I'm Black And I'm Proud - Part 4 - Post Production

I was miserable and felt completely useless the next few days after the shoot. I was embarrassed at asking for so much help and having nothing to show for it. I put the tapes away and said I would take a break from the production before logging the footage. It ended up being a very long time before I started looking at the tapes again. Eventually, I logged all the footage and was surprisingly happy with what I got. With no money and no sound I actually had something that could be interesting. I restructured the story and had to cut out a lot of scenes that I really liked. My brother's stuff had to be cut out; a really fun sequence with Sweet Daddy stealing a sip of a pint; and just about every sequence with the "lucky" coin had to be scrapped. I sorted out my EDL and was ready to edit.

My next major setback was that I had no one and nowhere to edit this puppy. I ended up shelving the project, again, as life got in the way and I was not able to devote quality time to it. A few years went by and I decided to shoot another short film that my brother and I wrote together, Ode To My Brethren. After that production was shot I started editing it with the incredibly talented Noah Wohl. During that very long process of editing part-time over many months I learned a lot about editing and had decided that I would edit Black & Proud on my own with some software my brother had purchased.

I worked on it for a few weeks and realized how limited the software was. I had just finished working on Ode with Noah using Final Cut Pro. The differences were incredible - like driving someone else’s Benz and then buying your very own Lada. It took some time, but I finished it and was happy that it was over. The final product I uploaded to Google Video that same night. I was happy to call Sweet Daddy and give him the good news. Finally, he would have something to see for all the hard work he put in.