Here’s one for the baby book: I’ll be cutting my first feature film this fall. The Impersonators, directed by Joshua Hull, started shooting today in the central Indiana area. I attended the last full table read and production meeting last night, and this is definitely going to be an interesting film to edit. The Impersonators is about a team of superhero impersonators who normally find themselves rented out for birthday parties or other recreational activities. Their whole team is booked to spend time in a small town bringing up the morale with their presence. Soon enough, they find themselves in a real superhero situation, and hilarity ensues. It’s got a pretty large cast and stars comedian Josh Arnold. The audience is definitely the comic book movie lover – there are a lot of jabs and self-referential pokes in the script. It’s also quite crude. I love it.

This will be the largest project I’ve ever cut on Avid Media Composer, and well, the largest project I’ve ever cut at all. The tone and what I’m guessing the cutting style of the film will be really matches closely to the kinds of film aesthetics I personally enjoy, which is exciting. The production will be shot on two GH2’s with a bit on the AF100, so I’ve spent some time checking out the workflow and pitfalls of the footage.

I’m also on the post team for Kate Chaplin’s feature film Ingenue. I’m not sure what my final role will end up being, but I’m providing editorial support, color grading, VFX, and an opening title sequence for the film. Ingenue has a bit of buzz around it, which is exciting. My friend Katie Toomey is editing the film, which is pretty cool because it will be HER first feature. It’ll be interesting to go through the whole experience of editing for long form as she does as well.

I know a lot of editors all over the place have a desire to cut a narrative feature and don’t ever have the opportunity, so it’s pretty crazy that I have the opportunity to be doing work on TWO in the Indianapolis area. I was originally slated to co-edit a horror feature this fall, but that project fell apart in a matter of days. I’m glad to have this film to work on – it’s suits my style, it’s not so crazy that I’ll need help, and the filmmakers have a great background. Lots of great stuff to chew on as an editor, too.

I’ll be chronicling my experience editing my first feature in this blog series, documenting the successes and inevitable failures that will ensue. I’ll probably also be asking for help occasionally too, so hopefully one of my dozens of readers may oblige.

So, to bring the whole thing up to speed until now, over the last month, I’ve been slowly getting ready to take this film on. I spoke with the director to get some idea about how post would go and set up the expectations, and we had a great conversation about the tone of the film. I did some refreshing in Avid, and some research since the last time I spent hours at a time in MC was not very recent. I edit in FCP7 all day at work and I can’t switch to Avid there, so I’m going to have a really split personality by the time this film is locked. I really don’t want to cut this in FCP7 for a number of reasons. I’m also in the process of re-arranging my edit cave to make it more habitable since I’ll be in there a lot. It kind of feels like nesting.

We’ll have a teaser available really soon after wrapping the film, long before post is even close to done. I’m not sure how often I’ll be on set for the next week, which I think is good, keeping separation. I work better when I don’t have any idea of what’s happened during the shoot. I’m expecting to be working on the color grading and titling for this one too, so there will be plenty to do and talk about in this blog. Both The Impersonators and Ingenue are following a similar post timeline, so I guess I’ll be spending another fall season mostly indoors (the way I like it.)

I’ll be picking up the first batch of footage on Monday and I believe I’ll start transcoding to DNxHD36 for the offline (unless for some reason that’s a dumb idea), then start the logging process. Happily, there is a script supervisor on set every day who happens to be a familiar face that I trust.

So, a little more edit cave nesting tomorrow, then it begins.