Notes from the Edit Bay

Nobody outside the edit bay sees the version of Interval Episode 01 that ran nine minutes longer, or the cut of Neon Tide that opened on a scene we ended up moving to the midpoint. This is a running, occasional log of decisions like that — small, unglamorous, and usually the difference between a film that works and one that almost does.

Cutting the scene everyone loved

The hardest cut in Episode 01 was a four-minute sequence of Renata Kwan tuning her bass by candlelight. Everyone in the room loved it. It also stopped the episode dead for four minutes. It's now a forty-second moment, and the episode is better for it.

Silence is a decision, not an absence

We've started treating silence in the mix as deliberately as we treat music cues. A held shot with no score does more work, more often, than we expected when we started making that trade.

More notes soon — this is very much a living document.