Our filmmakers Travis Pitcher and Joseph Lebaron and their team at The Good Line are deep into the post-production process. Documentary filmmaking is about understanding your subject matter, but it is also about properly organizing your footage when you shoot it and then again when you edit it, to tell an engaging story. Experienced documentarians carefully index the footage as they shoot it, and take time during each filming day and at the end of the day to note the scenes with the most promise.
The material involved in our project includes more than 200 hours of footage of Austin and Beccy during their 100 plus day experiment of living on bitcoin. We also have between 50 and 60 interviews which we shot over the course of the project. Additionally, there are several more interviews which we are hoping to get to complete the story.
The Life On Bitcoin experiment ended in early November when Austin and Beccy returned from their around-the-world trip. The Good Line had a couple of other projects/clients requiring attention during November. So although editing began in November, the heavy editing really got going in December. Our original plan was to see a rough cut before the Christmas holiday. However, anybody who has been involved in making a film or in any entrepreneurial endeavor for that matter readily understands that things do not always proceed as planned.
The Good Line put five people on the editing including Travis and Joseph themselves. Without warning, four of the five got hit with health issues / sickness in a two week period. David, (the awesome cameraman / editor who was with us in Atlanta) is a heart surgery survivor. He wasn’t feeling well one day, and ended hospitalized for several weeks. Another one of the editors suffered an acute appendicitis, and had to have his appendix removed. Joseph was wiped out with one of a diagnosed case of the H1N1 virus which he contracted while he was traveling to Hong Kong, and an episode of bronchitis simultaneously. Josh, the Good Line’s designer got hit with a nasty, prolonged flu.
Needless to say, the health issues were causing our team to drop like flies and set us back several weeks for the rough cut.
A rough cut, sometimes called an assembly cut, is basically a collection of the best edits compiled to flesh out the story. It is devoid of animations, soundtrack, sound and color mastering, etc. The filmmakers are faced with the daunting task of reducing those 200+ hours and all the interviews to 2-3 hours of the best footage.
The Good Line diligently editing.
The exciting news is that this rough cut is going to be ready this week! All the non-filmmaking members of our team will travel to Salt Lake tonight to watch this assembly cut and discuss and make suggestions.
According to The Good Line, and notwithstanding the delay from illnesses, they are still on track to have a polished film by late April, unless we run into unforeseen complications. We already have a composer working on the soundtrack, and we have folks working on the design and the look and feel of the film.
Before anyone gets really excited, we need to make sure your expectations are properly set. We will not likely be able to distribute the film to our supporters immediately following completion. Our various mentors in the film distribution business have encouraged us to first submit the film to major film festivals to achieve our greatest chance at wider distribution and maximum exposure. Some of these festivals have strict rules governing digital distribution. The distribution plan is still somewhat fluid and being mapped out. Please know, our goals remain the same:
1) We want to make our backers and supporters happy and
2) To get the film in front of as many eyeballs as possible to educate them about bitcoin and open the door to the incredible personalities in the bitcoin community.
We want the film to project a global reach. We are doing what we can to put in place a distribution plan which will help us achieve that.
As always, we are grateful to our supporters and backers from the bottom of our hearts.
-Theron H.