A Bad Rack. . .

This scene 10 is really beating me up. I've gotten a little further in it, but run up against a pretty daunting continuity break. The scripted dialogue goes from the shot on the left to the shot on the right, without anything in between. The guys walk off to the right of the camera, and then the takes for the next bit start with a closeup of Leland, without any transition. This is a tad problematic.



I can't remember what my logic was at the time; I think it may have been for Leland to walk in from the left in that closeup shot, because he does this in some (but not all) of the takes. However, on viewing it now I'm not sure this can work, because it means that Aaron just disappears and Leland starts talking directly across the table, while he would still presumably be walking around it. It may have made sense to me at the time, but it doesn't feel right to me now.

I have an idea for how to handle this, and take care of another issue as well. Because of continuity and blocking concerns, we didn't have the guys shoot a lot of pool while they were saying their dialogue. We filmed a lot of "random pool shots" especially with Aaron, so that I could splice them in somehow. I didn't know how that would really work, but now I'm thinking I could use some of those shots to show the game continuing.

Because that shot of Leland was a closeup, we have really good audio of him, and a lot of what he says in this part of the scene is long, almost monologue style stuff. For example, the first thing he says in the closeup shot is:

CLINT

Say I get a great job here, and work really hard and get promoted all the way to the top. I'm still in Albuquerque. What's the view like from the top of a piece of shit? People in the outside world - the real world - don't even want to step on you.

That's plenty of talking time to put in a shot of Aaron taking a turn at pool. Depending on how he's facing, I might even be able to put Aaron's reply in there and move into Leland's next bit, just by pasting the audio from the closeup over video of the guys taking turns at pool. I'm thinking that this'll allow me to use this shot, which I really liked but which I wasn't sure how to fit into the sequence:



Of course, getting this to work successfully is going to be a bit tricky, since at some point I'll still have to find a way to return to showing the actors speaking their lines. I suppose it might make for an interesting artistic statement to have a scene in a movie where you never see the lips of the actor who's talking, instead focusing on the other guy or whatever, but I think it would just give away the fact that I'm a terrible scene planner in this case.

I also discovered a new problem (yay!) when going over the footage we recorded near the very end of production, when we went back to the Anodyne to get a part of the scene that we'd left out the first time. When we went back, we didn't have the luxury of telling the whole place to shut up. Nor did we spend the same amount of time and energy setting up our lights and stuff. The lighting turned out okay, but the sound. . . not so much. Most of the sound in this scene is really nice, the actors' voices are nice and clear and there's almost no background chatter. In this one shot, however, the rabble is very loud. Not loud enough to drown out the actors, but loud enough that I doubt there's any way to get rid of it. Either the rest of the background chatter will have to be made to match it, or we'll have to devise something really creative...

The good news is, I'm almost to the Scene 11 "job interview" cutout, which I know will be the funnest part of editing this whole sequence. Tune in next week to see how far I get with all this. . .