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Chris Moore - On Post
Getting down to the wire on the shooting. So far Pete, Pete, Pat, and Jeff have had some real troubles and they have seen their share of mistakes and natural disasters. I hope people realize that good movies aren't necessarily built by smoothly run sets, and bad movies are not always due to poorly run sets. There is no formula for a successful movie and, quite frankly, the shooting process is only one stage in the building of a successful film.
The stages that a film goes through before it is a rental at your local Blockbuster are as follows: First there is creation, the writer putting a good story with good characters down on paper. Then someone buys that script and we hit the development stage. Now the people paying for the movie and those being brought on to make the movie, the director, producer, and actors, all suggest changes and the script is revised. Once the script and the budget are in line, we enter the pre-production stage, or prep. At this point, there are location scouts, more casting, the planning of shots, the scheduling of shooting, and more rewrites and budget work. Then we move to shooting, or principal photography. In the documentary you have seen development, prep, and shooting so far. Creation came before we knew Pete.
Once shooting is completed, we move to an under played but super important stage of movie making. Post-production is so key to a movie being good, and this week we get our first glance at the editing room. Here is where we begin the excruciating process of putting the movie together. I really want you all to understand that shooting is the gathering of raw materials. The putting together of the movie you see in your local theater is done in post. What you see in the theater is a piece of film that has titles, finished music and sound work, color-correction, and usually some additional dialogue and footage shot to make the movie perfect. All films end with the credit roll and the credit roll song. You would be amazed at how much better a movie is when it is finished compared to any other time. This makes it hard to judge movies while they are still in post because they are not finished until they are finished.
Building the title sequences can be huge productions in and of themselves; the James Bond movies and other films use them as signatures. The rerecording of dialogue (ADR) and the reshooting or additional shooting of scenes is crucial to the overall success of the movie. But the stuff rarely noticed, the mixing of the sounds, the careful original score designed solely to enhance that scene, the finishing of the special effects, all these things make the theater experience what it is.
Most of post is done in labs and small editing rooms. It involves Pete sitting and watching the movie and then watching other people watch the movie. He must make sure the story he wants to tell is coming through. Are people laughing in the right spots and crying at the end? It is hard, but exciting, because you do sort of get to start over with the storytelling. This week, you see Pete struggling with the beach and how to make it work. He is limited by the footage he shot. So he tries things in the editing room, and ultimately goes with something he had not thought of before post.
This is also where Pete, or any director, shows the film to those who gave him the job to make it, as you'll see on next week's show. Here, those people who were involved with development usually come back and give more notes and suggest other changes after viewing the film. Pete goes through this screening process with these people and the final version is a composition to which they all contributed. It is also hard because Pete, as the writer, envisioned his scenes a certain way and most of the time they did not turn out that way. So he has to get past this let down and take what he does have and make it great. Pete does a great job on this film.
So please watch these next two episodes and see the fun and pain of post. I am hitting it here because next week we talk about the last two stages of a successful film, marketing and release. This all begins at Sundance.
As always thanks for reading . . .
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