The 'Dennis Norden' School of Editing

For all you young folk out there, this is Denis Norden, who presented a series of bloopers shows on ITV.

As we said in our previous post, the Eton Crow editor is a law unto himself. This is not an exaggeration. Having handed over what one of our stars termed our 'acres of footage' on Sunday night, hehas spent the last week putting together a usable cut of a four and a half minute conversation.

The key word here is 'usable'. As we previously said, we here at Eton Crow are not professionals. If it's just as much of a shock now as it was then, seek therapy.

But, as we say, if you're planning to make a film, keep the word 'usable' in mind at all times. Of the total three hours of footage, approximately a third of this was usable. The rest was not, because of a variety of reasons, but primarily the following two;

(I) Outtakes - the finished conversation is four-and-a-half minutes long, while the finished outtake reel is only thirty seconds shorter. In these four minutes you can experience bongo drumming, random comedy quotations, occasional flatulence, strange sounds from off-set and general larking about.

(II) Framing. We love our actors here at EC, but even they will admit that while they have flashes of genius and talent, they are also not professionals. And so, at least half an hour was spent on the day finding imaginative places to hide the script so that it was in view of the actors but out of view of the camera.

This was a partial success.

Our director was also experimenting with multiple running cameras on the day - which is partially why we had enough usable footage - and this was a qualified win. Qualified, because, from some angles, the script hiding process was not so much successful as crashingly obvious.

This is why our editor has been locked up for the last week, intermittently watching Peter Gabriel videos (although, oddly, not the one you might expect.

One conversation, four and a half minutes (including a minute-long sight gag), four days of editing. Welcome to our world! Our director now has The Fear about shooting the fight sequences to come...