My editor Marc Wade got to work early on. First he had to cut together (see?) the "news footage" that we shot at his house on June 1, so that we could have a completed "broadcast" to play on the TV set that the three main characters watch early in the movie. And as I said earlier, even while we were in production, Marc would come over to my house to digitize the video (with help from sometime assistant editor Jeremiah Thompson, before he had to leave the production after being attacked by a Serbian crack addict - I'm not joking), log the tapes, split all the footage into separate scenes and takes, saving each one as its own digital file. By the way, for the gearheads out there who care about such matters, we're editing the movie using FinalCut Pro on the Mac.

The fun started with our first assignment: Cutting the trailer. This was important as I wanted to have something representing the film on this site as soon as I could. (Go to the Quicktime subsection if you haven't seen it yet.) It was also a good way to see what kind of rapport Marc and I would have, sitting next to each other in front of a computer for hours. We also hadn't synchronized any of the audio (which was recorded separately from the video, onto DATs) yet, which is why the first trailer had no dialogue, just simple sound effects. In any event, it got us excited about working together on the whole film.

Before that step, a smart young volunteer named Maxx Gillman helped synch up the rest of the raw audio with me in my house. Talk about indie filmmaking: Maxx worked on Marc's laptop in my kitchen. Occasionally I would have to unplug the refrigerator so we could hear whether the dialogue was synched correctly! After that, it was decided that my kitchen was not the best place to cut together a feature. So we moved everything back to Marc's house in Valencia.

When we were halfway through the rough cut, I realized something frightening: The film was in danger of being much shorter than it was supposed to be! Thus I devised a prologue and epilogue to the story, which would take place away from the main location (where I did not want to return) and without the principal cast (who I would have problems corraling anyway). Seeing as how we had shot that "news footage" of a crime scene at Marc's house in June, I thought, well, we've got that house - let's shoot a prologue of the woman whose death is discussed in said news footage. While we're at it, why not add an epilogue, shot at night, of a second news broadcast - one that takes place in the aftermath of what happens in the main story? How simple. So we shot the footage with a small additional cast over one semi-rainy weekend in November. And it added at least six minutes to the film's running time.