After many hours of sifting through our footage to find the best pieces to work with, we started cutting it all together. We had a vague understanding of where we wanted scenes to go, focusing on that more so than the minute details of cutting each shot to the beat and maintaining a strong momentum between the shots.

A lot of scenes like the outdoors intro and the kitchen were very easy to cut together as we had a very clear understanding of what was happening in what sequence. The main scene we had issue with and definitely took the longest to find our footing with was the dancing chorus scenes. These scenes were difficult due to the fact they were really a jumble of shots that are basically montages, which gave us the complete freedom of putting any shot at all next to each other, as long as the motion fit. The problem we had with that though was due to this complete freedom we had zero structure to work with, only the constraints of the timeframe, but eventually after much deliberation we were able to find a sequence we were all satisfied with.

 

“I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvellous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a ‘cinematic’ dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.” – Walter Murch.