A couple weeks ago I came across all the raw footage for our short film “Moses”, which we created in an independent study class in 2006. A flood of memories about the production returned, as did the realization that I was never fully happy with the film.
The first edit in 2006 was rushed for our Fresno State screening (this was a class project with a deadline after all). The second edit came a couple days later, which was really just some small tweaks, stuff we didn’t get done for the screening.
But this third and final edit was something I’ve been wanting to do for a quite a while now. I always thought we did an excellent job shooting this thing, and I consider this some of my best camera and lighting work for a short film. But since it was a class project, we were obligated to stick to a script we didn’t write and stick with some performances that weren’t great (the actors needed to be in the film to get their grade).
Now that 2 years have passed, I didn’t feel so bad jumping back in and really tearing this thing apart. This is not a complete re-edit from scratch, but it’s an improvement. It’s much shorter now, it went from the original 26 minutes with no credits to 14.5 minutes with no credits. Several scenes were cut, new footage was added, new musical cues were added, color correction was tweaked, as was audio. Overall I think the film is paced much better now. The underlying plot had problems to begin with, and you can’t really get rid of those, but I think the film is much improved. And I’m finally satisfied, or as much as I can be!
Click here to view the re-edit.