- Sep
- 11
- 2008
awake o’sleeper: post production
8:57AM by Brandon McCormick | Cetagories: News and Updates
The camera is wrapped and the extras have gone home. Everyone high fives each-other and we all leave set knowing we worked our hardest. The crazy part is, making the film has just begun. Awake O’Sleeper is in the editing process, where it will stay for a few weeks. There are over 70 shots for the three minute film, and with those, about an average of 10-15 takes for each of those, resulting in about 6 hours of footage in the can. Sure seems like a lot, but sometimes that’s what it takes to get it right. One of my goals as a filmmaker is to have no regrets. No sitting in the editing room saying ‘oh, I wish I shot that this way’, or ‘I wish we took a better take of that’. So the pain on set becomes the excitement in the editing room. For Awake, I have a lot of great stuff to work with, which makes editing less of a chore and more like a fun search for what will make the piece incredible.
Once the piece is laid out, I’ll bring in Nick Kirk, the composer and writer for the musical piece and he’ll help me sync each frame of video to the music. Often a tedious process that results in having your eyes play tricks on you while you wonder aloud, ‘does that look right?”.
Once we have locked picture, it’s on to my favorite part. I fire up Final Cut “Color” and start the color grading process. This is the first time when the image in my head begins to emerge on screen, and the feeling is tremendously exciting. I’ll be brining in Luanne Ditz, our resident photographer and documentary filmmaker, with her keen eye for color to help me take the grading from good to excellent. After that, it’s rendering and more rendering. Nick plays with some opening sound, and we ship it out for export, resulting in an HD final film with that ‘right out of FCP’ smell.
This project, although terribly hard, has become one of my favorite. The gap between what is in my head when I sit to write out storyboards and what is in the final draft of the film gets smaller with each passing film we make. If you haven’t noticed, we all love making movies, and every one of us at Whitestone is grateful for the opportunity to pursue a craft in storytelling.
Tags: awake, color, editing, final cut pro, o'sleeper, post, Production
2 Responses to “awake o’sleeper: post production”
September 12th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Thanks for the update! I can’t wait to see the film!
September 11th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Brandon, thanks for the update. I love reading your insight into the process. Very interesting to read. Can’t wait to see the Finished Product.
Have you noticed that the Consumerism video on FB is out of sink? I like watching the videos on their since they are High quality, but the consumerism video is about a second or two off for some reason.