Post production ... ‘anything but ordinary’
May 2 - Daisy Roser
High stakes, drama, problem-solving, and danger; post-production balances many on-set elements and responsibilities, but the most important one is gathering the footage from the various camera cards used during the day and sorting it into a secure filing system with multiple backups. Why?
Because filming costs money. The only thing produced from all the time, effort and monetary cost of a film budget, is the footage. If you lose it, you lose everything.
Whether it’s a $10,000 or $1,000,000 film, most of the funding goes to the filming. According to Pete Shickle, assistant professor at The Master’s University and teacher for the post-production course associated with “The Descent Pt. II,” “all of that money … spent on making the film lives on the [camera] cards.”
Not only money, the camera cards also hold time and effort. “Many of us are exhausted and we’re, you know, falling asleep. We have all dedicated time, hours, money, everything [to this film].” Shickle says that whether it’s a major or minor scene, if that footage were lost by the post-production team in charge of organizing it, “the movie is no longer going to be the quality of what it is.”
That footage, that moment in time, can never be recovered again. With some films, “you might have to spend more money to go back and reshoot it” but with films on a tight budget the option is implausible, and film elements have to be changed, scenes have to be cut.
Even if the footage could be remade, the experience will never have the same magic as those first few perfect tries: “you'll never get that performance back.”
Though the other teams depend on post-production, Shickle says that oftentimes “they don’t know it.”
“Most of our job is hidden.” Shickle says “That’s kind of the point.”
For the other teams on set to do their jobs properly, post-production has to fade into the background: “We don't really want to interfere at all if we’re stepping in there and making ourselves known, that's going to disrupt what they do. So the best thing for us to do is to just stay behind the scenes and then wait.”
“We’re used to being just in our own world, hidden away from everyone,” Shickle says, “We just want [there] to be a seamless transfer into post-production.”
And why shouldn’t they be hidden away?
Shickle admits “Quite honestly … who wants to film post-production? It's boring.” The student producers sit at various computer monitors, and “most of the work [happens] inside [their] mind[s] and that's not something you can translate to anything exciting.”
The entire goal of post-production is to emphasize other jobs on set, “if we do our job right though, then the work that they do on set will be really exciting.”
Not only is it a visually boring and oftentimes thankless job, but post-production also involves high levels of stress. Shickle describes the communal panic felt each time the team offloads the camera cards: “I mean, we’ve had some times where even just this shoot where we get some audio in [and go] ‘wait, do we have everything?’”
According to Isaac Busenitz, a TMU graduate who worked on “The Descent” I and is back for round two, post-production also involves a challenging learning curve for incoming or returning students.
“It’s a lot to learn. It’s kind of an overwhelming amount of information. Sometimes, for somebody who’s touched the software that we use, Avid, it’s definitely got a pretty steep learning curve,” he says.
Shickle describes the editing process itself as a long, technical process. They upload the footage to Shotput Pro, a video offloading software that does some of the work for them as it makes a backup of the information on a secure server. The step can take up to an hour because a full card for the set cameras can hold up to half a terabyte of footage.
After creating a backup, the team moves the footage to Davinci Resolve, where the team makes what they call “dailies … essentially a reel of the tape or card” and proxies that “are sent to Avid.”
Avid is the program where the team does major edits–though many of those edits won’t be done for months, as the focus on set is to organize footage and make dailies to export.
Eventually, the footage edited in Avid proxies will be brought back to Davinci Resolve and dropped into the larger film timeline composed of dailies. In Davinci Resolve, the footage will be color-edited.
Then the audio from Avid Media Composer will go to a professional audio mixer, working separately with Pro-Tools, compressing thousands of audio channels into just a few main ones. That will be plugged back into Davinci Resolve to add to final cuts of various scenes.
The students won’t work on all of the edits, but they will create rough cuts of scenes in Davinci Resolve, and use ScriptSync in Avid to pair audio with visuals in each take, labeling each scene with an exact location in the script.
