I spent the day cutting down the story of Sohni by about 12 minutes. It takes a lot of painstaking listening, watching, trying out different images over the music, to figure out what should stay and what can go. There is a lot of powerful poetry that I chose for Sohni, but leaving it all in will only slow down the action which will dilute the effect on the viewer. If I make the viewer watch pointless shots of the puppets standing, waiting for poetry to be sung, it only weakens the film.It is important to not feel too precious about any of the material. This way, I was able to cut out entire sections of the music. That sometimes meant sliding the visuals around and pairing them with different poetry than originally intended, which often gives additional meaning. I think that is what is fun about doing a film that is driven by poetry, but the visuals do not try to mimic the words. Both words and visuals come together to tell the whole story, but rather than repeat each other, they hopefully add different pieces of the story together. So you could just watch the visuals, or listen to the music and get a story out of each separately, but by combining the two, I hope to give a richer experience.I find that once I start adding this new set of storyboards over the music, I start to see where I can cut the music down. Once I start removing bits, I try to be ruthless about it, then come back and reduce the number of shots that go over it and lengthen them where needed. This gets things to flow together more smoothly, while carrying the pace of the story forward. My intention is to avoid lingering on puppets doing nothing for too long, as that is when I want to see more subtle facial expressions and movements, which they can’t provide. This way, I can play to the beauty and strengths of these handmade puppets in nice closeups, then move the story forward with bits of nuanced movement and a steady progression of shots and story. This is basically what is different in how I am trying to approach creating a film with puppets of this kind.Good compositions and nice broad movements can communicate the right emotions for the story, so long as we don’t linger over long on them, as we might in an animated or live action film where that lingering allows us to showcase more subtle emotions. Coupled with poetry, the scenes have the potential to convey the emotions of the stories in a fresh way.