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BH: The Latest Cut and The Only Good Indian Preview

New news on the Bunker Hill front -- the movie is looking great! I was lucky enough to get into Oldfather Studios the other day to see the cut that was submitted to a major film festival. It's still a rough cut, with some temp music and mixing, but it's truly a thinking-man's thrill ride. I'm very proud to have worked on it.

The filmmakers are still tweaking certain scenes, so I offered to noodle around on it and try a few alternate cuts, mostly so I could get some experience for myself working with a narrative feature. Yesterday, director Kevin Wilmott called me in to take me up on the offer. The other people who run the Avid for him are understandably gone or busy in the holiday season, so we addressed some notes. Then he let me loose to play around. I duplicated the main sequence, and went through the first act, seeing if there were any places I could trim to speed up getting to the 'apocalyptic crisis' where the story kicks in hard.

I had limited time, and didn't know the footage, so there was a limit to what I could do. And as I said before, the cut is already in great shape. Maybe they'll use one or two of my suggested cuts; maybe they won't. In any case, it was great fun and great experience to play around with an assembled cut. Most of what I do day to day with editing is organizational. It's fun to be the creative editor, re-cutting a scene to emphasize a certain character, rearranging the order of lines, or building out a suspense moment.

I also got to look at (but not touch) some footage from The Only Good Indian, the next movie from Willmott and collaborators, starring Wes Studi. It tells about the Indian re-education programs of the 1900's. It looked great and yes, you can tell they had a bigger budget this time around.

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.