A short documentary project I’ve been working on for Building Beauty is finally live: A tour of a house Christopher Alexander designed for two writers, Ann Medlock and John Graham, in Washington State.
This has been in the works since late last year! I did all of the editing/post-production, and what stands out to me now, ten months later, is just how much film editing experience I’d gained between the first and final cuts.
The biggest lesson was concision. That first cut was over 18 minutes; the last sits at 12 1/2. I also learned, pretty quickly, that duration of edit isn’t a linear multiple of final runtime. A twelve-minute video takes far more than three times as long as a four-minute one. Partly because it just takes longer to watch the whole thing from start to finish, which I must’ve done dozens of times.
I imagine that working on a film of this length (vs a TV commercial or a social media story) is much more microcosmic of working on a full-length feature. There were quite a many semiconscious, in-the-moment decisions that turned out to be good ones – and plenty others that didn’t. There were minor shots missing that I had to stage and match from here in Detroit. There were titles to be designed!
Back in issue #418, I wrote about Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje saying that editing was the closest, of the different disciplines in film, to writing fiction. I can attest. The sequence of the actual house tour was a natural spine, but the story itself had to be found.
