Post-production and release
Saturday/July/2009 10:42 PM
But Bob, what about the load out and the pick ups and the exterior shots that you need to finish after principal photography? Well, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll make that all happen. The only thing I’ll briefly say is that you should be creative about your extra shooting days. A lot of the work can be done without actors and even without a crew. Establishing shots can be pretty, think about things that fascinate your eye and photograph them, don’t just show people the outside of some place if you can. Time-lapse is a bit cliché at this point, but I’ve seen some interesting day night fracturing (one frame day then one golden hour then one frame night of the same shot) that look pretty cool and all they take is patience. There are HD cameras that are 3 ounces now, tape one to a moderate sized RC helicopter and fly it over the scene until you have something you like. Have your party with the cast and as they are sleeping off the hangover, you need to pull yourself together and realize that the projects are about half finished at this point.
The director on our films had been through the process and knew that while everyone was partying, he was just about ready to run a second marathon. He said that even after working 12 hour days thirty some days in a row – it will take roughly the same amount of total hours, the same time commitment to see the films through post-production and into a final mix and DVD master. The most essential work on the picture is finished and now the most essential work on the feature begins. I know that sounds confusing, but that’s just the way it is.
We had the editors compete for the job. We supplied a group of ten prospective editors with the first fifteen minutes of footage (about two hours of footage that would cut down to fifteen minutes) and saw how each of them handled the tempo, story elements and shot selection. The good news is that there is a lot of talent out there and the people who really love cutting will volunteer and dive into the project immediately. The bad news is that there are very few people who live the fine detail work that is feature editing. You’ll see talent in almost every person who cuts your film, but you’ll only see consistent master-level work in one or two if you’re lucky. We were very lucky. We landed an editor who set his own goals, met them and was constantly setting his standards above those of the last pass on the project. What I mean is, that he didn’t finish a scene until he’d cut it ten ways and decided which one was best. This level of commitment and talent is freakish and it made the endless days of editing and proofing with the Director and the Producer feel more like show and tell than give and go.
So we secured an editor for the first film and started him off. He was local, but realize that technology has made digital collaboration a reality. All of our VFX were completed by two different exceptional young men from San Francisco and Seattle. We posted the shots that needed to be rotoscoped and they would scope away, then upload the finished product to our server and minutes later (this does take time, so we’re talking 30-40) it was in the timeline. This can work for editors too. I worked with a very talented editor from another city who never really impressed the Producer, but even though he didn’t work out, I don’t think he soured me or anyone on the idea of collaboration over distance.
So, the contest for first fifteen minutes gets you a quality editor or two. Their work provides a rough cut in three months and a picture lock after three more months of close work together. Now it’s time to export the OMF (audio files) to take to your post production sound person. This is the most gratifying part of the production and if you’re lucky enough to have Dan Newman on your team, you’ll wish that this part of production never ends. Music cues by a skilled composer can add so much to the meaning of a scene. It can also bridge moments which seem to transition too quickly or make longer shots seem more like a lingering or leftover intensity from the scene before rather than an indulgence. I’ve seen it happen.
There are a lot of people who want to score films, so don’t just take the first resume off of the pile. See if you can advertise at an arts school with a dedicated film scoring faculty like UCLA or USC. These students have many of the skills and are looking for practice. Use the try-out method that we did for an editor and get multiple submissions. The sound work on your film will likely brand the professionalism of the entire production. The eye can trick people but ears do not lie. Weak sound post production will put the viewer in the mood of bad local TV production remote with Sassy Lane reporting- and you don’t come back from there. Ask Ms. Lane.
Plan on ADR for about 30 percent of your movie if it’s shot inside and double it if it’s shot outside with limited controls. ADR stands for Another Damn Reading of the script that most of the actors have forgotten by the time the ADR session comes along. Convince your sound guy to use most of the production sound and you’ll be doing yourself and the authenticity of the finished product a great service. For those times when a bus pulls up and parks on what sounds like the middle of your set or closer, open the door to ADR. This process takes about a week of recording and a week of placement. These are full weeks. Don’t let your sound guy think that he has a life or else you’ll end up waiting. Waiting to do the work on an indie film rarely helps anyone.
Once your sound is done, you’ll have a sound file to lay back into your editing window and you’re ready to output the project for screeners. You’ll want to start with DVD quality compression and then make a lossless backup copy of the quicktime file. Get lots of drive space as HQprores422 comes out to about 100gigs for a 90 minute movie. There are as many programs and formats to talk about as there are styles and genres of movies, but the workflow that we produced worked out very well so I’ll lay down the basics.
