The Rental Experience #15 - The Puzzle

a blog-series recounting the making of "Seven Year Rental"

We cut our teeth on the opening sequence and the Jackson store closing, two stand-out pieces for the movie.  We knew what they were supposed to look like and we would labor over those two sequences throughout the entire editing process. 

The first things we noticed when we began combing through the footage were the imperfections in our earliest days with the camera.  There was definitely a learning curve with filming but unfortunately we’d planted a flag for our timeline’s start and could not afford to disregard any of the footage.  The in-store footage was a little muted, we had trouble finding the whites in a store overrun with both warm and cool tinted florescent lights.  And those early interviews –  including John’s – were much darker than we’d anticipated and they required a lot of post-production work to bring them on par with the quality we were producing by the end of our filming run.  As frustrating as it was, it felt good to actually see our skills improve. 

I was present for nearly all of the filming and had in mind a lot of bits to come back to and use.  I would spend the week logging footage and pulling clips into a very rough sequence, and then Jason and I would meet to go through the material and really give it form.  Most of the time we worked off each other in sync, piecing together the puzzle.  Sometimes we'd have these great debates about the inclusion of a single clip or an entire sequence.  We flipped it on its head more than once and looked at it every way we could possibly imagine.  Sorting through It required tremendous patience. 

In our earliest days we were stringing clips together one after the other without any style or shaping, and applauding ourselves for these editing achievements that were not much more than a lineup of clips.  But by the end of our principle editing the following year, we knew the film backwards, and would spend entire nights going through just a few minutes second by second until we were satisfied, quite literally, with every frame that was being shown. We worked through it over and over, start to finish until every wrinkle was ironed out and it ran smoothly.

One year later we declared it complete.  We had a final cut. 

Half a decade would pass before I realized the cut we were so sure was our final was actually just a work-in-progress.

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