Shooting a film has a certain degree of excitement. Long days of creative work. Camaraderie over lunch. Tension of doing stunts with some small degree of risk. Finding the balance of light and shadow. Recording sound in and around a natural world only rarely accommodating.

After the shoot, comes editing. Editing is a detail oriented task of thousands of technical decisions. It’s actually often boring. It is however what makes a bunch of shots into a meaningful story. So, it is a creative process where the director uses the thousand shots like words and composes (hopefully) meaningful and compelling sentences.

Over 29 days of shooting we took around thirteen hundred takes/shots. This data, including the B-roll shots, effects graphics, and housekeeping files made by the editing tools, fills about one terabyte of space. That is one thousand billion bytes of information. This data is stored on one ultra fast disk drive for editing and two backup drives. One backup lives in a fire-proof safe. Should those three drives all become corrupted then the entire digital project would disappear forever.

On the right is a photo of the editing workstation and below is a rough cut preview of Scene 1, the prelude. This is not the final version and the music is just a temporary placeholder.