We used compressor which is paired with FCP. There is a setting for 90 minute best quality DVD. It takes about 12 hours to create the compressed video file and about a half hour to export the audio. These can both be opened in DVD studio pro and fit together on the time line. There is a preview button to make sure everything is still in sync and that the picture looks fine. Create the menus and make the front screen look pretty (don’t forget to add an MP3 audio file to play over the front menu a silent screen reminds me of the FBI warning too much). Then, you can make a .img file which will load in Toast and other UDF blah blah programs. You can also burn the disk straight from DVD pro, but having the image makes the film portable and burnable on any computer. Pop for a 4gb flashdrive (currently selling for less than 10 bucks) and you can keep your movie on your keychain just in case you happen to serve the head of the AFI film festival at your day job at California Pizza Kitchen.
Create a graphic for the cover. Again, Craigslist is an option to find a designer, but we’ve always kept it in house. Art students are cool people to know and you’ll get something a little less corporate if you hand the project to someone who doesn’t know what a DVD cover is supposed to look like. This is the one area, where I’ve been most impressed by people who didn’t have experience doing the job. Why does cover art always look like cover art? Because it’s done by cover artists. Just find a regular artist and you might really get some eye-catching stuff. Either way, talking to an artist is cool. He or she might rub off on one of your PAs and give them the confidence to shoot the next double shot film.
Printing the DVD’s is a snap. A regular inkjet can do the job nowadays. There are programs like DiscCover RE that is free and has enough features to get the job done. Get the same cover artist to provide a snap of the cover and weave it into the design. Make it look jagged like it was ripped off of the front cover and you’ll make my day. That’s what I wanted for the cover of these films. Alas, who listens to me? Bad question to ask at this time in the blog eh?
This is going to sound way too specific, but if it helps someone out there I might as well throw it out. Burn the DVDs on 4x speed. We had two DVD burners, one was a Pioneer and the other was a Panasonic. Both produced bad discs at 16. One was better than the other, but there were a significant number of discs that skipped at the end. If you don’t want to play every disc through to the end, use 4X speed.
Finally, you have something to show that real people can experience. Grab a small studio and have the cast over to watch the premiere. Use the “party” to start the process of getting the film out into the world. Make sure the cast and crew know that you’re searching for Film Festivals that fit the kind of films you’ve made. Start making contacts through the cast with people who can help you sharpen your message and get it out in a way that maximizes the positives of your particular production. If you have films that are going to capture the interest of an unsuspecting public, make sure you choose the right festival to let loose your finished works.
You can remember the top film festivals in the US using a simple numonic device.
A sailor nipped to Austin, sundancing lazily transmitted SARS.
Austin, Sundance, New York Telluride, AFI, Slamdance, LA, Tribecca, Seattle
Kick Toronto in there if you want to add North America to the list.
Everyone has their favorite, but there is no bad festival on this list and there are a few festivals that I’m sure I’m missing that are very close in stature. Basically, if you can find your way into them, you’re fantastic. Decide early on if one place is better than another to premiere your film however, because some places like Sundance require that your film is a world premiere if it is in competition. There are premiere requirements at most of these fests. Sometimes it could be a state or national, and I’m sure things change year to year, but be careful that your first festival submission is chosen as the best place for your work to be seen. There’s nothing wrong with getting shut down by a major festival. They are screening work from every country on the globe and sometimes your work will fit their bill and sometimes it won’t. Find a place to scream into a hollow tree and find out when the next deadline is for another place that might love your work. The founder of DS films got into four very good festivals with his first feature. It’s hard to take rejection, but if you don’t keep submitting you’re going to miss out on those four places that are going to give you an opportunity to show your work and let people know what filmmaking means to you. It sounds corny, but both are important things to express. Nobody who is making films like this is doing it for a bad reason. It’s just too much work for vanity and ego to clock in and out and run the joint. Films like this are about voice, expression, community and just a hint of something different – a little out of place.
Talk to filmmakers when you get to a festival. Most of them will be in a world that only orbits their projects, but some of them are there to bounce off of others and see where the interplay of creative minds take them. I got to be on one of the panels at a film festival once and it was so rewarding to listen to the way others had gotten there that I just listened. At the end of the panel someone turned to me and asked what film I was representing and I gave the name of the project. One of the directors there asked me why I didn’t talk about it and I realize it was because I enjoyed learning from others much more than I did promoting myself. I heard some of them banging their heads up against walls that I was sure that given the right methods and supports – they wouldn’t have to. I went back to the group and told them that we were awesome filmmakers, but we could be more than that. We needed to talk about what we did, but we needed to do it in a way that made others pick up a camera and start their own journeys with a bit of a guide.
We at DS films see this as the start of a company which builds off of these films and provides production grants to filmmakers in every state of the nation. Our goal is to kick off a fifty state Double Shot to give people who haven’t made films, but might be the next great storytellers of our generation, the needed support and organizational structure to shoot two films in their home towns. Over a two-year period, we could make 100 films and finish them with professional editing, sound and presentation. Fifty filmmakers standing behind one hundred films all made for distribution in a modern age by individuals who have trained themselves outside of the mold. It’s the excitement that film has been missing, and we’d like to bring to a very local level.
