The New Adventures Begin

For the looks of it, it appears that Dani had a great time while location scouting for Aventura, a film in which she has one of the two female lead roles, the role that Amy was going to have back in the day. Mila has a role too, but as one of the bad gals. Jac has no role except that of the kind dad of the director.

The film was going to be shot sometime in 2016 but things changed. Amy left for the US, Jac went into the rain forrest after traffickers of Jaguar teeth, and things got kind of weird after that.

Back in present time, while Dani enjoyed the heat of the tropics, Jac faced the sunny sometimes hot but mostly cold winter of La Paz, checking those construction materials I mentioned before, but he spent most of the time at his computer, working on the script for 69 Année Érotique and assembling the shots for CruXtreme V – The Playmates.

He completed almost 4 hrs of material ready to edit, with 5 hours of raw material to choose from still.

The process of editing is fairly straight forward. The first step is to synchronize the camera reels with the sound reels. That is a good moment to look at the footage and to select the shots that are going to be in the film.

Obvious you say? Yes, but the issue is WHO SELECTS THE SHOTS? Well… the director does, always, that’s why he’s the director. He might have an editor to work for him, but the director has to be there, at the editing table, selecting the shots.

In the old days of celluloid, the film reels shot at any given day would be taken to the lab to be developed and a copy of the negative was made, right away, that copy was called the work print. That work print was then taken back to the studio for the director and producers to see how it all came out.

They would get together in a screening room with a 35 mm projector and watch the reels.

**This is what a work print looked like back in the good old days**

The lab work normally happened during the night and it was done in a rush, that’s why the work print reels were called “the rushes“.

However, If the production was in a far away location, like Haiti, for instance, the director would see the work prints long after the shooting was completed, maybe days, or weeks or even months. The director and producers could only hope and pray to all the gods and goddesses for all the hard work done in dangerous conditions to come out fine.

That’s no longer the case. Jac shoots a movie and he can check the material even while shooting it!

He transfers all the recorded footage, both image and sound, to a hard disk the same day, he makes duplicates for safety and then proceeds to synch the material to assemble it later on.

Jac is assembling all the synch shots for CruXtreme V now, eliminating everything that it is not part of the scene. Like conversations before the action, or whatever. The cameras and sound recorder start running long before the slate and don’t stop when the action stops, not even when there’s a change of angle for the next shot, so there’s a lot of material in between takes.

Since the camera disks are reusable, it doesn’t matter if most of it might end up as Making of The Movie material… or not.

At last count, Jac has 3 hrs and 55 min worth of selected shots and takes. The total footage came down from almost 13 hrs of raw footage to 9 hrs 32 min. It means that there are around 6 hrs of raw footage left. He’ll be done assembling all the material by the end of the week and then the real editing will begin.

The question is, still, does the director, also referred to as the Auteur, has to do the editing? Normally the director will spend a lot of time at the editing table with or without an editor. The director has to decide how the shots go together and why and for how long. In the case of our RFPIX movies, there are so many shots that work well that the movie can very well be a 3 hrs movie. Ultimately, the director makes the final decision, always.

Frog shared the following image with a nice comment:

Simply beautiful. She emoted well and moved well under the lash. Sorely missed.
frog

As Camille before, Amy moved on to other activities in her life. She is, still, making movies, but gave up acting for the time being. She’s also teaching.

Camille is active in France, acting in theatre, playing roles that are unique to her, and editing movies… hmm… maybe she should work for Jac.

They are both missed a lot but they left a lot of great work that can be seen over and over and over again.

I found a thread at the Crux Forum completely dedicated to Amy where people post a lot of pictures of her from everything she did and is currently doing. They have an ongoing contest, for fun, around a picture I posted recently of Jac and Amy at the theatrical premiere of Maleficarum:

CAPTION CONTEST TIME :
Just for fun, what do you think Amy is saying to Jac, as he scribbles it down…..??
Answers, below, please…
Baracus at CruxForum