Soooo Gonçalo, the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue is when is the movie going to be finished?



Whoooo knooooooows? A few days? Months? A year? Forever? That’s a secret more well-guarded than the Coca-Cola recipe. I’m not sponsored by them by the way! But joking aside, I think one of the biggest mistakes a filmmaker can make is rushing to get their project finished and releasing it without a strategy into the wild. And I get it – that feeling of seeing it on the big screen with an audience or getting reactions from people online is exhilarating and fun. But rushing can also be detrimental to the story you are trying to tell; filmmaking is a long process in which post-production is just another step. You need to experiment with things that might not work and that take time.

It is very close to being completed but we are definitely taking our time, focusing on getting the story and its emotional beats just right because, ultimately, we want the movie to have a big impact on people and make them feel something deep inside their souls.



What is editing? What is it exactly that you do?



Imagine you have one big puzzle – let’s say 10,000 pieces. The puzzle is made up of three different colour sections: blue, red and yellow. In the box, you have the right amount of blue pieces, too many red pieces, and too few yellow pieces. 



It’s my job, in collaboration with the Director, to fit these pieces together to create a complete picture that works according to their vision and that makes sense to a broad audience. Of course, to achieve this, particular sections might require you to be extra creative to fill gaps where you don’t have enough pieces, without compromising your story or the sentiment you are trying to portray. Ultimately, in the editing process you can make or break a story, and that's also true for the actors performances. It can be tricky but I find it extremely exciting to have the power of building something or destroying it! You could even say I have ‘UNLIMITED POWER!’ Yes, I had to insert a Star Wars quote somewhere. And, um, you said it, not me.

When you’re editing something like this what are the things you’re thinking about?



My main concern is the emotional side of it. It’s a story that requires the audience to connect with what they are seeing on screen. So I’m always asking myself if I'm being successful in what I’m putting together. Does the cut make me feel what I want the audience to feel? It sounds a bit manipulative and in reality, it kinda is! Obviously the performances of the actors have a huge part in this and luckily for me, on Ecstasy, my job was made so much easier by our amazing cast. They just knocked it out of the park!



How much footage did you have to work with and what is the likely length of the movie?



It was three days of shooting and a bit over 4 hours of usable footage that will probably produce a movie of 18 minutes. Sounds like nothing and an easy job to do, right? Believe me, it’s not! The amount of love, time and dedication that every single crew and cast member put in leading up to now is quite extraordinary. We all believe in this project so much and think that we have something so special in our hands, so we are going to every possible length to ensure this the best movie we can make. The current version is made of 700 cuts! Now, that’s a lot of cuts – but they have all been precisely chosen just for you and hopefully, you won't notice a single one.



Can you share a picture of the Ecstasy timeline and explain what the flip it is to people?



This is a screenshot of the current cut.

I’m obsessive about project management, but even by my standards, this timeline is actually very clean compared to other projects. For example, in some music videos Grant and I worked on together, you would see loads of video clips on top of each other everywhere. A timeline, by the way, is basically where I construct the puzzle. I always try to have it organised by having multiple labelled folders so if someone else needs the project file to work on, they can decipher much quicker what’s where.



In the picture above, the purple line is the 700 cuts all merged together and all the clips below that are audio files: the green ones are the originals recorded on set, and the different coloured ones are for temporary sound effects – music, ambience, etc. Colour-coding helps me see specific sections, what’s temporary and what’s not. That includes video footage as well. I also prefer for all clips to have their plate numbers and a description of what's included (for example SC09SL01 - T003 - Kristian undressing front shot) as this makes searching for specific actions or scenes much quicker. 

After receiving the reshoot footage, I tried a different approach to analysing/building the scenes. Before viewing/presenting the entire cut, I decided to work with individual sequences so that I could treat each scene as if it was its own self-contained movie. Then, with feedback from Grant, I would move them to the main sequence, making adjustments for pacing and checking that they fit correctly into the story as a whole. Then more feedback from Grant and Emily, and I would address their comments.



You may or may not have heard that the first shoot ran into problems. What was it like editing the film knowing that it had stuff missing?



It was hard, to be honest. Obviously, you try different ways to fill those gaps to allow you to tell the story in some shape or form that makes sense. It does require a fair bit of imagination to see the big picture and the potential of it. But I have to say, not having those shots from day one ended up being highly beneficial for us because we could look at the cut we had and say, ’Right, we need this, this and that.’ This allowed us to identify very precisely how to elevate the movie.



When the lockdown happened and the car park location was on the brink of demolition what was it like editing the movie knowing that we might not be able to film anything extra?

Scary. But also sadistically funny because of all the wild behind-the-scenes stories I was hearing from Grant up to that point. And even then, the ones that happened during the extra day of shooting just seemed to fit with everything that happened in the entire production. In the editing room, though, there were no such stories, because I’m the Captain and I run a tight ship! Honestly, not having that extra day of shooting would have been a big disappointment as I knew what we could achieve story-wise. The extra day allowed us to bring the movie to a completely different level by making the emotional side pop so much more – letting the story shine the way it really deserves.



Now that we’ve done the re-shoot and you have a whole extra day’s worth of footage, how did that change things for you?



It’s quite interesting to look at the cut before the reshoot and after. To put it in some perspective, we added roughly 2 minutes of new footage to a cut that will probably be 18 minutes long. It’s such a small amount of the whole movie. But the thing is, those 2 minutes, which are sporadically added throughout, brought the movie to the level we wanted the audience to feel from beginning to end. It just made certain things much clearer and impactful. Or at least that's what I think – we’ll find out when people have a chance to actually see it!



What’s been the most difficult sequence to edit (Without giving away spoilers)



Obviously I can't go into detail without spoiling anything, but I’ll say that the intro – to this day – is very challenging. You want to grab the audience’s attention from the first frame and that’s not an easy task as people tend to be less forgiving of short-films than feature films or episodes of a TV series. The competition for the next viral thing is big and attention spasms are all over the place. If people are not interested from the first second, they’ll just tune out.



What’s your favourite part of the movie and the sequence you’ve most enjoyed editing?



Interesting question! You’ve definitely put me on the spot. I don’t think I have a favourite sequence, per se, but what I enjoyed the most was putting together all those little moments of comedy that are spread throughout the movie. I just loved that element of it. When Grant pitched me the idea of the short, he described it as a light-hearted comedy full of emotion. So when I first read the script I just giggled like a little boy – l was so excited to see them on my screen. And of course, some of them worked better than others but having the chance to discover that by myself is what makes me enjoy my work.



So once the edit is complete, what’s next in the process and how will they change things for the film?



Pretty much like with any other short-film: it will go to Sound, Music and Grading. With each step, the movie will just get better and better. Right now it’s quite raw, but we already see we have something special and we are just itching to have everything else done at the scale of commitment we’ve had so far! After those are complete, we’ll put everything together, insert the credits at the end, export different formats, submit to festivals and that should be it! Our baby will be born and ready to take on the world. So treat it right.



Lastly… could you imagine going on a drug deal with a parent?



My dad is a teacher and my mum is a social worker, so if I wanted to be disowned by my family, sure! While I can see something hilariously stupid happening with my dad, a bit like Kristian and Ian’s story, it would be a completely different story with my mum. I’m pretty sure she knows the entire police force back home and she once told me she was part of a police raid! So it’s safe to say that I won't be doing anything illegal with that scary lady, and I just want to put it out there that I have NEVER done anything illegal. And any so-called proof is just slander against my good name... which nobody in this country knows how to pronounce anyway. 



Check out Gonçalo's other work here: https://www.goncalosacorreia.com