It's likely you've been thinking you haven't heard much about The Mind Job lately. Well there's a reason for this.
After an amazing, crazy week of shooting, just as we were about to crack into the editing process with all guns blazing... we hit a snag. A fairly hefty snag. I didn't think it was right to trouble you all with it until it was resolved, one way or the other.
When we started processing all the footage, we discovered we had some serious corruption issues with the footage which had somehow evaded detection during the shoot. I won't go into too much detail, but a significant number of takes were affected, and for a while it looked like we had lost so much footage that we weren't going to be able to finish the film with without a pretty serious reshoot. It's worth noting that the main location was demolished a couple of weeks after we shot. So someone was having a bit of a laugh. Ha ha... keep smiling, keep smiling.
We're still not sure exactly what happened, it's possible we never will, but it looks like it was a problem with the camera and how it was recording files while we were shooting. What we do know is that it's an extremely rare problem which practically no one in the industry had ever encountered. We had all the right measures in place, but somehow... it happened.
At the risk of sounding a bit soppy here, I've never been involved in something where I've felt so much support and enthusiasm from so many people. Everyone has been incredible and I have to say, during the last few weeks, that's really helped.
Since we began trying to recover the damaged footage, it's been a roller-coaster ride of breakthroughs and setbacks. I have to give a massive shout out to Nikki Rubino at Fanatic Films who has been absolutely incredible in doggedly looking for ways to save the footage. I'd also like to thank Suga Suppiah at Method Studios for all her hard work over the last few weeks, and thanks generally to Fanatic and Method for being absolutely incredible with their support.
As I mentioned, I didn't want to bring you all down with this news until we knew whether it was all over or all on... Well I'm pretty damn overjoyed to let you know it appears to be ALL ON. Last week we finished retrieving the last of the salvageable footage, and it's looks like we've saved enough footage to finish the film. And not only finish it, but finish it very close to the standard we have always envisaged (that's extremely high if you weren't sure). It might even give the film a certain quality otherwise unobtainable with uncorrupted footage.
This footage is now heading to the edit room, and we're back on track – a few weeks later than we'd planned, but back on track.
It was all going a little too smoothly, I must admit.
