Reed Martin on the disasters that can – and can’t – be fixed in postproduction.

The thought of someday winning the Audience Award or landing a million-dollar distribution deal keeps many aspiring filmmakers warm through the cold, dark years of poverty, rejection and endless rewrites. But for every dream of Sundance glory, there is an equal and opposite nightmare-reality that often begins during the final home stretch that is postproduction.

Bad performances, incorrect eye lines, damaged film, clearance snafus, digital dropouts, focal problems, missing coverage, off-tilt tripods, exposed negative, color timing shifts, story holes, location noise and time-code breaks can destroy a crucial scene or even derail an entire project.

"Everyone always says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in post,’ but independent filmmakers need to know that some things actually can’t be fixed in post – and often the things that can cost much more than these filmmakers can afford," says Jennifer Lane, vice president of postproduction at Miramax Films. "It can cost a small fortune to have a van or a sign digitally removed [from a scene] when it could’ve cost next to nothing to have someone move it during production."

Even the best solutions or "solves" are often less-than-ideal. "People should really say, ‘We’ll cheat it in post,’ because I don’t think anything’s ever necessarily ‘fixed’ in post," says Matty Libatique, cinematographer of Tigerland, Requiem for a Dream and Pi, among others. "Sometimes you can cut corners with things most audiences won’t perceive, like changes in color temperature, light quality or whether the sun is in or out on a day. And, yes, if it’s a moderately-budgeted film, you can probably put in new skies or digitally remove a truck, but it’s a dangerous concept for independent filmmakers to think they can ‘fix it in post.’ Independent filmmakers succeed on the power of what they can do in production and in camera."

Don’t Worry, It’s Digital

With the advent of automated prosumer Mini DV and pro DV Cam formats, many directors and budding cinematographers believe that everything they shoot will be usable, regardless of lighting conditions or aperture settings. In reality, however, the word "digital" does not translate into perfect every time.

"There are actually huge problems with shooting digitally," says director Gary Winick, whose Sundance entry Tadpole was distributed by Miramax in 2002. "Every time you turn on the camera you have to make sure you’ve checked every switch and put every automated function into manual mode – the gain, the shutter speed, the exposure, focus – all of it. If you forget even one of those things, you’re going to be very unhappy when it’s blown up to 35mm."

But because effects houses can make dinosaurs walk the earth and magically drop Tom Hanks into well-known archival footage, DV filmmakers think that overexposed backgrounds can be resurrected or that light and contrast can be boosted to illuminate scenes shot in darkness. Winick, however, discovered that lighting and focal problems in his original Mini DV footage could not be so easily fixed.

"After our shoot I called ILM in California and said: ‘Look, I’ll give you any amount of money to make this look really good. Can you make this film look beautiful?’" Winick recalls. "And they said, ‘If the information’s not on the cassette, we can’t do anything for you,’ which I was really shocked to hear. There’s this assumption that ‘it’s digital,’ so they can do whatever you want."

Ultimately, Winick says, Miramax had to spend more enhancing the look of Tadpole than the film cost to produce. "DuArt digitized the uncompressed PAL footage and put each shot in the EditBox," Winick explains. "Then they had to put some shots in the Cineon and up-res them to 2k to do rotation reframing. Then they also had to do sharpening and matching work to match several shots since some were sharper than others, and vice versa, and many shots didn’t match very well."

DuArt then did extensive color-matching work on a DaVinci, a sophisticated computerized color correction system. "They shot the whole movie to 35mm from 2k data files," Winick explained. "The clocking was done [to off-tilt shots] on the Cineon at 2k, and then there was sharpening done to deal with the focus issues."

Tadpole was bought by Miramax Films for $5 million in 2002, but without Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s postproduction largesse, Winick’s film might not have seen a theatrical release.

Other times, such high-tech digital Band-Aids and special effects are used as "fixes" for coverage lapses or to create alternate takes that could have easily been grabbed during production. Midge Sanford, who produced Desperately Seeking Susan and How to Make an American Quilt with producing partner Sarah Pillsbury, had to look to an effects house during postproduction to accommodate the MPAA. "In How to Make an American Quilt, there is a scene where Joanna Going poses nude for her artist husband, and in order to get a PG-13 rating, we had to digitally remove her nipples from her body, which cost $15,000," Sanford remembers. "It looked a little weird, but it had to be done in order to get the rating."

Brokedown Palace producer Adam Fields knows the forehead-slapping frustration of learning that a "simple" digital fix will cost $200,000. "Claire Danes’s character smokes a joint during a really important scene, and it became a big ratings issue with the MPAA," he remembers. "They were going to give us an R for it, but changing the joint to a cigarette digitally, since we had already wrapped, would have been prohibitively expensive. Unfortunately, we also couldn’t lose the scene, so we had to very carefully cut around it so we never saw her inhale. It became a really big problem, and it would have been so easy to just shoot an alternate take with Claire smoking a Marlboro on the day."

