Cutting it together...
Having proved to ourselves it was possible to shoot an improvised film this way, the next test was taking all that wonderful footage - all those fantastically long takes - and shaping them in to concise scenes that would set the tone of the film we wanted to make.
As we soon discovered, editing improvisations is a long process. Really long. Our actors had given us fantastic material, with some takes running as long as 20 minutes. With no script to work from, what followed was a painstaking process of picking and choosing the moments that best told the story, revealed our lead characters, and provided the necessary humour, drama, and realism. It was heartbreaking, too, to realise that a big majority of the footage would end up not being used, since we had so much to play with - but that is a wonderful luxury.
Eventually, excitingly, we began to see the scenes take shape, and Dan & Alice come to life better than we could have hoped. The editing process over, and after a few more weeks of fixing sound and some colour correction, finally we had something to show people - no longer just an idea in a director's head. A few sample scenes that we hope will get everyone else as excited for the feature-film proper as we are.
