TVCs - post 10

Editing began yesterday!

Actually that's not true, because Toetu actually decided to get in a day early and began labelling clips and rough cutting on Wednesday. I was very impressed! He had made a few different rough cuts to show me as soon as I walked in. Unfortunately for him I got him to begin again from scratch, but it was still useful as it meant that he had already selected the best bits from some of the takes, and we were able to use that.

Toetu and I didn't have a great experience last time we worked together, as he was going through a period of questioning whether he wanted to continue to pursue editing, and I was going through a very high stress time which meant that my patience was thin. Nevertheless, thanks to Toetu's initiative we were able to get off on a very good foot yesterday morning.

Sadly, beginning the cut quickly revealed that a lot of the gorgeous footage we shot on Tuesday will never make the light of day - or rather the darkness of the screening room. We simply could not fit it all into 30 seconds and difficult decisions had to be made.

I was surprised how quickly we came up with a relatively good 30 second cut. I was quite pleased with how dispassionate I managed to be about dropping footage, although I have to be careful not to think about it too much as it's quite painful if I do! Now the really big challenge is creating the right soundtrack for the ad. I spent a long time yesterday flicking through track after track, trying to find the right music for the forest scene. Although I found some tracks which sort of hinted at being the right style and mood, none were quite right so I'm still looking. I might actually ask a friend to write something specifically for the commercial, but that raises the problem of having to be able to describe exactly what it is I'm looking for, and I'm not terribly good at doing that with music. I did find some stuff that we could definitely use for the city part of the commercial though, although to be honest I really want to drop the city section and will ask Sima about it when she gets back from Wellington.

Aside from music we also need to put in some bird song and wind and make sure the sounds of footsteps sync up nicely with the visuals. I also need to record the voice over. I wish it could be done today but unfortunately all the soundies are on shoots this week.