By Steve Gerace
Mt. Shasta Herald
Sep 3, 2008
A small one-room outbuilding surrounded by tall pine trees on a hillside with a view of Mt. Shasta has served this summer as a film editing studio for Jerry Alden Deal’s “Dreams Awake.”
A powerful Apple computer with a 4 terabyte hard drive contains all the raw footage for “Dreams,” much of which was filmed last year on and around Mt. Shasta.
Some of it was shot on the same piece of land where veteran film editor Bob Gordon was quite content to sit for hours in front of three computer monitors for several weeks electronically stitching together scenes using one small high definition video segment after another.
The property belongs to Deal, the writer, director, and producer of “Dreams Awake,” which features a cast of both Hollywood actors and a few Siskiyou County residents.
Deal has said previously that Mt. Shasta, too, is a character in his film. He said he uses stories about the mountain “as a tapestry for the story that happens to the family” the story revolves around.
“Dreams Awake” is the feature length film directorial debut for Deal, who has made film shorts in the past and has written numerous screenplays.
Though the film’s final mix won’t be ready until sometime after this year’s Mount Shasta International Film Festival in October, Deal said he plans to show a trailer of “Dreams” at the Festival, as well as clips from the film and some behind the scenes footage shot by John Cumming of MCTV. He will also be giving a seminar for the Festival.
Gordon, who lives in southern California, has been a film editor for 30 years and has worked on more than 30 films. He started with some low budget features before his first studio film, 1980’s Blue Lagoon, which was filmed on a small island in Fiji and starred a young Brooke Shields. Gordon also edited 1985’s “Return of the Living Dead,” which he describes as one of the first movies in the horror/comedy genre.
In 1991 he began working as a consultant, and eventually editor on the first all-digital full length animated film, Disney’s “Toy Story,” which was made by the animation studio that later came to be known as Pixar.
A self-described “inveterate game player and puzzle doer as a child,” Gordon sees film editing as “the ultimate jig saw puzzle. It satisfies me; I get great pleasure in doing it and seeing it when it’s finished. It also pays well.”
Deal said Gordon came highly recommended, and it wasn’t difficult to convince him to leave crowded and smoggy LA for a while to do some work in the mountains of northern California.
Using the film’s script supervisor notes as his guide, Gordon created what’s known in the business as a “first assembly,” which has all the scenes of the movie put together without a film score, sound design and visual effects.
The “real editing work” began after the first assembly was complete, Gordon said. That’s when he and Deal made further changes in the process of getting Deal’s “vision of the film onto the screen.” At each stage the film will be pared down to an approximate final running time of about 100 minutes.
In the end, about a third of the raw film material – Deal calls it “the clay I needed to work with” – gets cut. Individual scenes as they were originally conceived were shortened or expanded to get the tempo right.
Deal described his script as the film’s blueprint. Once the assembly process began with the real footage, things changed. “There’s a saying that you really make three movies,” Deal said. “The one you write, the one you shoot, and the one you edit.”
Deal said the film has now moved on for visual effects work, after which media will be created and turned over to a sound designer in Los Angeles, who will work closely with the film score composer. Then it moves to the mixing stage, during which all the tracks are blended together.
“Dreams Awake,” according to Deal’s description, tells the story of a disconnected family that gets stranded while on vacation near Mt. Shasta. “A family drama grows into a spiritual mystery, and finally becomes a mystical adventure. A glimpse into the subtle but intense possibilities of the human spirit, this story delves into that magical lore between reality and illusions, dreams and awake, and life and immortality.”
The film’s title comes from a quote by Henry David Thoreau, “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
The mother in the film is played by actress Erin Gray of “Buck Rogers,” “Baywatch” and “Silver Spoons” fame. It is during her journey of self-discovery that “she wakes up in the dream of her life,” Deal has said.
Original Post: http://dreamsawakemovie.com/media/film-news/deal%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98dreams%E2%80%99-moves-toward-big-screen/
