I was advised by a whole bunch of people to get started on the editing right away. And I think it's good advice - you really need to get the first, rough cut done quickly while you're still in the zone. Then it's perfectly OK to arse about for a while doing other things, and come back to the whole thing with a fresh perspective. In fact, I would highly recommend that you get someone who *wasn't* connected with the filming, except for one thing: you can't pay them, can you? And editing is very time-consuming and only becomes rewarding right towards the end of the process. So they had better owe you big favours - perhaps you edited their film, for example - and even then, you shouldn't expect the editing process to go quickly.

And that bit about editing right away? I've never managed it myself.

So, as you can imagine, I put off editing for quite a long time. In fact, I only really got down to the editing in January 2000 - we had finished the filming in October of 1999, so yeah, bit of a break. And the only reason I did get down to it properly was because I had set a date for the release of the film, my birthday, February 20th. And I booked a theatre to do the screening, and promised limos for the cast and crew. A big deal; better get down to it and put the film together, eh?

When I finally started editing, I realised one thing that will almost be completely irrelevent in your case, unless you are extremely unlucky: Adobe Premiere 5.1 is crap. Really crap. But more on that later.

I was capturing DV footage onto a duel 16G HD RAID array, using a DV Raptor card. The problem was: what footage should I capture? At this point, the sensible thing to do is go through and log all the footage that you've taken. One way is to get some big pieces of paper with columns, and log the tape number, and the In and Out points of the good footage. The DV Raptor actually came with a fairly decent tool for this - it could go through and get the In and Out points of all the shots off the tape, and log them into an EDL - an Edit Decision List. Using all those log sheets that we had painstakingly written down the scene/shot/take details earlier, I could throw away a lot of the shots without even looking at them. Phew! Because I had eight tapes - about six hours - worth of footage to view, otherwise.

I grabbed a whole bunch of the footage off the tapes, pretty much every take that we had logged as being decent, and then went through the much more painstaking process of finding the corresponding bits of minidisc footage and capturing those. Remember, we were recording all our sound onto the minidisc recorder rather than the camera. Believe it or not. The reason was, I wasn't familiar enough with the TRV900 camera to realise that I could have recorded the sound directly onto it. I knew it had a microphone input, but I also knew that it had it's own phantom power supply that was completely incompatible with the one I was using, and I didn't want to blow up anything by plugging it in incorrectly. In the end, I just risked it one day, and surprisingly, it just worked. Now I record sound onto the camera.

Digression aside, the minidisc capture wasn't too bad, just rather dull. The problem with minidiscs is that you can't import them directly into the computer. It's technically possible, but forbidden due to the possibility of flawless copies of CDs, for example. Nowadays that's possible anyway, so it just serves to annoy people who have legitimate reasons for using minidiscs. Anyway.

So, I finally had a whole bunch of captured footage and separate sound files. Time to start using Adobe Premiere 5.1. There's just one problem: it's crap. Sure, using it was OK - it had quite nice features, was fairly intuitive to use, and so on - but it would crash, freezing the computer, on average every half-hour. Also, sometimes you would start playing back a video clip and it would refuse to stop until you got to the end of the footage. Very annoying when you want to preview how some of the editing has gone. But since this is of historical interest only, I had better talk a bit about the process of editing, minus the bugs. Before I leave this digression, though, it did teach me valuable lessons in backing stuff up: back up your project files. Save regular copies of your partly-edited film, in case both your project and the backups turn out to have bizarre flaws in them later. This served me well with Premiere 5.1, and in one vital place using FinalCut Pro some years later.

Editing was pretty simple, really. I'm not sure what to say about it. You just put one bit of footage against the next one, in the order that you specified in the shooting script. There's not really much that I can teach by talking about it. You have to do it. Some things that I realised in the editing room, though, were interesting. Firstly, that the clapper-board wasn't really necessary when we were logging the start times of all the clips anyway. It slowed everything down, and I didn't even need the synchronisation between the picture and sound, to get the external sound clips aligned - if you view the waveforms of the sound, you can just line-up the (inferior) in-camera sound to the (superior) minidisc sound. No worries, no clapperboard necessary. As far as I was concerned, for that shoot, I could have done without either the log sheets or the clapperboards. Doing both was overkill. As to which one to use - I recommend the log sheets. They don't slow down the filming to the same extent. If you are going to use clapperboards, get a piece of rope, and attach the clapperboard to the clapperboard operator. Also, attach the pen and the eraser to them. Number of times that the clapperboard operator couldn't find the clapperboard, pen, or eraser: infinite. Number of times that the pen or eraser appeared in shot: far too many. It wasn't anybodies fault, just the fact that everyone had too much to do. But I think I'd do without clapperboards in future.

