The second cut of the film, clocking in at 1:32 hours, was almost like a new first cut in terms of having to completely re-envision the approach, the story, and the narrative. Let me clarify: this doesn’t mean that there’s only one character in the film at this point; in truth, there is currently one main character, Sam (known as “The Mayor” of TVN), and two featured characters, Dorothy and Ceil. In addition, plenty of other people appear in the film, and going forward, I will work to incorporate other voices into the film. It has been the right approach to try to make the film very focused, about just one man, and then to build out from that core, rather than the original approach, which was to try to include everything and everyone. Moving forward, we will try adding more voices to the core of the film. In fact, this was the overwhelming demand during the discussion at the rough cut screening. We haven’t forgotten about the other characters, it’s just that there’s so much material at hand that it would be easy to make a really diluted, topical/conversational film. But if there’s one thing I learned in film school, it’s that film’s strength is in its emotional impact. In order to carry emotional weight, to reach out and touch an audience, you have to let the audience get to know a character, get involved in their life, and go through a journey with him/her. So this is the current plan. I will continue to refine the film, probably expand it out some to more voices, and I will post more later on specific directions, characters, and scenes.

I’ll aim to have a trailer done by the end of this month that everyone can enjoy and start getting excited about. I realize that it’s been a long journey and you haven’t gotten to see any of the actual film yet, but we thank you very much for sticking around. Because there’s so much amazing material that will inevitably not make it into the film itself, we are considering releasing a lot of content online and as DVD extras. We want to get as much of this material out as possible and tell as many stories as possible; we just need to take it one step at a time. Stay tuned!

P.S. If you are interested in participating in future rough cut screenings, be they in Dallas or LA, please let us know!

Jared gives an update on Life’s Waltz in the editing room from the frontlines, 7 months into the assistant editing and editing process. Full rough assembly complete!

As you can see, as I post this, it’s much later than 2 or 3 months after we started the entire project in late November, which would have had us finishing the project and saying goodbye in February or so. That’s how long we originally intended to work on the project. But when we first started realizing that we’d be shooting and then editing instead of both simultaneously, we shifted back our sights and told people we thought we’d screen the film at TVN (where they intend to do a big red carpet event for the whole community!) in late April, early May. This is no longer realistic either. In fact, it’s not even close, considering that it’s now August, and we’d have to time travel to make that deadline. We’re looking at December 31st, 2009 for an end-date to the creative aspects of the project. In other words, have a finished product on our hands by the end of the year, February at the latest. That’s a full year later than we originally thought. But, it’s in line with what all the pros told us: they’ve never edited a documentary in less than 6 months to a year (and that’s just editing).

Now how does that sound? Things have definitely changed, but it feels good. We both feel good about this, despite any issues or grievances that have arisen like in any relationship. We’re on course and trekking forward. Look for less frequent blog posts but more substantial ones when they come, though we’ll still give the occasional post-production status update via vlog.

Since I last began writing about The New Deal, even more has changed. Ashley’s now back in Oregon doing producing work, while I’ve stuck around in Dallas to continue editing. My goal is to have a rough cut of the film done by September 1 (may be pushed back a couple of weeks because I just got back from that long in NYC), and Ashley’s goal is to raise money for finishing funds (such as for titles, graphics, removing all those damn reflections in people’s glasses, and DVD mastering, authoring, and replication). In addition, Life’s Waltz has taken on an intern (volunteer?)! He’s already been doing a lot of assistant editing work and has even started cutting some Old Stories. Finally, to give y’all sense of direction, we received some excellent advice from Mark Harris (Producer, Darfur Now), whom we met with when we sojourned to LA a couple of months ago, to try to aim for a premiere at SXSW – South by Southwest – the now-famous Austin film and music festival. That’s in April, and submissions are likely due around the end of the year, so that puts us on an interesting and healthy timeline.

We’re excited, we think we have a much better grasp on the realities of what we’re doing, and barring unforeseen acts of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, we’re in it for good for the long haul.

Ashley gives us a producing update from Oregon!

