We chose to produce the movie in the digtal format for both budgetary and editorial reasons. DV allowed us to shoot an hour of footage for under 20 dollars' worth of tape. And the Canon XL1 camera was wonderfully accommodating of our technical needs. Perhaps the greatest benefit of low cost digital tape to the movie director is the ability to roll the camera long enough to relax the subjects and thus capture a much richer and deeper story.

We shot 23 hours of footage over seven days during a five month period in Alabama, California and New York. We transcribed every moment on tape and categorized it into Final Draft's 3x5 Card program, creating a story outline. We then imported it into Final Draft, and had our first script at 72 pages. We edited the script, and then assembled our first video cut with a running time of 82 minutes.

We stumbled onto the debut of Apple's video editing program, Final Cut Pro at 1999's NAB in Las Vegas and successfully used it to edit the feature on a Mac G3.

A turn-key DV editing package from Promax Systems afforded us the luxury of building the story over a four-month period. We accelerated post-production to enter film festivals by the beginning of 2000. We transferred our edited video to an Avid (a week-long pain in the...) and added stock clips and original music. In three all-night sessions, Eddie Baytos and the Nervis Brothers composed and recorded 35 music cues for Mau Mau Sex Sex. The music was digitally recorded directly to hard drive.

We finished the picture on a Jaleo and mixed the music and audio on Pro Tools. The movie was upgraded and finished to a completly corrected digi-beta master. Our mini-DV video became a real movie during the extensive post-production phase, using several different hardware systems and many more software applications, all optimized by the brilliant folks who run those machines. The goodwill of those people and a host of others made "Mau Mau Sex Sex" a reality.

Staying true to it's native digital, non-film format, "Mau Mau Sex Sex" is now playing in digital cinemas across the United States and Canada.