Untold Dailies

When I was an art director, we created an animated product based on a feature film. Our product was to be released along with the movie. As such, we received “dailies” from the feature film production crew, meaning we got a VHS (yes it was a while ago) of all the film they shot in a day, uncut, unedited, unfinished, so we could see exactly what the characters looked like and how the scenes progressed. We got dozens of snipits of the story as they were created.That was a wonderful window into almost being in the film production crew and served to help us create our product, since it was the only real visual reference we had to work from. But since movies are shot in a non chronological order, it was wholly confusing to try to put the parts into a semblance of order to understand the story line. Some days we were left piecing bits together and filling in the gaps with our imagination.

I found I was applying the same methods as the film crews in getting the stories out for this book. A story would be forefront in my mind, and I’d tap it out without regard to chronology. That makes for a bunch of snipits that then need to be woven together. So getting it all out was the initial draft phase. Then the weaving began… and it took twice as long to weave it all together than the story-telling phase. But it had to be done that way, because it was too big of a thing to all fit in my head (or an outline or notes) all at once, in one place.

Another thing I learned (again) while telling a story this long is that you can’t tell it all. There are things that were interesting at the time that simply don’t translate well. There were simple moments that are insoluble in their beauty, but don’t go down on paper or in photos. In other words, they were real moments, simple and direct as part of life. Things that expressing in words functions to destroy, rather than embellish. The funny thing is, it is important as I look back at these snipits to realize this fact. I have a deep desire to include them, and that would be to the detriment of the book as a whole. Some stories serve to embellish others, some denature the ones around them. And I suppose this is all common knowledge and trivial study among the literarily-trained folk out there who might be reading this, but it was something I learned along the way. And it happens to be one of the things I like best about storytelling. But you all didn’t want to see the dailies anyway. There is a finished feature out there and it’s a lot easier to tread through.