we’re aiming to shoot 175 hours total (a goal that may or may not be met, of course, but we will try!) for the feature version and cut it down to, let’s say, a 90-minute film, this would yield a ratio of about 117:1! Maybe we should just stop now and save ourselves time in the editing room! No… but let’s just say that the editing process will be neither quick nor easy! “Fun” may be the word I’m looking for.

production, status update