Cutting ninety seconds from forty hours

Dry Run came back from the desert as forty hours of a man running along a road. This is how it became ninety seconds.

Watch everything once

All of it, in order, at normal speed, with a notebook. It took a week. You cannot cut footage you have only skimmed, because the shot you need is always in the take you skipped.

String-outs, not edits

A string-out is every usable moment of one kind laid end to end: every footfall, every look to the horizon, every time the light changed. We built eleven. Only then did we start a timeline.

Find the breath

The film has no music for the first forty seconds, so the rhythm had to come from the runner. Once we cut to his breathing instead of the picture, the structure arrived in an afternoon.

Stop early

The eleventh pass was the film. We made a twelfth and a thirteenth, and went back.