Bragdon, Brice and Brevity

We sat down tonight to watch the whole movie, just to get an overall sense of things we wanted to do. We had not watched it once through since the last cuts, over six weeks ago, before we took a break, then did the new intro and began color correction.

As always, we were unable to get more than a few seconds before we decided to mess with it. That's the way it is: you never achieve perfection. You hit a point where you can agree that, yes, it's good enough to release, but we are not at that point yet.

And it's especially important that we get the beginning to our liking. Most of the movie falls into place fairly tightly and we are happy with it but, since we have made so many changes to the start, it's natural that we needed to do a bit more editing.

Or maybe we are just hopeless perfectionists. I recall the immortal words of Stan the Hat and Tommy Train, who once told me "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Still, we want this to be good.

So, to that end, we rearranged our bold, superlong shot of Kathy at the start, moved the credits past her, and then moved on to the second section. The section on Wilfred's childhood is fine. We like that. The very early days needed some cutting, though. Specifically a little bit about Claude Bragdon and the Brice estate, on Long Island. We're not talking about much here, maybe 10 seconds, but we got it done. It took moving five or six clips around, rearranging this, cutting that, stretching that. The usual.

I hope it's good enough now. We got about three minutes into what was going to have been an 83 minute session.

When we are done, if I have the stomach for it, I want to go back and watch the initial 130 minute first cut, just to see what we cut. Hell, it may be a good idea, anyway, just to make sure that we didn't sacrifice some gem along the way.

Until tomorrow.