I’m refining the cut as I prepare HEART OF NEON for mastering, removing unnecessary archival material and polishing (and in some cases overhauling entirely) animations that have been placeholders for years. I’m not going to lie. I’m exhausted.
When I encountered this article that I wrote for the newsletter back in 2021 it resonated with the work I’d just completed (I think) on the opening act of the film. Here is the article in question in its entirety.
While you read, I’ll have a little lie down : )
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A BRIEF CONVERSATION ABOUT EDITING
The first ten minutes of a film is about the amount of time you have to convince people they should watch your movie. If someone has already rented or paid for your film then the point is moot, but there is a period in a film’s life before it goes on sale where people have to be convinced it’s worth watching: funders, producers, film festival programmers, even film festival audiences who may be debating whether to stay with this movie or leave now to catch the new Ashton Kutcher sci-fi premiere… You get the idea. Consequently, the beginning of a movie, especially a movie being made by an unknown director or at the very least a director untested in the market, bears a lot of weight in the success of the project.
I am painfully aware of this.
The challenge of this movie is to introduce dense, esoteric topics in game design and video game technology to an audience largely unimpressed and indifferent to the subject. This is not an insurmountable problem, but it requires finesse. You can see the movies made by people too close to the subject - they start in a niche place of privileged knowledge and stay there. Examples of this cropped up my #GAMERSINMOVIES series of movie double bills: THE LIVING ROOM WILL NEVER BE THE SAME, FROM BEDROOMS TO BILLIONS and GET LAMP are all examples of perfectly good documentaries that aren’t interested in an audience outside of people already compelled by the subject matter, movies that aren’t out to win new converts so to speak. I on the other hand want to be able to show this film to my mum and have her eyes NOT glaze over at the talk of sprites and frame rates, to have her be interested and maybe even invested in the lives of Jeff and Giles as they try keep their heads above water in the global video game industry. So, how do I do that?
One approach is to take a look at how other people achieved the same and try to apply those techniques to my own material. One touchstone throughout the development of this film has been the Errol Morris film A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, a documentary that marries the concepts from Stephen Hawking’s book of the same name with the Hawking's life story. Cosmology is not exactly a spectator sport, so Morris’ task was to make cosmology relatable to a novice audience (much as Hawking’s book attempted to do). There is also the passive nature of Hawking himself, a genius unable to move or to speak without his powered wheelchair and his computer voice. In the first five or ten minutes it becomes clear how Morris is going to make this work.
The first minute is just credits and music from Philip Glass. It gives the audience time to settle down and focus. The next thing presented to the audience is a starfield and Hawking’s computer voice, asking “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?". And then we see a chicken. That sets the tone: cosmic, questioning, words spoken through technology, but with an irreverence that juxtaposes the operatic majesty of Glass’s score. I don’t think Morris came to this intro without a lot of trial and error, but there’s a grand simplicity to this that’s admirable. The chicken is the hook.
This isn’t just a dry reading of the book. What follows is a parade of brief interview bites from uncredited speakers who all have a relationship with Hawking. Each interview snippet is an anecdote from his life that establishes context, both about who these interviewees are and about who Hawking is as a person: while pregnant with Stephen his mother buys an astronomical atlas (somebody jokes it’s an act of premonition); after the blackouts of WWII how she and Stephen would stare at the stars at night with wonder; stories that illustrate Hawking’s inquisitive, problem solving mind; about how his friend in high school bet Hawking that he would ultimately reveal himself to be exceptionally capable…
Between each interview snippet Hawking is heard to elaborate on his thoughts about the universe, from initially believing like most people that the universe is fixed and eternal, to learning that the universe is expanding and how that one fact suggests other dependent facts must also exist… like the universe must have a point in time when it began. Everything is presented calmly, without fuss, each piece not adding much in itself, but as a whole there is a sense of building tensions, that this is all going somewhere. Hawking is always asking questions about the universe and about existence in his snippets, while the interviewees are providing answers to the question “Who is Stephen Hawking?” in the form of his actions related as anecdotes. It’s really very elegant, which I don’t doubt belies the struggle inherent in finding the voice for a film. By ten minutes into this movie the rhythm has been established and you’re either onboard or you’re not. Even today, just reviewing for the purposes of writing this, it was hard not to just keep watching. It’s the connecting of ideas in a way that suggests the path ahead, that presents the questions the rest of the film is going to ask, and invites the audience to join the journey, those are the hallmarks of a strong opening ten minutes.
The current iteration of the opening sequence for HEART OF NEON is edited along these lines, although I don’t have family anecdotes from Jeff’s childhood. I’ve intended all along to tell a story where Jeff’s life begins with video games. It’s sort of a statement about how I don’t care for docs where someone’s childhood is either shoehorned into a story that doesn’t need it, or is otherwise used as some kind of explanation for why this person does what they do as an adult. I’m rarely impressed by backstory, but seeing A BRIEF HISTORY again today I can appreciate now that this film uses backstory very effectively, and that my strategy presents some stringent limits to attempting it myself. But then again that’s why I made that rule from the outset. I’m not sure what my solution will be, but I know it won’t be like this film, as much as I admire it. The trick is to learn lessons from earlier examples without copying them. That’s the goal, anyway.