The gear has been returned, film is at the lab, thank you notes are in the mail, and we are caught up on rest.

With that said, post-production on Cowboy Smoke begins tomorrow. Our assistant editor Tim Edwards will begin logging and capturing the footage as well as syncing up the sound. No small task and I will explain why. When shooting on film sound is recorded separately, meaning the audio and visual are recorded in two seperate formats. If you’ve ever wondered why a man or woman (assistant cameraman) stands in front of the camera before each shot and calls out the scene number, setup, and take and then claps the slate shut… it’s so the sound can be synced up in post-production. An assistant editor has to sort through hours of footage and before each shot, looks at the slate where the scene number, setup, and take are marked. Next the assistant editor (or whoever is syncing the dailies) will listen to the audio for a matching scene number, setup, and take… then will locate a spike in the audio on the audio’s timeline. A spike in the audio is nothing more than a point in the audio’s timeline where the sound peeks to a sharp point, hence the term spiking. When the slate or clapper is shut, it causes the audio to spike or peek. This is how the editor knows where the audio and visual sync up. Sounds pretty easy right? It is.

Except, when attempting to sort through 10+ hours of footage and 17+ hours of audio it becomes rather monotonous and boring. I am thankful to have Tim handling this for me because aside from requiring a lot of visine and no-doz it zaps you creatively. On Wesley Cash I synced up all the dailies and afterwards I was none too excited about beginning the editing process. I leave tomorrow for a (much needed) vacation and when I return, Tim will have most of the dailies synced up. This will allow me to jump right into editing… and to top it off, I will be fresh and ready to go.

148 scenes, 117 characters, a 101 page script, 86 cans of film, 53 Locations, a 24 day shoot, four weeks, and more prayers than a Baptist church on Easter Sunday… all in the can kids.I’m not going to lie, this last week was the hardest. We had hog roping, a hanging, two fight scenes (one in front of a twenty foot fire), a shootout, a night shoot with 50+ extras, an 18-wheeler, and rain. Thursday - day 24 - was originally scheduled to begin at noon because that day was a split.A split basically means the day is split between day and night. Splits are great because you get to sleep late and go to bed before the sun rises. Night shoots are tough because you wake up when the sun is setting and work until sunrise. It’s fun for two or three days but after a week of night shoots you start to feel like a vampire. Why the 101 you ask? Because our last day WAS scheduled to be a split. At noon we would begin shooting our hog roping scene, break for lunch, then wait for night to shoot a scene where we see Mexican Immigrants offloading from an 18-wheeler. The day before I was told we had to shoot the hog roping scene first thing in the morning. Come to find out, hogs don’t like the heat, cannot take it. It kills them, makes them cripple, doesn’t matter… what does is that we had to shoot at first light. This of course would mess up our schedule and the crew would have to break mid-day and meet back up around seven to shoot the night scene.

Did I mention we shot a hog roping scene. I had never seen a wild hog before Thursday let alone know how to direct the scene. So… I deferred to Fagan, who has roped two wild hogs, and basically had him tell me what type of coverage we would need. We started tight on the cowboys roping the hog, getting standard coverage to insure that I would have something to work with in the editing room. Next, we set the camera up in the back of a pickup truck and shot some wide angles of the cowboys galloping after the hogs, lasso in the air, all good stuff. Finally, we decided to mount the camera on a four-wheeler and chase the hog with the camera. I had Steve, our DP, over-crank the camera to 72 frames per second in an effort to smooth out the shot. I was driving, Steve operated from the front of the four-wheeler, while our camera was firmly secured to the front by a car mount. We finished up around noon and then spent about three hours shooting pickups from the previous day.

We broke for lunch around 3pm and the cast and crew was given a four hour break to sleep. Around 7:30pm we regrouped well rested and ready to go… but facing a new problem. A front was blowing through the area and we were guaranteed rain but had no idea what time the rain would come or how long it would last. So it was a race against time and with 50+ extras it wasn’t going to be easy. Around 9:30pm lighting and thunder on the horizon alerted us that the storm was near. We shot for another hour and amazingly enough, got everything we needed. Not five minutes after I called wrap it began to rain. And hard. The local paper wrote that the front was as bad as a tropical storm.

Over the next couple days I will be wrapping things up by mailing off equipment, cleaning up the ranch houses, catching up on my emails and what not. I should begin editing sometime next week. Stay tuned.

After eighteen days we are still on schedule despite rain delays, special effects on a daily basis, and a hundred plus actors to keep track of. And while the hours have been long (averaging fourteen a day) and we are all tired I can’t help but feel an excitement in the air.The day before the shoot began I met with the crew and challenged them to use me and this production, to walk away knowing they’d created a film that defined their ambitions and talents. Not to approach this film as a stepping stone or chapter in their careers but as a defining moment in their lives. During production the script is shot out of order and it’s hard to gauge nor do you want to think about how the whole movie is going to play once pieced together. But great scenes make great movies. With that said, I say this with a confidence I’ve never felt during production. We have shot a lot of great scenes. At the end of each day I overhear the cast and crew talk about how awesome the scene we shot that day is going to be. From amazing locations, to actors that surprise me daily with their choices, to a production team that will go without sleep, days on end to get the job done right. I’ll say it again, to get the job done RIGHT. A talented camera crew led by a DP who saves me on a daily basis, our sound team, which manages to get clean sound in the worst conditions, everyone. This film will only be as good as its cast and crew… and there are no weak links here. I am living the dream right now and have a week left. Like I told my producing partner Fagan Patterson the other night while watching dailies, this is going to be a great film.