Post-production

Landing home from London in late October with the filming stage of the film complete, I was in need of a big rest. Being away from my home and family for seven weeks takes its toll and the last two weeks of filming were extremely stressful. But the edit had started and we were on a roller coaster ride already with Christmas fast approaching and delivery deadlines looming. I began to regret our promise to deliver the film to Ireland by the end of January and the Adelaide Film festival in early February. But that was the deal. They provided financial support and we delivered on time. So it was straight into the edit room, where our intrepid editor James Bradley was already at work, logging and viewing all the footage.

The next ten weeks are a blurr. Wading through all the material, deciding which characters and which pieces of story should be in, and cutting, slicing and trimming the material down until the film begins to emerge. We decided early on to use a selection of Spike's funny sayings as chapter links and we brought an animator, Murray Debus, into the process in December. There was an air of mania throughout the edit, partly induced by Spike and the material and partly by the looming deadlines. Spike kept us laughing, even when we were dealing with the difficult and unfunny aspects of the story and we tried to keep to the spirit of: "we don't have a plan, so nothing can go wrong". However, when you are editing a feature length and two television versions of a film, you have to have a plan, and it has to be clear. Our plan was to show the personal side of Spike, what he was like as a father, brother, husband and friend, and how his personal life and his "illness" affected both his family and his work. This meant the film was going to be a mix of humour and sadness, and would roller coaster from one mood to another just like Spike did when he was alive. He was very open and articulate about his manic depression and we wanted audiences to hear in his own words, what it was like for him. We also wanted to show how the family dealt with it and how profoundly it influenced his work.

Christmas came and went in the midst of the blurr and still the film wasn't ready. Our Irish broadcaster wanted more Irish elements in the film, and our Australian partners wanted less. The Woy Woy sequences, which had at one stage been central to the story, were now feeling extraneous and were cut almost to extinction. The focus needed to be on Spike, his depression, his legacy and his family. Finally be the second week of January, we had three films that worked for all the partners, and we set off for Adelaide to do the picture grade, graphics, sound mix and final animations.