Here’s the latest – covering weeks 14 & 15 – in our ongoing filmmaker diary series featuring writer/director Matthew Cherry, as he continues with post-production work on his feature film debut, The Last Fall, with an ensemble cast that includes Lance Gross, Nicole Beharie, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Keith David and Harry Lenix.

A teaser trailer is on its way, and we should see it in the next month or 2.

Hey guys. Welcome to the latest installment of my Shadow And Act Filmmaker Diary series.

Since we’ve stopped shooting these next entries will not be as extensive as my prior ones but they should remain informative nontheless. We are into our second and third weeks of post production for the film and it’s been a pretty great experience so far. I have been working with a great editor Michael Norville and we have been putting in major work. We have experimented with a couple of different ways of being productive and since I have editing experience as well and I know what I want we decided to simultaneouly do a rough cut and refined cut at the same time. He will go ahead of me 4 or 5 scenes and edit it how he sees it and then I will go behind him the next day and edit the footage myself adding cuts and taking away things as I see fit. It’s been a really productive process. It has to be, as we are trying to make the submissions deadllines for The Pan African Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival. We are going to miss the Bronze Lens, Chicago International and AFI Festivals but maybe next year.

It’s crazy how important music and sound is to a film and so often times it’s one of the last things that we think about. I can tell from just watching the raw footage that I am not getting the full experience already. The footage looks great and I know we have something special on our hands but I am extremely excited about working with The Foreign Exchange for our original score and soundtrack. We finished our first rough cut on Wednesday August 17th and I promptly sent the cut to them so that they can get started on the music. Our next step is to send the footage to our sound mixer/sound designer so he can start to get the audio right.

Earlier this week I cut together a rough cut of a teaser trailer. I sent it out to get some feedback and it’s been pretty amazing so far. We incorporated a lot of stats about the NFL and we have some great footage that we incorporated. I can’t wait to premiere it. It’s looking like we’re gonna put it out the world on Thursday September 8th 2011. The reason for this being that it is the first regular season NFL game and the nation will be focused on football so to me it makes sense. We are going to try to premiere the trailer on ESPN.com as well. We’ll see. It makes the most sense. Our executive producer Ellis Hobbs went to Bristol to go on all the ESPN morning shows this past Monday and he shouted out me and the film on all the shows he went on. it was kind of surreal to have someone say my name on Sportscenter and it wasn’t because I was playing a sport it was because I directed a film about sports. A lot of amazing things are happening already with this film and the press has already been pretty crazy. We were referenced in JET Magazine and a lot of blogs have started to take interest int he project as well. It helps having name talent in this regard and it’s cool that Lance lives in LA and we can hang out together and strategize.

We’re gonna have to really press to get this thing finished in time for these deadlines but in a lot of ways deadlines help you set a tangible goal to cross the finish line so I look forward to the challenge. Next week we have to get our trailer color corrected and put the final titles on it and set up dates and times for our pick up days for scenes that we still have to shoot to complete the movie. Thanks for reading my blog guys and hopefully I’ll see you soon.

“Actions inspire louder than words”

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