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Thursday, November 29, 2007

KURUS Production Diary - Sleepless night of editing

29th of November. I have reached the fourth day of post-production for the film, KURUS. The past three days were spent on editing its rough cut, while today's spent on subtitling. I can only work on this until tomorrow afternoon, then I'll have to submit this film to the Rotterdam Film Festival.



I've underestimated the work I need to put on doing subtitles, expecting it to be done in mere hours so I can actually submit the film by evening. On the contrary, I'm actually going to have a long night ahead of me. Prepared myself a can of Red Bull to keep myself awake.

The film is mostly in Malay, the script was originally written in English, I'm putting up the English subtitles, a job made infinitely more daunting because we allowed actors to improvise a lot during the shoot, and instead of just doing copy and paste work from the script to the film, I'm actually doing quite a lot of translating myself.

So I'll be spending my night at the editing studios of Limkokwing university, which brings back memories of my university days last year, when I did the same while editing my short films, Vertical Distance and Girl Disconnected. I actually liked sleeping in editing studios, with the computer in front of me. It makes me feel... closer to my work. All of a sudden, there's just me, and the film I'm editing. Everything else becomes secondary.

Good thing I'm not doing this by myself, as I have a guy, Stevo, helping me out too with the editing of the film. There's also another editor, James, editing a documentary in the studio next door.

These few days had been interesting, since I myself have also managed to learn a bit of using Final Cut Pro for the Mac computers, an industry standard. I usually stick to Adobe Premiere Pro for the PC.

Editing, to me, is usually one of the more enjoyable aspects of filmmaking, since it's really about bringing the film to the finishing line, being the first person to see how the end product will actually look like. It's a luxury most other cast and crew members don't have. I can never understand a filmmaker who doesn't enjoy the process of editing.

(UPDATED on July 5th, 2016)

The entire film is here