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Waiting For The Best People

How long does it take to make a short film?

Actors and crew call me up every day asking when the film will be ready. We shot for 3 days in April (24-26th inclusive) and it's still not finished. What happened?

Well, firstly, we cut the film and then had to recut it. ScreenWest weren't the only ones unhappy with the cut (and when they're not happy, they withdraw funding). Producer Dale Fairbairn wasn't happy with it and even I thought that there was a cut hiding in the rushes ... somewhere.

We had to wait until Tim Wellburn was avaiable, so that put us on hold for a month.

The new recut also pushed back our post sound and so we had to wait for Richard Mahony's availability. We were meant to do a sound track lay this week, but he's not feeling the best, so now we will start on August 8th.

Jonathan Mustard did a fantastic job on a soundtrack that didn't match the film. He hadn't seen a single image and so had to reconstruct the music almost from scratch! I'd say we had to wait for that, but he was actually always ahead of us by at least a week!

We had to wait for the grade - which was done at Island Films in Sydney.

So there are a lot of stops and starts in post-production, dictated by people's availability. We could get different people to do each of the elements in this film, but we've chosen (who we feel are) the best.

I'd say "A Stone Throw" will be finished by the end of August - which is about right. For me anyway, a short film takes about 3 months. And that's 3 months without pay! This one has taken 4 due to the waiting.

Hope you get over that cold Richard.

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