As we have realized that the film is going to take much longer than we initially expected, we figured it would be nice to at least screen SOMETHING at TVN in the meantime so everyone could see some of what we’ve been doing with the footage and our time. In light of that, we’re going to put together a screening of Old Stories later this month, trying to have one story from each of the main people we’ve been working with at TVN in the lineup. But luckily for all of y’all, we’re gonna post them here. Look out for a whole slough of Old Stories coming this blog’s way very shortly! We were thinking of doing a red carpet event but figured it’d be best to save that for the movie’s premiere.

By the way, if you ever find one of the videos we post to be particularly laughter-inducing or heart-melting, pass it along to your friends with the direct YouTube link. Spread the word!

Jared gives an update to the Life’s Waltz community about what’s been happening in the past few weeks in terms of editing, and what to expect from here on out. We’re off to LA for three weeks!

The thing is, is that certain practical constraints changed the nature of our project, Life’s Waltz, and therefore they changed our schedule. Originally we thought the whole thing wouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 months. By now we’ve had a drastic reality check. Among the practical things that changed the nature of the project were the quality and type of footage we were getting, the realization of how long it takes to film enough to do justice to the subject matter, business matters like record-keeping, minutes, accounting, and insurance, and other random things that came up that we didn’t know we’d have to do or didn’t expect to do in the original framework for the project. This all compelled us to keep shooting and not edit at the same time. So after the couple of months that we shot, we ended up with almost 200 hours of footage and not having edited any of it. Then came some legal, business, and technical issues that delayed our beginning editing, which all took time to work on and resolve. Additionally, family members visited and we took some brief and uncoordinated vacations since real life was still going on, and meanwhile we continued to follow up on a few stories that had emerged by shooting, and we also went to film a few special events, such as Valentines Day. We would’ve been remiss had we not filmed the election of the elected Valentines King and Queen.

See, we had originally only even formed an LLC for the litigation protection. That’s it. We almost tried doing this film without even forming a company. We were just in it for the experience, after all. But once we decided to form an LLC for the legal safety, we realized unwittingly that it opened some unexpected doors. First off, in dealing with the nation’s largest senior services provider at one of whose community we’re shooting Life’s Waltz, they definitely aren’t going to enter into any agreements with two random people who aren’t even behind a company. The LLC was equivalent to legitimacy and credibility, more or less. Though obviously we still couldn’t walk in with clown suits on. It made it official. Though we hadn’t thought about it, they required us to have insurance if we were going to be there, and having the company helped with that as well. But both of these things, most importantly to this story, started changing the nature of the project without us really thinking about it. It was becoming more business-y and by-the-books. Soon after forming the company, we thought we’d better have image and location releases/agreements for everyone appearing in the documentary. This led to a ton of time and work drafting the appropriate agreements (having no legal background and getting free consultation by BDD’s Legal Services *wink wink*) to turn out agreements that even changed as we kept shooting. Also, we showed up to the meeting to sign our “Location Release” with TVND, they took one look at it and their lawyers went and drafted a real one. So much for that effort – but it’s come in handy for shooting off-location. At any rate, the picture I’m trying to paint is that things started, not by design, taking a very official, by-the-books form. And this was certain to change the nature of the project.

We realized also, after talking to a number of professional, successful documentary filmmakers, and also after seeing the quality of footage we were getting–truly outstanding–that the process would probably take much longer than we expected as well. Remember, we originally though the whole thing from beginning to end would take 2 or 3 months, and then we’d part ways. Guess again!

So we started drafting a business plan. We started talking with people about their approaches to sales and distribution. We spent a few weeks figuring out how to best manage our footage in the editing room; because we filmed with Panasonic’s brand new HMC-150, the footage poses a number of technical challenges to be able to edit it. Ultimately, we had to figure out a way and get the correct hardware to convert all of the footage twice over into a severely degraded, much smaller storage requirement format (this is called “downrezzing”, in other words “downgrading the resolution”) to keep potentially immense storage costs down, and then not to mention the amount of time and coordination it took to convert all of the footage twice over and back it all up onto three separate external drives in addition to what now are the two computers that we have to edit on. But the good news is, our process is correct and will work solidly and provide a lot of stability. We now have two computers to edit on, as well, so that we will both be working on different selected characters up until the rough assembly of the film.

