Film salvaged from house fire gets cut to needed length

After spending Easter weekend with his family in New Albany, Ind., Adam Carroll returned to Bloomington to find every homeowner's nightmare: His house caught fire.\n"I should be really upset," Carroll said. "But what does being upset get me?"\nDespite the incident, director Carroll and screenwriter David Mickler stuck to the task of finishing their film before its May 1 deadline. The raw footage was complete by mid-March, and since the filmmakers have been spending time shaping nearly five hours of film into the order, length and style they envisioned when filming began.\nCarroll and Mickler spent about 24 hours during a two-week period in a small room in Ashton's Mottier Hall, the location of the Film Studies Program.\nAccording to the editing resources on the Web site www.learner.org, the "rough" cut, or first edit, of a Hollywood feature film can take up to three months to complete. For the smaller-scale "Conversations," Carroll and Mickler have a much shorter time frame.\nUsing "Avid Xpress DV," a film-editing computer program, the film's audio and video tracks first must be separated before making cuts in the video portion. After each segment of video is edited as desired, the audio must be dubbed over the new video stream. Carroll is familiar with the process from other film classes, and Mickler learned the ropes as they went along.\nAt press time, they had completed the first editing run to turn in to their professor for feedback, Carroll said. Afterward, they plan to make necessary changes and polish the audio-video syncing to create seamless transitions in the film.\nFor now, they have run into some problems. Having already cut one scene because they said it did not enhance the plot, Carroll and Mickler are stuck with a sequence of video without enough audio.