It’s officially week 13, meaning classes are already over and our project is now due this Friday (tomorrow). We got a tonne of great feedback last week from Liam during the rough cut process and we’ve booked a suite every day this week. We’ve been down here editing constantly, day in, day out. And I finally feel like it’s coming together. Before, even at the rough cut stage, we only really had segments, sections we knew we wanted to use, but we didn’t know how we were going to combine them. Until Liam gave us an idea, an idea we’d had from the very beginning but never really fully utilised. To use production footage to not just separate the segments but draw a unique distinction between the segments, bringing deliberate notice to the cuts, to the production side of the film, to not just critique Hollywood, but shatter the illusion that Hollywood creates.
With this new element, this new-found idea to draw everything that was once so separate even further apart and yet together into a cohesive, jarring whole, it was finally beginning to look like a documentary and not just a bunch of sequences.
We spent most of our days this week not only piecing together footage, using footage we hadn’t already to create new sequences, and then stitching those sequences together with production footage segues, but also sourcing new footage, footage to add more layers and evidence to another argument we are trying to make about the portrayal of women, this time off-screen. Through using the voices and sometimes even faces of only male directors and mostly male crews, it emphasises the way in which women in Hollywood, are still treated as lesser than their male counterparts, not just as characters, but as employees of the system itself. the sheer number of male directors we were able to find only further compounded our argument.
We were still searching for material this morning, but we were only looking for the finishing quote, and we managed to find 3.
‘She’s a slut’ – Jeremy Renner
’I don’t exactly hate women…’ – Alfred Hitchcock
‘What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?’ – Mel Gibson
We also managed to finish the film! A whole day early too 🙂 You’ll be able to see the finished version in my reflection, that I’ll be posting tomorrow.