We finally started editing, well… Ashley did. I was still converting footage and taking care of a lot of other business stuff, such as getting all of our books in order and preparing taxes for the first time in my life. What a learning experience. Plus, we came up with some more consolidated and streamlined approaches to the marketing campaign, namely focusing on Old Stories, the Sam Show, and the Ceil series (we haven’t named it yet because we haven’t done an “episode” yet). But during this time period, things were very crazy, and we re-prioritized what we were doing, thus less frequent blog posting.

Now, we’re running full steam. We’re both editing full time. All taxes and business matters are sorted and settled. Old Stories are in the pipeline. And mostly importantly, as we were advised by my friend Daniel who’s consulted us so much on this project, we’re focusing on the product, because without that we’ve got nothing else.

To do this, we’ve sat down for a few hours (and will continue to keep the dialogue open and dynamic) to hammer out a few basic guiding principles for how we edit so answer the questions of what are we doing and why, all in order to create the best film possible. As a practical matter, since we’re editing on separate computers and we need to remain coordinated and collaborative, we sat down to figure out to what extent we should be creating rough assemblies of each scenes, which type of scenes we should be doing rough assemblies of, and what the timeline/schedule of getting things done, who will do what work, and what our goals are.

I’ll put it very concretely in the next blog post, detailing our schedule, timeline, goals, character arcs and conflicts that we’ll focus on, what our process will be for doing the full rough assembly, and much, much more.

To be continued again…

Well, while you’ve been left to wonder, many things have happened over here that beg reportage. But let me start off with the story of how we got to this point before I get into the meat of what’s happened in the past few weeks in my next post.

Once upon a time, Ashley and Jared made a 17-minute short-subject documentary called Life’s Waltz, about life, love, and loss in old age in their final semester at the University of Southern California. Though there were definitely some hitches along the way, they emerged with an overall wonderful learning experience and a solid, very enjoyable, professional product on their hands, screening it to a theater of over 400 people who hooted and hollered in applause for two filmmakers that the vast majority of them didn’t even know when they entered that landmark Norris theater that May 3. On the heels of this small but substantial success, the high-as-kites Ashley and Jared submitted their short film to a number of film festivals. It was rejected by every single one of the 15 or so that they submitted to, except that they’re still to this day waiting to hear from 3 or 4 more. No matter. Esteem untarnished, they kept their heads high. Who cares? Not they. In the meantime, they continued to show the film to friends, family, and absolute strangers the world over, as they each departed for 3 months to opposite ends of the Earth on backpacking trips.

When Jared returned to New York at the end of July, he walked around Times Square and made a couple of phone calls. One of them turned out to be fate-sealing: the one to none other than Ashley. “Yo, doozle. I’ve been thinking. The entire time I was traveling and meeting all of these amazing people, I had the growing compulsion to do a feature documentary. It’s what I want to do. What do ya say, pardna?” And so it was that Ashley and Jared committed to making a feature version of Life’s Waltz, one that would go deeper, hit harder, mean more, and defy all expectations. Jared hit the ground in LA in mid-August while Ashley was finishing up her job at her beloved ranch. They went through 9 drafts of a treatment (film summary, outline, plan and proposal) and got to work approaching various retirement communities in Bend (Oregon), Los Angeles, and Dallas to see where they could seal the deal on an opportunity to shoot their full-length documentary at an amenable retirement community of active, independent seniors.

Of course, things always take longer than one expects them to in film, and so finally, Jared went back to Dallas in mid-October, and it was then that they finally struck the golden deal at TVND (though other communities made themselves available in Dallas and Bend, as well). After a lot of time spent researching equipment, research, and how to create and run a company, signing some business and financial agreements, and a lot more planning (and with innumerable, crucial, and invaluable help from some key players in the business and legal departments), Ashley booked a ticket for Dallas. That brings us to late November, when we actually started filming Life’s Waltz. You see, originally Ashley and I had estimated that we’d shoot for about a month while also editing to see how our film was shaping up, then edit for a little bit, go back and shoot some more based on whatever story was emerging, and then wrap the entire film after a total of 3 months. We thought, “Hey, even if nothing comes of it, at least it will have been a great learning experience and we’ll have a feature film under our belts in 3 months, and we can part ways and go about our lives, nothing lost, and a lot of experience gained.” Well, remember how I said that things always take longer than one expects?

To be continued soon…

We’ve started editing! Ashley gives a run-down of some basic approaches to editing.