Last week I give my first public screenings of my latest film. Before then, I had only shown it in private to small, select audiences, who gave me good feedback. This process seemed to be working pretty well, and so after several small intimate screenings followed by revisions, I was ready to show V20 to a bigger audience.

On Wednesday, I gave a screening at my university, Duke Kunshan University, as part of the arts festival last week. Then on Friday, at an event sponsored by Frank Tsai and China Crossroads in association with Katherine Song and the Royal Asiatic Society of Shanghai, I screened the film to a sizeable audience of 100+ people in Shanghai. Overall, I got some good and positive feedback. Nevertheless, the experience has taught me a valuable lesson.

The lesson is this: It is best to work with an editorial team when shaping the film’s story.

I have been making this film pretty much on my own. I had some help with the filming, but the editing process has been me sitting in my “studio” (a room in my apartment with an iMac), for hundreds, perhaps even over 1000 hours. And that tends to create a myopic vision of the story, even if one comes into it with the best of intentions.

Because the film came together organically, it took me a while to get around to scripting it, and even then, I was working on it piecemeal. One big breakthrough came earlier this year, when I realized that I had to add a narration to the film. Since then I’ve been scrapping the narration together piece by piece, like a patchwork quilt. This has been effective, but it also led me into some thorny brambles.

Certainly the film has improved greatly over the past few months. And my editing skills have improved 100-fold since I started this project. Still, it is far from where I want it to be. It wasn’t until last week’s screenings that I realized how distorted some of the story is in its current form. I don’t mean that its untruthful, but it represents only a part of the picture.

This is where an editorial team comes in handy. Having a group of trusted people to go over your story with you and help correct your own myopic vision is important. For example, because I did most of my research and filming around 8-10 years ago when I was working on the book Shanghai Nightscapes with James Farrer, the story of jazz in Shanghai that I tell in the film is outdated. Even though I covered some events since then, I realized after talking to some people who know the scene well that it since has progressed in many ways that aren’t being captured in the film.

Second, the film is focused too much on the jazz club/bar scene, and on the foreigners who built that scene. I did try to strike a balance with Chinese musicians and singers such as Coco Zhao and Jasmine Chen, but this wasn’t enough. 

Third, the film right now is too much of my own personal take on the scene and its development. I need to pull out further and develop a bigger picture, with more context for people unfamiliar with Shanghai and China. I’ve done some of this already, but more needs to be done to get this film to Peoria. : )

In my next version, I plan to work closely with a few trusted people to help revise and broaden the story. And I plan to incorporate more of the recent changes and add more about the Chinese musicians who have been pushing and shaping the jazz scene, and diminish the role of the jazzpats (not that they aren’t important, but they are only part of the story).

The next step is to rework the script and revise the narration. Then I can go back into the editing room and reshape the film. It won’t involve any radical changes, just some more contextualization, and a broader view of the jazz scene in Shanghai with more focus on the Chinese musicians who are developing the scene. I’m looking forward to doing some additional research and a few follow-up interviews this summer.

Fortunately, this project intersects well with some other writing projects I have in the works, including some articles and conference papers on the music scenes. So it should be a productive summer as I re-engage with the city’s jazz scene and delve deeper into recent developments in that scene. I’m aiming for Version 21 to be completed later this summer. Once that’s ready, I plan to hold more screenings of the film, but not until I get the story right.