Chasing Summer stars Iliza Shlesinger as Jamie, who retreats to her small Texas hometown after losing her job and boyfriend. There, friends and flings from a fateful high-school summer proceed to turn her life upside down.
In addition to appearing on-camera, Shlesinger also served as screenwriter for the film, which was directed by Josephine Decker. For editor David Barker (pictured, left), the film marks his sixth collaboration with Decker, sometimes working as the main editor, and other times coming in to rework an existing cut.
“We’ve had great collaboration – an approach more like documentary editing in that we quickly move past trying to ‘make the script’ to focusing on what the movie we see in the footage is,” he shares. “On this film we used a combination of LucidLink and Premiere Productions to stay in sync across the cloud and let several people work on the film simultaneously.”
Julie Cohen handled additional editing duties, and the experience went off without any complications, despite of sometimes being in different locations.
“Because the script was written very quickly on a deadline to shoot the film the following month, there was not really an ending to the film when it was shot,” Barker explains. “Over a few weeks of intense work trying to meet the Sundance deadline - which was six weeks after our assembly - we got clear about what the film was about: a woman learning to experience pleasure and have it all. With that in mind, we were able to construct an ending for the film by moving things around, repurposing some material and adding a bit of ADR. I like this ending quite a bit because it is very true to the character and story, and came out of the re-writing aspect of editing which is very central to how Josephine and I work together.”