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What
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Post Production On Sunday March 4, I finally had a chance to sit down and watch the rough footage of the movie, and to my horror, the sound on Tape 2 (everything we shot Saturday afternoon) was horrible. No one knows exactly what happened; since tapes 1 and 3 were okay, Liz believes it was a bad tape. Maria had gone home to Orlando, and I was leaving in a day and half for L.A. to edit the movie. The film was ruined. I called Rich in a panic. He said not to worry, the editor might be able to do something to improve the sound, and worse case scenario, we'd have the actors re-record their dialogue. On Tuesday, I flew to L.A., and Wednesday morning, I drove to the Amp'd Studio in Santa Monica and met my editor, Andreas Kidess. Andreas had already assembled a rough cut of the film, putting in the best takes for each line. I was really pleased with what he had done so far. What we aimed to do while I was in town was cut it for time (it was well over five minutes), get the graphics in place, and choose new music and sound effects. We immediately started going through the movie clip by clip, tweaking this scene, cutting this line, cutting that line, whittling down the film. |
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Day two, Andreas spent most of the day working on the audio for Scene 2. Most of scene 2 was on that bad tape. He literally went word by word through all the rough footage, pulling any good sound and assembling a workable soundtrack. What he did is truly amazing and saved us from having to re-record the dialogue. While he was doing that, I reviewed the rough footage and went over sound effects and music needs with Amp'd's sound librarian Ben Dally. For example, he went through the sound library and picked out several pieces that might work for the opening titles, then I listened to all of them and picked one. Thursday night, I went to dinner with Rich and Jacques. They are old friends and real Hollywood insiders, so it was an exciting night for me! |
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Day three, Rich came over and that's when the cutting really got intense. Some of the cuts made sense to me. Some were made for technical reasons or really did help move the story along, but a couple of the changes were knives right through my heart, because of how they affected the story, or the characterization, or the pacing. When I left Friday night, I had a rough cut on my phone that was three minutes, 45 seconds long. It had some of the music on it, but one cut remained that needed to be changed. Most of the ambient sound (like the rustling sound when Jack pulls his lucky shirt out of the trash) still needed to be added. But by-and-large the movie was finished, and for the most part, I was happy with how it turned out. Over the next week, I compiled a few notes for last minute changes. The rough cut went out to everyone at MTV and Amp'd who needed to approve the film. We all sent our notes to Rich, who compiled them and sent them to Andreas for one last cut. That's the version that is now showing on MTV.com. |
