Time and Space

People absolutely love movies and T.V. shows but do they actually know how much work goes into them? They could probably take a guess but it's not something that they really have to worry about given they have their own busy lives. They just love enjoying watching something in any down time that they can find. Some movie makers and editors have very, very limited down time especially on some of the films that are coming out nowadays.

Let's take Mad Max: Fury Road for example. A much anticipated film once a trailer came out. But not many people know that the final edit ran 120 minutes and consisted of 2700 individual shots. That’s 2700 consecutive decisions that must flow smoothly and immerse the viewer. 2700 decisions that must guide and reveal the story in a clear and concise manner. One bad cut can ruin a moment, a scene, or the whole film. And guess how many hours of footage was taken in the filming process? 480 hours, that is exactly 20 full days of footage. Just thinking about going through that footage and even having to rewatch most of it. But one thing that did save the editors a lot of time was the fact that every shot had the point of interest center framed so that the editor did not have to sift through footage trying to trace eye-lines to the next shot.

This film was clearly planned well, in some aspects, given that it had no scripts as they prepared to shoot but Mark Sexton had made 3500 storyboards over the course of ten years and happened to actually have one script that wasn't very good but provided a structure.

So as you see, there can either be days or months for smaller videos, but nowadays years that go into almost every big movie that we see on the big screens and wait to be able to own for our personal pleasure. Myself being an editor the most time I have spent on a film would have been a few months but that is what it takes to produce something presentable. All in all we all know the saying that says "all in good time".