Welcome to Production Note #5 regarding the workings on the Leo “Bud” Welch Documentary.
This week, we prepared and then showed the current version of the movie (135 minutes) to some members of the extented team. Many lessons were learned that night.
We learned what scenes worked and what scenes didn’t, we learned what probably needed to be rearranged and what needed to be dropped altogether. We also got many new inputs about how to tell Leo’s story more efficiently and elegantly.
Based on this, we decided to work out a new dramaturgy – focusing stronger on what aspects and themes to tell at what point rather then telling things in a more chronological order.
Or, as one of our favorite directors, Spike Jonze, put it: “There’s not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure (in portrait documentaries). You build something in the editing room that’s shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.”
So right now our editor Lisa is busy editing the next version of our movie. We believe it will be much smoother and probably also considerably shorter – but you’ll get more infos on that next week.