We had picture lock over a month ago and James Dickinson has been working on colour grading, Carrier Higgs has been working on music and Jamie Gasson stepped in at short notice to clean up the sound and do the final mix.

James Dickinson is something of an expert in Resolve and uncovered various problems with the work I’d done. Also, while we had a picture lock, I had still been tweaking effects. With James’ expertise we muddled through. So, you might think, we were well on the way to hitting the mid-August deadline. 

However, Sod’s law meant that real life barged its way into the schedule and I was out of action for a week. On resurfacing, Jamie Dickinson had completed the colour grading, Carrie had completed the music and I spent a day at Jamie Gasson’s studio in Portslade doing the final sound mix.

Putting it all together was surprisingly complicated, but the first festival deadline wasn’t until 4^th September and I spent the whole of last week tweaking. I had a good version, but I still felt that the start was a bit too slow and it was too fast toward the end. There were also two very problematic scenes where we hadn’t thought enough about blocking, which led to continuity problems.

I’d got around this, I’d thought, by “leaning in” to it and using jump cuts, which I’d tried to soften using the Cross Cut effect. I’d resigned myself that I’d done the best as I could with these scenes and moved on.

Last week, after watching the film numerous times and completing my fine-tuning, I realised that one scene near the beginning would work much better later, helping the overall balance. I completed the edit on Thursday and then, on Friday, I started thinking about those four or five of those jump cuts.

Surely I could do something to fix them!

Having not even thought about these scenes for months, I returned to them with a fresh eye and, by midday, had sorted all the jump cuts.

Halle-bloody-lujah!

I’ve learned in the past, that making even small changes can lead to accidentally screwing something else up, so I make it a rule that I have to watch the whole film again if I make any changes at all. On Friday afternoon I sat down to watch yet another version and about an hour in I realised I was watching the previous damn version!

Arrrghhh!!! 

By 7pm I had watched the right version, and by 11pm, I had uploaded the film to FilmFreeway and submitted it to the Cinecity film festival in Brighton.

And now we wait.

So, is the film finished?

Yes…..but…… 

We have a week or two before the next festival deadline and there are always tiny adjustments that can be made. Today I went through a few of these. I also have in mind that I might try to shrink some of the denser dialogue scenes, but in general I have a good version that I’m happy with. I shall now start planning a cast and crew screening.

It’s been a long journey. Angela and I started this years ago. We started pre-production around January 2025, started filming in June 2025 and began editing in January 2026.

I hope now to get my life back.