It gave us headaches. Research had revealed that the story of the siege was an unwieldy and complex subject. There was so much to tell and we didn't know where to begin. Our priority was to try to bear in mind what should be the golden rule of all filmmakers: do not assume that your audience will be as fascinated by your subject and all its minutiae as you are. Ergo: pare it all down and slice out ruthlessly whatever is superfluous.And so we did, agonising the winter away, cutting out chunks of this and clods of that, trying to concentrate on the essential facts and most interesting background details, all the while aiming to create a fairly simple account and overview of the siege.After a few months of intermittent labour and despair I had succeeded in putting together a draft commentary which seemed to read fairly coherently. However, the Director/Producer/Editor/Boss, although happy with my efforts, was left tearing his hair out (in a manner of speaking!) trying to fit visual images to the spoken word. It was an impossible task and in the end we agreed that the only thing to do was to make another visit to Vicksburg to get the footage we needed. I've heard some good excuses for taking a holiday, but "We've got to go and get more film." just about takes the biscuit.Another holiday was duly organised around a return visit to Vicksburg the following autumn. The great advantage of going back for a second shot is that you have a very clear idea ofprecisely what you want to film and how you intend to tackle it. We spent a week in Vicksburg this time a really hardworking week during which a number of "narration to camera" sequences were each filmed at least five or six times over to get them as nearly perfect as possible.An added bonus on this trip was our stumbling, quite by accident, on a Civil War reenactment taking place locally. This lucky chance enabled Dennis to bag some wonderful battlefield action shots, as well as useful "contemporary" material. So our second visit to Vicksburg was all that we had hoped for and more. Incidentally, it also gave us an opportunity to visit Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of our favourite places in the USA. (Watch this space!)At last Dennis was confident that he now had enough film to put together a decent production. It was at this point that the really hard work began. In the weeks and months that followed I would be hard put to it to calculate the total number of hours he spent editing his work. Tribute must here be paid to the merits of nonlinear editing on the DVC computer system. Its advent has made the whole process of editing so much simpler and easier than before and consequently there is much more scope for individual creativity. However, the fact remains that much of the merit of any production must lie in the care taken with its final presentation. Suffice it to say that when it comes to visual and aural fine-tuning, Dennis is obsessively perfectionist, settling for nothing less than the very best that he can possibly do.The end product of all these travails was finally ready in time to be entered for the SERIAC Film Festival which took place in Guildford in November 1999. The result was beyond our wildest dreams. "The Siege of Vicksburg" came second overall in the competition and carried off the Best Documentary and Best Sound awards. This was a very gratifying outcome after so much work and effort put in over a long periodof time, but whatever the film's achievements, undoubtedly the most important thing for us both was the enormous pleasure and enjoyment we got in making it.

SECOND TAKE June 2000

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