AUGUST 20, 2006

TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD

by Amy Berg




Woo hoo!!  What an awesome episode!!  Kudos to writers Ira Steven Behr & Bruce Miller and our man behind the camera, Scott Peters. 

I imagine the spoiler-mongers among you already knew this big revelation was coming, so it might not have had the same impact for them as it did for the rest of you.  But a great scene is a great scene, whether you're surprised by its contents or not. 

We've had a lot of great scenes in the three seasons of this show, some you've never even seen.  Some were left on the cutting room floor, others were never even shot, having been dropped from a script before it ever went before the cameras. 

One of the most difficult aspects to writing and producing a television series is time.  Sometimes you have too much.   Sometimes you have too little.  On this show, it's almost always the latter.  Nearly every episode this season has run long, meaning we have more material than we have space to put it.  And when that happens, something's gotta give.   Sacrifices have to be made. 

Sometimes we'll only lose a part of a scene here and there, taking out stuff that doesn't affect the audience's understanding of it or undercut the emotion within it.  But on many occasions we've had to cut entire scenes, which is always a little difficult to stomach.  Television episodes are timed down to the second, so this is an inevitable dilemma.  You have to be able to make tough choices.  In the trade, when a writer is forced to sacrifice a scene or piece of dialogue they're particularly fond of, we call it killing your baby.  An inappropriate comparison?  Sure.  But sometimes that's exactly what it feels like.      

Of course, there are also instances where the decisions aren't that difficult.  Occasionally we've lost scenes because they just didn't turn out the way we'd expected.  But more often than not, the scenes we lose are the ones that don't do anything to move the plot forward.  Even on those occasions, though, there are moments within the scene that you just hate to lose. 

Case in point.  In the writer's draft of Terrible Swift Sword, we had a scene where Tom and Diana seek out Michael Lawrence's family in an attempt to locate him.  Michael was the kid with the ability to put everybody to sleep, which he used to free the Nova members in NTAC custody.  Anyway, when our script supervisor timed out the episode she told us we were running a little long and that we should make some cuts before it goes into production.  We did. 

One of the things we lost was a scene of Tom and Diana talking to Michael's father.  It didn't really do much to propel the story, and we were never going to see Michael anyway so the scene was a bit superfluous.   Cutting it was a relatively easy decision.  But still, there was some juicy stuff in there that we missed when it was gone.  The scene gave us an outsider's perspective on Jordan Collier's return, something we hadn't yet explored.  And it gave us further insight into Tom and Diana's opinion of him and the influence he wields over people. 

Anyway, I thought you guys might enjoy reading it so I've posted it below.  It's illuminating, yes, but you can also see why it didn't make the cut.  Hopefully this gives you a fun little peek into our decision-making process.

Since this blog focused on editing, before I go I'd like to give a big shout-out to our fabulous post production department up in Vancouver - producer Ben Brafman, coordinator Anne-Marie McGinn, editors Ron Yoshida, Paul Day, and Richard Schwadel, assistant editors Jen Pearson and James Lawson, and production assistant Kirk Hay.  Thanks for everything, guys.  You rock!

Next week... the season finale.  Buckle your seatbelts, folks!  I'll try to cajole Mr. Behr into writing the blog for that one.  If you're going to hear about the finale, you should hear it from The Man.

Past Entries:

• (8/13) The Gospel According to Collier
  
• (8/4) The Starzl Mutation
• (7/23) Blink
  
• (7/16) The Home Front
  
• (7/9) Graduation Day
  
• (6/25) Gone
  
• (6/18) Being Tom Baldwin
  
• (6/11) The New World, Parts I & II
  
• (6/1) Ira Steven Behr's Season 3 Sneak Peek