Second Draft Begins

James: You can picture it: my stepmum and I are taking boxes out of my flat around Gabby’s ears. She is re-cutting the movie and I’m taking the coasters out from under her tea. It is frantic. The following night we show it to Toby Mountain, one of our sound guys, and the media connections are all fucked and scenes are all over the place. At this point I’m just too tired to be bothered.

Gabby: I am totally unable to look at it objectively. I am so tired and uninterested in it that I fall asleep and wake up when the credits are rolling!

First Draft Finished!

James: I remember that the experience really wasn’t as overwhelming as I’d expected. It was 80+ minutes of our first feature film and all I could think of was my bed. There were no high fives or champagne corks. I think we had a cup of tea and a couple of jaffa cakes and complained about a scratch on the monitor.

Gabby: I can’t even remember this day it was so much of a non event!

All is Lost (Nearly)

James: We come so close to finishing the first edit, but stop short of a few fiddly bits in the early hours of the morning. Gab heads home and we leave it saving. I have a quick bath and then noticed it has all disappeared! I’m in shock. The auto-save files are there but the media is all lost. We have a backup but they don’t have very large handles on the clips and the names don’t all match. I stay up till 7am reattaching clips until it roughly plays the same way. This is a laborious task. To this day I don’t know what happened. I had called our editor Gareth Spensley and he had calmed me down and I went about fixing it. It was all a blur.

Gabby: First I know about this is the day after when James tells me. I don’t think I appreciate just what an ordeal James has just gone through, after all the film doesn't lookany different. What a star though. I don't think I would have had the heart to do this!

Editing Hurts

James: In order to drop my sister of with my mother, I’ve travelled down to London on the last train on Friday night and travelled up on the first one Saturday morning. This mad dash is completely pointless as Gab doesn’t turn up at my flat until 1630, all teary eyed and hungover. I really want to throttle her at this stage, as after a week of great momentum, she undoes it all and fundamentally disrespects my time. I leave the country in two weeks, have a flat to move, a house to find, a job to leave, a course to start, a loan in euros to borrow, debts in sterling to repay and this film feels quite simply like a millstone round my neck. I think of what the money would’ve bought right now…

I leave Gab to edit away whilst I head out with my friend Tallulah.

Gabby: Tallulah has been watching snippits of the film and seems to be engrossed in what’s going to happen. It is refreshing to hear a new person’s point of view at this stage because we are both tired and bored of the whole thing.

Editing

James: I can’t remember if this is when we started in earnest or just whether I started to think it was of any significance. We basically broke the script down into ten sections of roughly the same length and then went about editing those segments. It made it feel a bit more bite-size.

Yeah it was so daunting to try and cut together an 80 minute project. Breaking it down made it more psychologically doable.

It is harsh to admit, but I’m really loathing Gab at this point. I feel she edits too slowly and is concerned with nickety little bits and I just want to chuck her off the computer and throw the fucking thing together. This is hideously unfair but this is editing and what it does to my head. I’ve always had this kind of reaction to Gabby. It is 50 – 50. Some days I consider her to be the most talented film-maker I could ever hope to work with, with great social perception and a determination to succeed. Other days I find her the wimpiest, insensitive gob shite I’ve ever met and wish I’d never shown her the script.

Anyhow, the editing wasn’t going well.

Gabby: It’s difficult. How do you if you have the right take until you have fiddle to get the right edit. James is right though. I was being too fiddly. Chuck it down and then revise. Lesson learnt. James is bad tempered at this point and I can’t do anything right. I have a sneaking suspicion that if the roles were reversed and James had this mammoth task of editing this beast he would have had the same problems as I did and I would be equally frustrated at him.

Editing Extravaganza

Monday 8th August – Friday 12th August

James: As a thank you present to the school pupils in the film Gabby and I invite them to the University to make their own projects. In the week-long busy atmosphere of filmmaking we become inspired to forge ahead with editing Peppermint. It almost takes this crazy workload to reignite the senses and enthusiasm. We are joined by my sister, which makes it particularly exciting for me, as she gets to see what excites me in life.

As an indication of my fickle nature, Gabby is incredible at this stage.

Gabby: Yeah myself and James run this week and edit at night. When we are productive we do manage to fit a lot in.

Website construction discussion

James: We meet a talented young guy who will be able to help us with the web development. This is crucial as it will eventually act as a portal to everything when we are finally done. We want people to contact us through it, download press kits etc.

Long story short: This guy, along with various others in the months that follow, messes us around hideously with all kinds of excuses. Two filmmakers who’ve written, financed and shot their own film aren’t too keen on excuses as to why stuff isn’t done. Larry Smith steps in the week of our eventual premiere to put up the site. Thank you Larry, I hope you enjoy your free skiing holiday.

Gabby: Larry is a god. We love you.