The Making of Crestfallen Diary - Entry #6

Here is the final entry I have for the diary. I hope someone found something interesting in there, haha. I know I did, and it was my movie.

EDITING

Post-Production didn’t star on CRESTFALLEN for a while. Dominick and I were fighting to meet a delivery date for our first cut of THE SADIST, our “killer in the woods” feature film we shot in the summer of 2010. Russ and our other collaborators had to wait patiently, occasionally chiming in with queries on what the hell was going on with this little movie we shot back in September. When we finally started cutting the movie, I can only commend Dom, who had a very clear-eyed poetic approach to the material. When selecting the opening image, we had miles of B-roll but he became fixated on this image of a dreary old barn against a cold sky. “I don’t know, it just feels like death,” he said, then turned to me with a smile and said, “Nobody is gonna understand what the hell this movie is about!”



The second act of the movie took a slip into what we called “purgatory”, with Chris Cunningham inspired sound effects as the narrative as it were fell right off the rails. And in the original script, the character has a moment of epiphany where she comprehends that the child provides her with a reason to live. But this realization comes too late. Our editing ground to a halt as the movie felt leaden with despair, and we had run out of places to go with our material. We had always intended on shooting a baby and a toddler upon our return to New York, but figured out it was an essential element to the completion of CRESTFALLEN. We went out and spent a pleasant afternoon on a misty Sunday morning filming a friend’s children up near the Cloisters far uptown. Once we had that, the editing resumed and we had the necessary climactic beats of our picture. We caught an image of a baby’s tiny fingers wrapping tight around her mother’s hand; that bit of magic encapsulated our central character’s reason to live.

I hope everyone finds the time to at least stop by the Crestfallen Facebook page and click "LIKE" for more updates on the film from time to time.

Here is the link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Crestfallen-movie/100874133313179