Monday, January 28, 2008

The Devil's Music Cast & Crew Screening

Last Friday we had the cast and crew screening for The Devil's Music at the BFI in Stephen St, central London.

Cast & Crew screenings are always slightly odd beasts. It's a room full of people who are a bit nervous. For most of the cast and crew, they're nervous to see how something that they invested loads of time and energy into, ages ago, has turned out. For them, it's like spending two months mixing the ingredients for a cake, then having to spend 8 months waiting for it to cook without being able to peek into the oven to see how its doing. For those involved in post-production, however, it's a different matter.

Take me, for example. Whereas other folk in the audience might have entirely forgotten about certain scenes, be unaware of other bits that were added as pick-ups and so on, I'm painfully aware of everything. And it's all so familiar, from months of editing and polishing, that I've completely lost perspective on the whole damn thing. I can't even hear the dialogue being spoken, let alone process it; all I hear is background noises, edit glitches and so on.

So there's all different kinds of nervous in the room. But its good nervous. Happy nervous. And Friday rocked the house in all kinds of ways. To watch the movie in a nice full screening room is exactly what I needed right now; this flick delivers the goods and our hard work has paid off handsomely.

The aftershow party is always a blur, and it's always tough to try and get to speak to and thank everyone. I woke up the next morning with a bit of a sore throat (3 cigars) and a bit of a sore head (an indeterminate amount of beers), trying to work out whether I'd managed to thank everyone. I hadn't, so if anyone I didn't manage to get to during those couple of hours is reading this, thankyou so much for making this flick happen.

Now to work out what happens next...