Jesse Vanderpool, a first-time post-production student who has worked with Adobe Premiere before, a software he calls “a slightly easier version of Avid,” says that even working as a student and doing a small part of the workload entails “a learning curve.”
Other aspects of the class, as students interact on a set for the first time, are also challenging. In the compressed timeline of the weeklong shoot, there is added pressure even on the social parts of the class.
“It can be kind of stressful to get along with your coworkers or people in the class with you,” Vanderpool says.
So, again, why be involved in post-production, when it involves everything from stress to lack of recognition to a steep learning curve and challenging social dynamic?
A part of the charm comes down to the people that students have the opportunity to work with.
Busenitz commends Shickle for his passion for post-production and talent for teaching it: “[he’s] really good … he knows this stuff better than anyone. And so having somebody like him be able to mentor and to kind of just guide and lead is so helpful and valuable.”
Jesse Vanderpool also speaks about his fellow students, saying he’s had “a great time” getting “to know everybody.”
The unique pace and style of the work itself is the second appeal of the post-production team. Aside from the aforementioned stress of sorting SD cards, in comparison with other on-set classes, post-production is “a lot more technical [and] a lot more laid back.” Vanderpool says that this has bolstered his ability to become better acquainted with his fellow students.
Busenitz says that post-production is “on the one hand it’s similar [to all the other classes] because we’re all on the same set; we’re all actively involved in the production. But post specifically is involved in a very different way than any of the other[s].”
Classes like art and set design, lighting, directing or cinematography are “all so concerned with what is captured on camera and their work goes all into making something show up on the camera.” Post-production, conversely, “is kind of after that; it's to take what they put on camera and put it on the big screen.”
The third draw of the post-production class is career opportunities.
Busenitz has personally experienced the opportunities that being a part of the post-production crew can provide. Working in 2023 on the post-production team for “The Descent” I, a film much smaller in terms of location and scale, Busenitz joins the post-production crew for the second time as a TMU graduate in a paid position. In the coming months, Busenitz will be in charge of managing the visual effects (VFX) for what Shickle calls the most VFX-heavy film ever produced by Master’s.
Busenitz’s work after the week of filming, according to Shickle, will be interspersed within all of the other major edits. Busenitz will use VFX to add things from a TV show playing on a screen that is blank in the original take to a Revelations 9 monster attacking innocent civilians.
But growth opportunities aren’t only for returning students and professionals. Vanderpool says that even the first few days of life on set with the post-production team “made [him] feel more comfortable with being on a set [and] being tasked with important projects around the film.”
The fourth reason to do post-production: pure love for the work.
Shickle describes his relationship with post-production as a fall: “I was originally a music major … but I fell into editing.” It was his love for music that caused him to stay.
“With music, there’s a rhythm, there’s a pace, there's a beauty to all the dynamics that happen within music … but within editing you can not only take music, but you can also take visuals and that becomes a musical element, and then you have performances, then you have a pacing, you have sound design, you have all these elements to it that essentially expand upon music.”
Shickle says each element is just a smaller compounding element “build[ing] upon story.” According to him, “Editing is nothing more than storytelling.” The editor is someone who takes all the raw footage and audio elements they’re given and constructs something beautiful.
Busenitz similarly appreciates the beauty of a job as a post-production film editor: “I enjoy being an editor and doing the post stuff because it’s really where the story comes together. It’s kind of like taking a bunch of ingredients and making something out of it … It’s sort of taking the chaos of the set and ordering it and structuring it into the actual story.”
Even professor Green, writer and director of “The Descent Pt. II,” and the program director for Cinema and Digital Arts, admits that the set couldn’t function without the post-production team: “So you shoot the movie, that’s making the movie one time [and] when you go into editorial, they’re making the movie a second time.”
With the dedicated post-production team from “The Descent Pt. II” continuing to work on edits for a ‘second cut’ of all the footage filmed in March, the movie will be anything but ordinary.