As a writer I have learned over the years that there comes a time when you have to finish. Not that you completely feel at ease – it’s as if you could go on fiddling for ever and ever, searching for some kind of illusory perfection. No, the time comes when you have to declare “Enough!” It was one of those moments yesterday when we spent the last day hovering over the Avid at the editing studio. Maestro editor Paul Maxwell made his last little adjustments, and suddenly, before we knew it, the pictures were locked!

Hot damn. Thirteen years after the novel was published, eight years after I started work on the movie script – here we were with a feature film in its final form. Worth pausing and raising a glass of bubbles to (which we did later). But in the interim we left Paul to the task of readying the files for ingest to the baselight system, where they will now be available for the online work. Lots more work to do of course – colour grading, music mix, foley, vfx, sound mix yada yada… But as things stand, we’ve finished the picture edit.

It was significant that cinematographer Tom Burstyn called in to the studio for the last few tweaks. He’d just finished doing the colour grade on the first reel of the film the day before. Damn me if he didn’t cry as he watched some of the more moving scenes we had running on the Avid. It was in many ways a special blessing to us, inured as we have become to the emotion of the piece, through watching the film over and over and over…

So, a milestone reached. The destination swinging into sight around the last corner. Wish us well for the home strait.

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