It’s wild to think that after two years of working on this film, yesterday we began editing.

Jon and I spent the previous five days holed up at camp (his cabin in upstate New York) cranking on the script. Kathryn is deep into campaign mode now (she makes a living running campaigns) and couldn’t join us, sadly, but we were able to confer with her along the way. We’ve now got a solid script for most of the film and will fill in the rest over the next few days as Brad works through the first couple of acts in Premier.

There’s still a fair bit of filming to do … some important interviews, a few follow-up interviews later in the fall, the conventions, GOTV and the election (and we’ve got a crew filming at the GOP convention in Cleveland – more on that later), etc. But after all this time planning and filming it’s really cool to actually be assembling the story that’s been slowly evolving in front of our eyes and our lenses.

It’s also a bit strange, since we are now editing before finishing all the filming, but that’s a necessity for hitting key festival submission deadlines and our end-of-December completion date. This is a film and a story that really need to launch into the world early in 2017 after the election. Over the next couple of months we’ll finish as complete and polished a version of the film as possible for the initial festival submissions, and then complete a final version in December after the election and our final post-election reflection interviews are done. But we’ve got a really good handle on the stories and the arcs and how they all fit together, and it’s exciting to see Brad Johanson, our editor, actually start cutting the pieces together.

And now that we’re starting to put sequences together, it’s also just really cool to the images and story flow together on the screen.