Glitches & Other Fun

I haven’t felt this busy yet idle since college. Being in post production is interesting; I’ve only been in post on short films and student films before and this whole feature film thing is a whole different creature. I think I’m keeping my stress level bottled up pretty well though.

One of the funnest things about post production is the technical glitches that always seem to happen and they have been happening to us. Nothing earth shattering has happened so far but glitches are always time consuming; things that sound so simple like backing up footage on digibeta’s and capturing footage become huge hurdles without you expecting them to. There is nothing more frustrating than spending hours capturing footage and quitting for the day to then come back the next day and discover that your hard drive has dumped everything that you worked so hard on capturing the day before. Because of a stupid technical glitch you spend hours doing the exact same thing you did the day before. This is why I do not envy Bill. Bill is my hero.

Whenever technical glitches start happening in post I just remind myself that this would be happening to any filmmaker no matter what their budget. If we shot on film we could find out that part of the negative got scratched or it was accidently pushed or pulled a stop or two while being developed or any other of a million things that could go wrong.

I’ve been very good at pointing out the obvious recently so I have this little nugget of wisdom: all phases of production are tedious and hard no matter how much you enjoy them. What I have been telling my post production crew is the production philosophy I live by. Deadlines are great; but at this phase in our careers it is more important to make sure we have a well made, great project to show than rushing through everything just to make a date. Deadlines come around again, but if we take the time to make sure End is the best possible movie we can make it, then every pain, sleepless night, fit of laughter and technical glitch was totally worth our efforts.