24.06.26

Interrupted by the heat · Listening to the work · breaking habits

This heat, this infernal heat.

I’ve been getting into a good editing rhythm, but my Mac packed up yesterday, overheated around 6pm. It was operating at 19% capacity, impossible to work in the timeline, everything was stuttering and hanging. So I had to call it, went and got a cold beer and watched the World Cup.

It was a bit annoying. I’d just found a decent way to work around the interruption to composing the music, which is to carry on, attempt to hear the music in my head, and then arrange the cut accordingly. I make notes for when my composer returns, and try to leave the correct spaces and breathing room on the timeline, which I can kind of loosely judge from experience. Here’s a sample of a shorthand note from yesterday:

[10:21:32:16] Beat/impact – the same one as from the first cells shot in the intro, matched against the first shot in the seq. Increasingly urgent and unsettling, a swarming sound building under shots 1-6 and then: “I took off running”, another impact [same sound] and bring it back down into a long-note bass pulse for rhythm.

I would normally use commercial music reference tracks and I started doing that with this project, but commercial music doesn’t quite fit what’s needed for this film, which has a very specific approach to music, and cutting with it was obscuring what I actually require from the score.

The sea is incredible this morning. An azure lake under a slab of glass, ribbons twisting across the horizon.

I’ve been circling the idea behind this project for years now, ever since I was a teenager, and I’ve just never had the chance to explore it. I’d always been taken with a filmic device in which dialogue leaps into the non-diegetic soundtrack. Sequences off the top of my head include the marriage scene in Casino, when Sharon Stone speaks to James Woods on the phone, and a scene between Cameron Diaz & Ewan McGregor in Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary (an otherwise terrible film).

My concept was to see whether I could extend that technique and do a larger piece, which would unfold as a kind of audiovisual poem, with dialogue rolling non-diegetically, but also carrying a narrative, rather than being abstracted. It’s something that I tried out on my first ever 16mm film, back in film school, but I haven’t revisited it since then and that was a drama, and this is a documentary, which is very different.

The subject of the film takes place in the U.S, across several states, and it wouldn’t have been practical for me to fly out there. That’s something that I would have done in my former career, when I had the budget for it, but isn’t feasible with my current resources.

I thought that those constraints might provide an opportunity to explore this long-running idea - since I won’t use the video of interviews, I can do them remotely, pull the audio into the soundtrack, and put images together in a more conceptual way. It may be that I am being over ambitious: I have several interleaving stories, it’s feature length, and it’s difficult to find and marshal the right images, while retaining a sense of the big picture and flow.

I’m usually quite precise when cutting, but I think with this one I’m going to have to be deliberately baggy, at least until I have a full picture cut, because I don’t think I’ll be able to get a full sense of the film, and whether the concept’s landing properly, until I have that cut, not just an assembly.

Usually, music is critical for me to even have a picture cut. I don’t cut pictures first, then lay music; I tend to get the music composed first, at least in its initial iteration, and then put pictures down on top. But in this case I think my composer being pulled onto another job might be a blessing, because it’s forcing me to think about working towards what this project needs rather than what I’m used to doing. And what this project needs, I think, is something far looser and more iterative.

A few weeks back, before my composer’s temporary exit, I had completed the first 20 minutes or so, and I sat down and watched it, and I immediately sensed that it was not working. I revisited it, chopped some out, moved some things around, changed the pace, and I have the feeling that I’m going to do that many times over as the film unfolds. I think that will prove to be a more rewarding experience and lead to a stronger outcome, albeit with a longer process.

One of the reasons that I exited my company was so that I can be more experimental and creative, and that means having greater sensitivity to the material, project-by-project, rather than working out of habit in the way that I’ve always done, according to a formula, which is definitely what I got into. This is a common pitfall: creative work can become repetitive and formulaic as the author ages and becomes set in their style and approach.

So I’m trying to keep that in mind, and work less from muscle memory and more from thoughtfulness about the needs of this particular film. And maybe it won’t work, who knows? But it’s fun to find out.

I’m not being helped by this damn biblical heat. How much I’ll be able to get done today and tomorrow is unknown. 40°C (104°F) temperatures predicted by tomorrow, and, of course, in the UK, no one has air conditioning. My studio is right at the top of the house, underneath the roof, so I am cooking.

On the flip side, the sea is absolutely stunning. Loads of activity this morning, people swimming, paddle boarding, kayaking. My only concern is that there was indeed a storm discharge yesterday morning, so the sea’s probably not good to swim in for at least another 48 hours. There’s an app where you can monitor the water quality, and I’ve got my eyes on that ahead of the weekend.