Welcome to Production Note #4 about this week’s work on the Leo “Bud” Welch Documentary.
Our editor Lisa spent the whole week in the editing room, executing the changes she and Wolfgang defined last week, and also working on making many scenes much, much smoother.
Wolfgang kept on looking for archive footage and racked his brain about some scenes that were still troubling us, including the ending.
Stefan, back from some TV projects he directed and produced prepared the data for our 2nd editor who we’re currently hiring. The 2nd editor will work on the musical performances we captured, editing them into videos for our Kickstarter backers and for social media use.
On Thursday, Lisa was ready with the new version and she and Wolfgang watched the first more or less watchable version of the movie – still 156 minutes long. This is our v1, so the first version that we were planning to show to some people (crew and family). However, while watching Wolfgang and Lisa immediately changed many many scenes and were able to solve a lot of problems (also cutting it down to 146 minutes), so v1 was already old before anybody got to see it.
Wolfgang still showed it to his girlfriend Renate who was the first person to see it. She liked many parts of it but was also critical of some scenes. Luckily, most of the scenes she didn’t like were those scenes that we had changed in the meantime.
Today, Wolfgang and Lisa worked on the ending of the movie and actually came up with something we really, really like. We can’t wait to show our v2 to the rest of the crew to get their feedback, but it still takes a couple of days until v2 is ready – there’s still a lot of fine tuning to be done by Lisa.