Editing is slow. It took over a week, even after all the capturing had been done, to put together the rough draft. And that was working on it every night after coming home from work. When I showed the first draft to Jon and Kate, it was very discouraging, too - it was just sloooow. Bits that should have been tense were boring. The middle bit dragged. This is another truth about editing that I've found. No matter how good the footage looked when you were filming it, or reviewing it later, it will look absolutely crap when you're editing it, right up to the last draft. Only then will it start to look reasonable, and by that point, you're completely fed up with the whole thing. You've completely lost perspective. This was my first experience editing, and it proved typical in many ways: putting the footage together was a very discouraging experience. It made me realise many of the things that I had done wrong. There wasn't enough coverage, for example - reaction shots were scarce, especially for Simon. Y'see, we did all the reaction shots on the last day, after the relief of all the main filming was done. We were all feeling fairly jovial. When we were doing reaction shots with Simon, he kept cracking up, because people were telling jokes, etc. And I was too tired to really worry about it much - I figured it didn't matter too much. I think it's a typical editing experience to get reams of footage for some things, and a terrible scarcity in other areas. There were two places where I had to reuse a reaction shot. Completely my fault.

After I had a reasonable draft together, it was time to get it off to Evan, my friend in Brisbane who is an excellent musician. He had already composed a wonderful theme tune which he insisted be titled: ""Once Upon A Time", theme to Once Upon A Time.", which went over the closing credits. There was just one problem: the theme tune was about two minutes and thirty seconds long, whereas the credits would happily run for under a minute. I was reluctant to trim the tune, even though I knew I ought to, because it was so good. Instead, I came to a comprimise. I could afford to be indulgent in the credits, as I didn't have any professional release plans, so I decided to add some extra footage. Alistair and I shot some "closing-credits" footage at his place one day, and I went back home and incorporated it into the credits, which nicely rounded it out to the required length.

Anyhoo, Ev got the draft of OUAT and wrote three bits of incidental music, sent them back, and I had incorporated them into the film with over a week to go before release. Sweet! The incidental music is really nice, too - it fits in with the scenes very well, adding atmosphere to the bits that need them the most. The only problem is, I just wish there had been more of it. Most of the film is unscored, so the bits that *are* scored stand out just that little bit more.

By late February, it was all finally coming together. I had to start preparing for the opening party, and I still had credits and sound fixing-up to do. When you've got your first edit, there are all kinds of clicking sounds where you switch between sound from different shots. To fix these up is extremely tedious, and involves cross-fading between the shots, and also putting background noise over the lot so that the shots with lower levels of background noise wouldn't show up too much. Most of the latter bits of editing involved small amounts of tweaking for the sound levels. I'm still a rank amateur in that department, so I'm a bit reluctant to give advice, except this: get room tone. That is, record the sound of the room. Not just once at the end of the whole lot of filming, but at the beginning of *every single scene*. That way you capture the sound of the fan that was on in one scene, but not the others. Or the fact that the door to the bathroom was open in one scene, making the room a bit more echoey.

That's it. That's all I can really convey about the process of editing. I think it's a good thing for the writer/director to be involved in the editing, because it's a good stick for beating scene-structure into you. I'm an extremely slack editor. I really recommend setting tight deadlines in order to get things finished. The deadline for Once Upon A Time worked really well for me. I got the film done in time, and pretty much to my satisfaction. I haven't gone back and re-edited it at all, though I've been tempted at times.

Just one last thing. You can edit forever if you want. That's what the deadlines are for. I heard a cute truism about film editing once, and I agree with it: A film is never finished. It's just abandoned. This is not a bad thing.