I’ve been here almost a month now, and I’ve begun to pick up what it takes to put a series of films of this magnitude together. It’s a painstaking process. The Spirit Level Film offices are split in to two rooms. The first is the main office, which is the hub of all operations here. The second is the edit suite. If we were to film an episode of Cribs, the edit suite would be where we would say ‘this is where the magic happens’.
Every day, our team of editors join Rich, the series director, in the edit suite. These guys are at the sharp end of the production, tasked with reducing the days worth of footage shot for each film down to manageable running times, with a narrative and a structure that is watchable, informative and entertaining.
Every morning, the producers and Rich have a meeting where they look at the previous day’s edit and discuss how it can be improved on or whittled down. Disagreements are never too far away at these meetings, but we figure that’s what makes for a good finished product. If everyone agreed it could turn out terrible right?
Next door to the square eyes is the main office. Our job is to run Spirit Level, to get The Price of Kings ‘out there’, and to begin to organize the next films in the series.
This is all rather unglamorous work compared to going on shoots to far flung corners of the world, but that side of things only makes up about 2% of what goes in to these films coming to life.
Think of these films as a piece of wood. Before we started, it looked something like this:
When we finish, we want it to look something like this.
It’s a long process, but it’s coming together. We might even have some exciting news to share with you soon. Stay tuned.
