3 minutes in

Have rough cut approximately the first three minutes of "Tic Tock Toe" (working title, the title will almost certainly change), a 15-ish minute long short film we shot in Pescara in June 2017. Neither Ciro nor I thinks it's likely it will come together as planned, because it was an ambitious, effects-heavy shoot with a two-person crew, a kid actor, a bilingual environment, and extremely limited time. Without having reached the point yet of finding out exactly what the problem will be, it's almost certain there will be at least one major continuity error we can't cut around, plus even from the script stage I knew I was asking a lot of the audience. (It's urban fantasy with almost no dialogue.)

Hence I've prepared myself for the idea that I'll need voiceover and/or stock footage to fill gaps. I'm sure I'll have something watchable and interesting by the end (photography and performances are compelling), but it's not a straightforward edit. It's the kind of edit that requires me to be an artist with images rather than the kind of edit that lets me play with the delicacies of different acting takes. So far, everything has cut together fairly dynamically and the magical moments have felt magical, but of course as the writer I understand what is happening before I even see it. I don't know yet whether it's legible to a test audience. At a later point when I have more of it pieced together, I may ask for volunteers to watch it and then tell me what they think the plot was, so I can tell where I am and am not on the right track.

Otherwise, my day was mostly taken up with cleaning the kitchen again, making a steak and apple pie/galette, receiving more tax forms in the mail, ignoring many scam phone calls, and checking in with the editor of On Spec (I think a poem of mine is coming out in March but I may have the month wrong).