Editing Tomorrow Never Comes

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

So it's been a while since we gave you a sense of where the movie is really at. Well, today we want to inform you that we have successfully completed The Final Cut. That is where the Video part of the movie is complete, and what is left is the Audio. We are now in the sound editing phase and should be completed as scheduled. In "Behind the Scenes 4" you had a glimpse of our intention to have this movie out in April 2008, and inshaAllah (If God wills) we plan to do just that.

So I thought i'd take some time and explain the process we went through to get this movie edited. So here it goes.

• On our first shoot, we were able to get a lot of the footage we needed but we ran into some technical difficulty which translated into needing to reshoot some scenes. This shoot lasted 46 hours with around 8 or so hours of sleep.


• From our first shoot, we edited a draft to see how the movie looks and see what kind of new footage would be needed to "Fill in the gaps"


• We drew up a schedule, whopped up some storyboards, and got ready for the second shoot.


• We got on set again, and got to filming. Again, we ran into slight difficulty with the equipement because of our very tight shooting schedule. This shoot lasted around a day and a half.


• After this second shoot, the camera we shot with (on the first day) was actually broken and we couldn't download the footage from it for A WHILE! So the director was scrambling for literally hours daily for a week to try and get his hands on a camera that can download this footage. This set us back quite a bit but we got the footage.


• Now the footage we got from the second shoot was of two formats; standard DV 30p, and HD720 24p. The HD footage we got was in Apple HDV codec format so we had to go through apple to edit it. We also had to throw in some non-HD shots with the HD ones to make sense of the scenes.


• So, we edited the HD in OSX on Final Cut Pro, exported it to windows into Adobe Premiere 2.0 and we edited the movie there.


• Once we had another draft edit, we got feedback, changed what was needed and found a few things missing. This prompted yet another (much shorter) reshoot.


• Only a few people went to the third reshoot, and it was from Dawn till noon. We got what we needed, transferred the footage into the movie timeline, and output another draft.


• From here, we got more feedback, we addressed as many issues as we could, and output what we have now: The Final Cut.


• BUT ALHUMDULILLAH (Praise be to God) We have a Final Cut now, and very little left to do.


• The Sound Designer will start the work anytime soon and should be done before the deadline.