Well, aside from some music rights and a minor amount of tweaking, we have a finished film. It all came together about as last minute as possible – with me not seeing the film with all of the elements in place until the screening. Friday night we had a Cast & Crew Screening in Orlando, which went really well. It’s so thrilling to finally have a completed film to show for 3 1/2 years of hard work. I’m really proud of it and everyone responded positively to it. You never know how people will take it so I was pleased to see how many people really connected with it.

The screening went off without a hitch (aside from a few really minor DVD glitches) – the sound mix and score sounded great and the color correction looked beautiful. Then we had a terrific reception afterwards. It was great to see everyone – a lot of people there I hadn’t seen since the shoot.

  Below are a few pictures from the reception.

I finally locked picture a few weeks ago. I could have continued to edit for months (or even years), but I eventually reached a point where I realized that the changes I was making was simply making the film minutely different, not better. So I did one final pass and then handed it off to my sound designer, Jon.

The past few weeks have proven just as busy though. Jon has been working furiously, along with my composer, David, and Marco, my DP and colorist. I’ve been giving feedback on their work as they go along. I was also recently in Orlando for ADR (automated dialogue replacement). Because of the background noise of most of our exterior locations (e.g. Stetson University’s insanely loud A/C next door to our house exterior), some of our dialogue wasn’t usable. So we had to bring the actors into a studio and re-record their lines. I was amazed at how smoothly it went! I had a little bit of ADR experience with one of my short films and I remember it being a long, complicated, and often frustrating task. This time, however, it was great fun! All of the actors nailed it and Jon was a joy to work with. We were able to complete all of the ADR in a mere two days!

The stress is on now, though. I’ve arranged a Cast & Crew Screening for the end of the month and I’m a little concerned about how close that is. There’s still much to be done…