In other instances, especially for filmmakers working in digital formats, a digital fix can be a less expensive solution to a production problem. "On Lovely & Amazing we shot the exterior of a hospital that had the hospital’s name on a big sign that we couldn’t avoid from any angle," says producer Anthony Bregman. "We could have covered up the sign, but it would have been really expensive. But since we were shooting digitally on Sony 24P HD video, we were able to make a decision on set that it would be an easy fix in postproduction to digitally block something out on a locked-off shot, and it was."

Of course the key words in this second situation were "locked-off." Digital effects are much easier to create when the frame – and the objects in the frame – are stationary. Trying to add digital effects to jerky handheld footage is much pricier.

Lack of Focus

Focus was an issue for Winick on Tadpole due to the awkward focus procedures on Mini DV cameras. But for filmmakers shooting on 16mm or 35mm, focus can be a problem too. What usually cannot be fixed for any amount of money – without reshoots or "additional photography" – is an out-of-focus shot or one that comes up "soft." Contemporary filmmakers love shooting with shallow depths of field – where one character, or perhaps even a section of one character’s face, is in sharp focus and the background blurs out – but shooting at these f-stops leaves little room for focus-pulling errors.

If the assistant camera operator fails to nail the focus properly the whole shot will read soft, leaving miles of footage unusable. "Focus is something you really can’t fix," confirms Lane. "They can do a little bit with it in post, but it’s very difficult [to repair]." The best prevention then is to focus on focus during preproduction.

"All focus-pulling issues should be brought up, discussed and worked out when you’re blocking the shots," says Libatique. For example, a director can alleviate focal problems in some cases by increasing the depth of field. "If you wanted to keep two characters in focus at the same time, you would use a different f-stop on the lens and then work the focal length. If your lens is wider, you’re more likely to hold it all in focus at a certain f-stop. If your lens is longer, you’re prone not to be able to hold it at a certain f-stop."

Producer Jason Kliot (The Guys, Down to You, Three Seasons) warns that unforeseen equipment problems, not just errors by the d.p. and a.c., can also cause focus problems. "You can check out your lenses fine from a lab," he warns, "and then your truck can hit a pothole or the atmosphere of the air can change, and your lens can come out of alignment. And there’s nothing to guarantee against that except having watched the dailies and having [the camera department] watching for any problems."

Kliot adds that in a world of digital video and filmmakers who eschew dailies to save money, it’s important to at least spot-check footage by printing it on film to see how it looks projected. "My recommendation is to print everything on film for the first three days [of the shoot]," he says. "Even if it’s in a test situation on set, try to use every single lens you’re using in a real-world situation with a wide-open lens – not closed down, because when you’re wide-open you’re showing all the imperfections of the lens. Then, after those three days, if there’s anything that has to do with critical focus, I would specifically choose those rolls and look at them. If you’re making a feature film for theatrical distribution, you should be looking at as much as you can possibly afford."

Filmmakers who only watch their 16mm or 35mm dailies on video may have to chase down focus problems later that are not readily apparent. Focus problems can "tighten up" on video dailies, so for projects that will be finished on film, it’s important for producers to tell transfer houses not to let engineers correct for any problems in the negative.

When it comes to their shot footage, producers should assume that anything that can go wrong will. Camera equipment should be tested by the camera department, with test footage screened on film and not just reviewed in DigiBeta, prior to principal photography. By being vigilant, producers can lay the groundwork for an insurance claim later during postproduction should footage be unusable. If the a.c. pulled focus incorrectly, if the d.p. was rushed and couldn’t take marks or if equipment was not tested before shooting, insurance companies won’t pay for reshooting the fuzzy footage. But, if the production team does everything correctly and a lens or camera problem occurs during shooting, reshoots are usually insurable expenses.

Notes Kliot, "The only thing insurance won’t cover is the weather and human error. So make sure that you hire the best people you can to work on your film and that your camera equipment has been checked out really carefully. Make sure there’s a chain of command so that you’re not caught with your pants down late in the game."

Of course, other unforeseen visual problems can pop up in post. "Video has a much narrower range of colors than film, so the first time you project your finished film on celluloid, you may see things you don’t necessarily want in the shot," explains Anthony Bregman, Human Nature producer and partner in the New York film production company This Is That. "In Eat Drink Man Woman there’s a scene where the father goes into the steam bath and is enveloped by a cloud of steam. We had been looking at it on 3/4" dailies and in various cuts of the film on the AVID for months, and we couldn’t see through the steam, which looked like a solid cloud of white. But when we saw it on film, we saw only a thin layer of steam and a bunch of naked men with their penises showing, which of course would have been a delight for the folks at the MPAA. Luckily we had just enough time to switch it out of the negative and replace it with a more modest shot."

