A week in the edit of Feedback

Feedback took five months to cut. Kofi Mensah-Hart and a crew of three, including cinematographer Priya Natarajan, followed The Lowlands across twenty-two dates over six weeks, and came home with about 300 hours of material. The finished film runs seventy-two minutes. People ask how you get from one to the other, and the honest answer is one ordinary week at a time. These are my notes from week nine, about halfway through.

Monday and Tuesday: the song

By week nine we knew the film would be built around one song. The band played it every night, and every night it was different: faster in the small rooms, slower and angrier towards the end of the tour, once with the lights failing halfway through. The idea was to let that song carry the structure, returning to it five or six times so the audience feels the tour wearing on the band without anyone saying so.

The hard part was choosing which versions. My assistant had already synced every performance to Tobias Wren's multitrack recordings from the desk, so I could listen to clean audio for all twenty-two. I spent two days doing nothing else. I listened without picture first, picked the six that told a story on their own, and only then looked at what Kofi and Priya had shot. Two of my favourite performances had almost no usable picture. They went.

Wednesday: the rain set

Midweek I went back to the gig in the rain, the one played to nobody. It was a disaster on the night and is now the heart of the film. Kofi and Priya had shot it on the two identical cameras from the side of the stage, mostly looking out at an empty field and the stage lights in the drizzle.

The first cut of it was eleven minutes long and felt like an hour. I cut it down to four by keeping only the moments where something changed: a string breaking, the drummer laughing, a single person with an umbrella arriving at the back. Everything else was weather.

Thursday: the screening

Every second Thursday we screened the current cut for Kofi and two people who had not seen it before. Not producers, not the band, just people with no reason to be kind. I sit behind them and watch the backs of their heads. When they reach for their phones, I make a note of the timecode.

That week they stayed with it until about minute fifty, where we had three backstage scenes in a row. That told me more than any notes session could.

Friday: losing things

Fridays are for cutting what I love. That week it was a ten-minute scene of the bassist teaching the bus driver to play a song, which everyone in the cutting room adored and which did nothing for the story. I moved it into a folder called "later", which is where scenes go so that nobody has to admit they are gone. Most of them never come back. That one became a special feature on the release.