Lack of Prestige (Magicians Veil) Post Production

The editing process was an interesting one for me, Christi and Jordan were quite on the ball and apart from actually sitting at the computer and working there wasn't a lot I could do to help. That being said I still came into the edit suite as often as possible to check on things and offer constructive feedback and make sure everyone was on task. Most of the time they were and despite a tight editing schedule the work got done to a good standard in good time.

One creative thing that came from the edit was the way we will in future treat special effects, some of the things we wanted to do didnt work and some of the things we did do could have been achieved more easily. There are a few ways we could have figured them out before production such as test shoots and test edits but the fact that the schedule changed so much made these things difficult to plan. However I am a little glad we didn't know exactly how easy it could have been, this could have led to an overuse of things popping up added with after effects as the muzzle flashes were. I think the balance between comedy, story and effect is just right, it isnt a camera exorcise but a tasteful and playful film, a fine line we could have easily fallen off.

We also have a very different end product to the script for a lot of reasons. Firstly its because of large changes in post, Christi's original script was too much for the time scale, there were too many ideas within it. We had a really long session talking about where to take the script and came up with some good ideas and simplifying the idea a lot. However, I believe, the problem with the project on the whole is that after this meeting the other group members left it to me and Christi to plan the film. They were told to come along to the scripting discussion and the shot listing session but they didn't. This lead to lots of production issues and a lack of coherence between the team. Finally a lack of professional actors and Christi's directing style led to takes being improvised and different every time causing continuity and editing problems.

I think overall that is why we have a different product, with a lack of coherence and muddled story lines we never quite knew what we were making. With the coverage I made sure of and the voice of Christi that was written in the script and executed on set we ended up with a nice final project, cobbled together from takes a little all over the place.