Directing, 4th Edition

C H A P T E R 4 1

USING ANALYSIS

AND FEEDBACK

After weeks or months of sustained editing, a debilitating familiarity sets in. You lose objectivity and the ability to make judgments on behalf of an audience. Every version begins to look the same, and all look too long. You become obsessed with particular faults in your footage, and curing them grows to an overwhelming task. Not unusually, you want to hang on to a sequence or a minor character that the editor and others think is redundant. These are your darlings, and you must kill them if the film is to be consistent and work well.

This disabling condition is particularly likely to overwhelm the hyphenate, the director-editor, who has lived closely with the intentions and the footage since ...