So what do you do with 30,000 feet of film?

I am supposed to keep telling you something about the process of making a feature-length movie. Since this column began, I have related what it's like to make a film. Now that principal photography is completed, what do we do with all that footage we shot?

Transfer it to video for starters, courtesy of Alpha Cine Labs. It's a $7,000 proposition, but we have no choice. No choice because we don't have the funds to do a proper post edit on film. So we are pinning our hopes on doing an off-line edit on video, assemble a rough-cut of the film, send it down to movie distributors (most are in Los Angeles) with the end hope being that one of them will pick up the film and pay for the post work.

This is probably a long-shot. The safer way to make a movie is to have the funds- all the funds, including the $150,000 needed to do a proper post job on a film- before one sliver of footage is shot. But we were not so lucky.

I've had the idea for American Messiah for over seven years. While I may not have shopped it around the various studios and production companies as much as I should have, the few that did "read" the script immediately passed on it- every single one claiming it was a religious movie. With a title like American Messiah, this might be apparently so, but this is not the case when you begin to read the script. Maybe the lesson here is that production executives don't bother to read the script when they don't like the title.

This period between finished photography and editing is sometimes accompanied by a let down. The adrenalin that was needed to push the photography through suddenly is no longer needed, so when that stopped, I was overcome by the blahs. I began to question the film itself, wondering if we had a real movie, or whether we simply exercised something in futility. From what I've been told, this is completely normal.

Recently, however, the enthusiasm has begun to return. Editing is where the movie is at. That's where the art of film truly comes alive. So my excitement is revving up, and I look forward to spending countless hours staring before the monitor screen looking at footage over and over again. The trick then is not to get sick of the film.

My partner on the project, Adam Gold, and I hope to have a rough edit of the movie in about three months. I would like to have a special screening and invite readers of this magazine to attend.

Before I sign off; here are some loose ends regarding principal photography:

1. When determining how many scenes to shoot per day, keep in mind that your crew will start to resent you if you push them too hard. That is when tempers begin to flare, not to mention our dark sides. We mistakenly scheduled too many scenes for one day and ended up shooting until 2 a.m. It was not a good idea. Our only saving grace is that we had a short shooting schedule, so the crew was understanding.

2. Having food on the set, constantly, cannot be over-emphasized. We never really budgeted for food and it ended up being a huge expense, but it was worth every penny. Having a background in the restaurant business helped me to insure that no one ever went hungry and to buy items at wholesale.

3. Disasters will happen- expect them. The night before principal photography began, we had no film. How you handle these crises tells a lot about the kind of moviemaker you are.

4. Be careful about where you rent your equipment. Unless you like living on the edge and gambling whether or not your camera truck is going to start at two in the morning after a grueling day of shooting, do your homework. MM