You’ve read about our rules, advice and my flying off on the tangents I could remember over a year since the productions. This is intended to just give any filmmaker the kind of platform that at very least should be shouted “IF THESE IDIOTS CAN DO IT SO CAN I.”
And good on you if you can do it better.
The director on our films had been through the process and knew that while everyone was partying, he was just about ready to run a second marathon. He said that even after working 12 hour days thirty some days in a row – it will take roughly the same amount of total hours, the same time commitment to see the films through post-production and into a final mix and DVD master. The most essential work on the picture is finished and now the most essential work on the feature begins. I know that sounds confusing, but that’s just the way it is.
We had the editors compete for the job. We supplied a group of ten prospective editors with the first fifteen minutes of footage (about two hours of footage that would cut down to fifteen minutes) and saw how each of them handled the tempo, story elements and shot selection. The good news is that there is a lot of talent out there and the people who really love cutting will volunteer and dive into the project immediately. The bad news is that there are very few people who live the fine detail work that is feature editing. You’ll see talent in almost every person who cuts your film, but you’ll only see consistent master-level work in one or two if you’re lucky. We were very lucky. We landed an editor who set his own goals, met them and was constantly setting his standards above those of the last pass on the project. What I mean is, that he didn’t finish a scene until he’d cut it ten ways and decided which one was best. This level of commitment and talent is freakish and it made the endless days of editing and proofing with the Director and the Producer feel more like show and tell than give and go.
So we secured an editor for the first film and started him off. He was local, but realize that technology has made digital collaboration a reality. All of our VFX were completed by two different exceptional young men from San Francisco and Seattle. We posted the shots that needed to be rotoscoped and they would scope away, then upload the finished product to our server and minutes later (this does take time, so we’re talking 30-40) it was in the timeline. This can work for editors too. I worked with a very talented editor from another city who never really impressed the Producer, but even though he didn’t work out, I don’t think he soured me or anyone on the idea of collaboration over distance.
So, the contest for first fifteen minutes gets you a quality editor or two. Their work provides a rough cut in three months and a picture lock after three more months of close work together. Now it’s time to export the OMF (audio files) to take to your post production sound person. This is the most gratifying part of the production and if you’re lucky enough to have Dan Newman on your team, you’ll wish that this part of production never ends. Music cues by a skilled composer can add so much to the meaning of a scene. It can also bridge moments which seem to transition too quickly or make longer shots seem more like a lingering or leftover intensity from the scene before rather than an indulgence. I’ve seen it happen.
There are a lot of people who want to score films, so don’t just take the first resume off of the pile. See if you can advertise at an arts school with a dedicated film scoring faculty like UCLA or USC. These students have many of the skills and are looking for practice. Use the try-out method that we did for an editor and get multiple submissions. The sound work on your film will likely brand the professionalism of the entire production. The eye can trick people but ears do not lie. Weak sound post production will put the viewer in the mood of bad local TV production remote with Sassy Lane reporting- and you don’t come back from there. Ask Ms. Lane.
Plan on ADR for about 30 percent of your movie if it’s shot inside and double it if it’s shot outside with limited controls. ADR stands for Another Damn Reading of the script that most of the actors have forgotten by the time the ADR session comes along. Convince your sound guy to use most of the production sound and you’ll be doing yourself and the authenticity of the finished product a great service. For those times when a bus pulls up and parks on what sounds like the middle of your set or closer, open the door to ADR. This process takes about a week of recording and a week of placement. These are full weeks. Don’t let your sound guy think that he has a life or else you’ll end up waiting. Waiting to do the work on an indie film rarely helps anyone.
Once your sound is done, you’ll have a sound file to lay back into your editing window and you’re ready to output the project for screeners. You’ll want to start with DVD quality compression and then make a lossless backup copy of the quicktime file. Get lots of drive space as HQprores422 comes out to about 100gigs for a 90 minute movie. There are as many programs and formats to talk about as there are styles and genres of movies, but the workflow that we produced worked out very well so I’ll lay down the basics.
We used compressor which is paired with FCP. There is a setting for 90 minute best quality DVD. It takes about 12 hours to create the compressed video file and about a half hour to export the audio. These can both be opened in DVD studio pro and fit together on the time line. There is a preview button to make sure everything is still in sync and that the picture looks fine. Create the menus and make the front screen look pretty (don’t forget to add an MP3 audio file to play over the front menu a silent screen reminds me of the FBI warning too much). Then, you can make a .img file which will load in Toast and other UDF blah blah programs. You can also burn the disk straight from DVD pro, but having the image makes the film portable and burnable on any computer. Pop for a 4gb flashdrive (currently selling for less than 10 bucks) and you can keep your movie on your keychain just in case you happen to serve the head of the AFI film festival at your day job at California Pizza Kitchen.
