The recurring nightmare lasted until Christmas Day, when my body gave up and tried to contract the flu just to spite me. After a night or two of slightly different dreams – this time rushing to strike the set before we got kicked out of HDS – I finally recovered.
A few days before Christmas I had completed a rough cut of scene three (unsurprisingly, the last of the trio scenes which the pilot was intended to comprise). If I was editing the feature right now I’d be very pleased with the scene and more than happy to cut it into the timeline. As a pilot it’s somewhat problematic because it doesn’t have the wide establishing shots of the set and the Swordsman. However, by the skin of our teeth we did manage to cover all of scene two. I cut this yesterday and it’s not as far from working as it could be. It’s a question of what, if anything, can be done to bring this scene up to scratch, or whether I’ll have to resort to behind-the-scenes B roll and interviews to set up scene three.
Speaking of which, over the last few days I have been capturing the prodigious “making of” material which Gerard and his friends shot. In all we have amassed 21 hours of material since we started documenting the pilot in 2007, half of which covers the shoot.