Back in NYC, I saw the last of the dailies today with Robin, Alex, Bill, and Donna. To my horror, one of the scenes (the oral sex scene, which has caused me so much grief) was truncated in the dailies. We can't quite figure out how it happened, but it seems almost certain that the negative of one of the shots no longer exists in complete form. I spend the night fretting about how best to work around this loss, and never came up with a good solution: I suppose we'll just have to end the scene with an abrupt, jagged cut instead of with the moment of calm that I'd intended. If this sort of thing had to happen, I'm glad that it happened to a scene that I don't like that much--but this still feels like a big setback to me.
Even before this crisis, I was bothered that two or three important shots were framed much more tightly than I want. I don't know exactly how this happened: maybe I was temporarily deranged on the set, or maybe Dave and I didn't have a good enough system of communication. Anyway, I'm not happy about it. Two of the affected shots occur right at the film's climax, and one of them used to be the funniest moment in the film before it changed from a long shot to a medium shot. I know that no one else in the world will notice, but....
Robin was very busy with her job while I was in Paris, and it looks as if there are still a number of things to be done before we can start editing. One problem is that the lab may have messed up the numbering of the film frames when they made our video dailies--they will reprint the dailies for free if they made an error, but that will take time.
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