Create a graphic for the cover. Again, Craigslist is an option to find a designer, but we’ve always kept it in house. Art students are cool people to know and you’ll get something a little less corporate if you hand the project to someone who doesn’t know what a DVD cover is supposed to look like. This is the one area, where I’ve been most impressed by people who didn’t have experience doing the job. Why does cover art always look like cover art? Because it’s done by cover artists. Just find a regular artist and you might really get some eye-catching stuff. Either way, talking to an artist is cool. He or she might rub off on one of your PAs and give them the confidence to shoot the next double shot film.
Printing the DVD’s is a snap. A regular inkjet can do the job nowadays. There are programs like DiscCover RE that is free and has enough features to get the job done. Get the same cover artist to provide a snap of the cover and weave it into the design. Make it look jagged like it was ripped off of the front cover and you’ll make my day. That’s what I wanted for the cover of these films. Alas, who listens to me? Bad question to ask at this time in the blog eh?
This is going to sound way too specific, but if it helps someone out there I might as well throw it out. Burn the DVDs on 4x speed. We had two DVD burners, one was a Pioneer and the other was a Panasonic. Both produced bad discs at 16. One was better than the other, but there were a significant number of discs that skipped at the end. If you don’t want to play every disc through to the end, use 4X speed.
Finally, you have something to show that real people can experience. Grab a small studio and have the cast over to watch the premiere. Use the “party” to start the process of getting the film out into the world. Make sure the cast and crew know that you’re searching for Film Festivals that fit the kind of films you’ve made. Start making contacts through the cast with people who can help you sharpen your message and get it out in a way that maximizes the positives of your particular production. If you have films that are going to capture the interest of an unsuspecting public, make sure you choose the right festival to let loose your finished works.
You can remember the top film festivals in the US using a simple numonic device.
A sailor nipped to Austin, sundancing lazily transmitted SARS.
Austin, Sundance, New York Telluride, AFI, Slamdance, LA, Tribecca, Seattle
Kick Toronto in there if you want to add North America to the list.
Everyone has their favorite, but there is no bad festival on this list and there are a few festivals that I’m sure I’m missing that are very close in stature. Basically, if you can find your way into them, you’re fantastic. Decide early on if one place is better than another to premiere your film however, because some places like Sundance require that your film is a world premiere if it is in competition. There are premiere requirements at most of these fests. Sometimes it could be a state or national, and I’m sure things change year to year, but be careful that your first festival submission is chosen as the best place for your work to be seen. There’s nothing wrong with getting shut down by a major festival. They are screening work from every country on the globe and sometimes your work will fit their bill and sometimes it won’t. Find a place to scream into a hollow tree and find out when the next deadline is for another place that might love your work. The founder of DS films got into four very good festivals with his first feature. It’s hard to take rejection, but if you don’t keep submitting you’re going to miss out on those four places that are going to give you an opportunity to show your work and let people know what filmmaking means to you. It sounds corny, but both are important things to express. Nobody who is making films like this is doing it for a bad reason. It’s just too much work for vanity and ego to clock in and out and run the joint. Films like this are about voice, expression, community and just a hint of something different – a little out of place.
Talk to filmmakers when you get to a festival. Most of them will be in a world that only orbits their projects, but some of them are there to bounce off of others and see where the interplay of creative minds take them. I got to be on one of the panels at a film festival once and it was so rewarding to listen to the way others had gotten there that I just listened. At the end of the panel someone turned to me and asked what film I was representing and I gave the name of the project. One of the directors there asked me why I didn’t talk about it and I realize it was because I enjoyed learning from others much more than I did promoting myself. I heard some of them banging their heads up against walls that I was sure that given the right methods and supports – they wouldn’t have to. I went back to the group and told them that we were awesome filmmakers, but we could be more than that. We needed to talk about what we did, but we needed to do it in a way that made others pick up a camera and start their own journeys with a bit of a guide.
We at DS films see this as the start of a company which builds off of these films and provides production grants to filmmakers in every state of the nation. Our goal is to kick off a fifty state Double Shot to give people who haven’t made films, but might be the next great storytellers of our generation, the needed support and organizational structure to shoot two films in their home towns. Over a two-year period, we could make 100 films and finish them with professional editing, sound and presentation. Fifty filmmakers standing behind one hundred films all made for distribution in a modern age by individuals who have trained themselves outside of the mold. It’s the excitement that film has been missing, and we’d like to bring to a very local level.
You’ve read about our rules, advice and my flying off on the tangents I could remember over a year since the productions. This is intended to just give any filmmaker the kind of platform that at very least should be shouted “IF THESE IDIOTS CAN DO IT SO CAN I.”
And good on you if you can do it better.