Production Note #18
Welcome to Production Note #18 about our journey to make the Leo “Bud” Welch Documentary.
Let’s start with the most important thing: Today, we finished the rough editing process. So this means that every image, every scene, every song is where it’s supposed to be – the way we tell our story is fixed now, and we’re not changing a thing anymore. It feels really good to have finally gotten to this point. The main creative process is behind us now.
What’s next is that Lisa will go over the movie again a couple of times to perfect its rhythm – maybe add a split second to one scene, cut a split second from another scene. Then we’ll do a final screening with another editor who will also take a close look to the rhythm and the transitions between scenes. After that, we’ll call it a PICTURE LOCK – that’s the state where, as the name says, all the pictures are locked, nothing gets changed anymore. With our picture lock, we’ll go to the sound designer and the colour grader who will make the movie sound and look even better than they are right now. Really curious about how much they’ll be able to get out of our little movie.
What’s also still open is the title design, so our main font for subtitles, credits and all other text that we show on screen. As mentioned in the last Production Note, this is done by the same guy who designs the poster and the main lettering of the movie title, and it should all work really well together. This week, we got some more poster designs from him. They’re getting better, but they’re still not perfect. However, since we need the titles of the movie rather urgent at the moment, we’ll focus on the titles for now and get back to the poster at a later point.
Wolfgang also spent a lot of time browsing through film festival websites, making a list of possibe festivals where we could show or even premiere our movie. There are countless wonderful film festivals all over the world, but one of our favorite festivals has a submission deadline of May 1, 2016 – that’s six weeks from now. We’ll work like hell to get the movie as perfect and polished as possible until then. The good thing is that it’s possible to still make some minor changes on the movie after the submission deadline – but they probably won’t select a movie that’s not ready. So, again, we got a lot of work ahead of us.
All things considered, we’ll have our movie finally and absolutely ready in May, or maybe June. We’ll try to get the movie out there as soon as possible, but the premiere dates of course depend on what film festivals are willing to take us. We’ll definitely be working on festivals in both North America and Europe, and we obviously wouldn’t decline invitations from anywhere else in the world.
Especially the decisions on what festivals to make the World premiere, the North America premiere, the European premiere and the International premiere for a movie is really some kind of rocket science, it seems. But we’ll get the hang of it, and you’ll be the first to know. So please stay with us, we’re nearly there now.