JMS: Cut bits?

 Posted on 3/28/1995 by jmsatb5@aol.com to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated


Every episode is cut to varying degrees; I think there's been
maybe one out of 42 shot to date that's come out exactly right, without
anything having to be cut. (You always err a little on this side
because the last thing you want is to come out SHORT, which is a major
pain in the butt, and by the time this is known it's often too late to
shoot stuff within the timeframe of that episode.) Generally, you WANT
an episode to be about 2-4 minutes over, so you can trim and tighten.

Generally speaking, our episodes come in 5-8 minutes over *in the
director's cut*. One or two have gone as far as 10 minutes over in that
cut. And what's discovered is almost always that there's a lot of air,
long lingering shots that slow down the pace...my feeling is that 1) it's
better to have more story than time than more time than story, and 2)
all our episodes should be edited at a dead run, so tight they scream.

Consequently, while episodes may start out long, and often missing
scenes deleted by the director, once John Copeland and I go back in and
start tightening the screws, we almost always get all those scenes BACK
again, and then I line-cut here and there within scenes. So with very
few exceptions, there aren't very many scenes that would've added
anything that are missing, even from "Revelations." I think that that
was one of our longer ones, and we dropped bits here and there, but
in the long run nothing much really of consequence.

jms