Ultra-low-budget filmmakers may be surprised by their own version of Bregman’s steamroom shot if they aren’t working with a pro-grade camera monitor on set. For example, a director might not even know he or she needs to zoom in on a shot in postproduction – to crop out a boom, a light stand or a flailing extra – unless he or she is viewing the shot on a good-enough monitor. "Professional monitors all have a button called ‘underscan,’ which allows you to see what the camera is recording outside the lines in the eyepiece, inside the area known as ‘picture safe,’" says Los Angeles—based director and film editor David Tarleton. "On a normal TV set or low-rent camera monitor, you won’t see what’s being recorded beyond picture safe because that 10 percent at the edges of the frame will appear cropped out, but on computer screens, video projection equipment and professional monitors you’ll see everything. The problem is, by then it may be too late."

Can We Digitize the Story?

Although digital dropouts may cause independent filmmakers to plead with effects houses for help, the biggest filmmaking holes often reside in an obvious and far more accessible place – the story. "Script problems and logic errors that are bad in production are going to be bad in post," says Donnie Darko producer Adam Fields. "You can throw in a few looped lines to clear up something that doesn’t quite make sense, but you can’t fix large story holes. If the script isn’t ready, it’s not going to magically fix itself by the time you lock picture."

And while it is said that a film is rewritten during the shoot and rewritten again in the editing, many filmmakers don’t realize that during postproduction, the storyline can completely unravel. "If you move a line or a shot from here to there, you may suddenly need a new transition between scenes, because now your lead character already knows what she’s supposed to learn in the next act," says Andrew Williams, a partner in the Los Angeles trailer house and editing facility Winston Davis & Associates. "The problem is there may not be additional footage or transitional scenes that were shot to pull you out of this story hole you’ve suddenly created. Postproduction can easily turn into a big jigsaw puzzle, and filmmakers often find they’re missing a few important pieces."

While postproduction brings story holes, weak motivation and bad performances into stark relief, some directorial mistakes can, in some cases, be smoothed over by an experienced editor. For example, first cuts often lack a "sense of urgency" or storytelling vitality. "I’m constantly looking for movement – it’s essential," says Christopher Tellefsen, who edited Kids, Changing Lanes and Metropolitan. "Creating movement where there isn’t any is very tough. You can make something that seems static a little less so through the rhythm of cutting. Metropolitan was a very static film that was also very talky, so one of the great challenges of that project was to give it rhythm through cutting. You can create dramatic tension by being rhythmic and then holding on something for a while and then coming in again, essentially creating hills and valleys that keep it interesting."

Another problem less experienced directors encounter in the edit room is that performances suddenly appear unbalanced in relation to each other. Some actors are simply "too big" while others seem too subtle and don’t convey the emotions or story points they need to get across. Film editor Jay Rabinowitz, who cut 8 Mile, Requiem for a Dream and Ghost Dog, among others, says actors’ performances can be sculpted or "dialed" up or down in post. "A lot of times an actor may have gone too broad and too big," he says. "Through editing you can definitely shape a performance or tone it down," he says. "There was never a possibility for anything to be too harrowing on Requiem for a Dream. It was sort of like in Spinal Tap – ‘This one goes to 11’ – but through subtle shadings, maybe by cutting a scene with reaction shots, you can make adjustments if something has gotten too emotional or perhaps not emotional enough."

Tellefsen says this sculpting exercise can prove daunting, however, since one "fix" begets another and another. "Getting strong performances and weak performances to work together is a big job," he explains. "It’s a real balancing act, and you have to find ways to support the weak performances, strengthening them without undermining the strong performances while figuring out ways to bring everyone up to the highest quality."

Sometimes this involves focusing on two primary characters at the expense of a third. "In Changing Lanes there was a character I completely cut out of a scene with Ben Affleck and Toni Collette to make it more intimate," explains Tellefsen. "It was a character who was interviewing for a position at the law firm and was in the room to create tension or be funny. But it didn’t work, so I had to strategically recut the scene. There were many shots I couldn’t use anymore because of his presence, and all of this while Ben and Toni’s dialogue was still running."

The key to enabling the kind of editorial surgery Tellefsen accomplished is coverage, and lots of it. Yet too many first-time filmmakers and d.p.s fail to get sufficient coverage, arguing that if Ozu or Jarmusch made it work in a master shot, why can’t they? Of course, later on, when scenes are edited, these filmmakers then wonder why their film has an emotional remoteness or why key characters don’t pop off the screen.

Other times shots may be covered, but just not in the right ways. A scene may be covered six ways to Sunday, but if the director doesn’t shoot inserts of the lead actors sitting in repose, turning their heads from left to right and back again or indicating with their eyes that something is happening in each corner of the frame, the editor may not be able to cut to a close-up on an action that feels organic.

"Generally, the biggest problem less experienced directors run into is not understanding the kind of coverage they need," says Tarleton. "A lot of times I’ll have people come in with miles and miles of stuff that’s totally unusable because what they really needed was a reverse-angle, an over-the-shoulder POV to establish eye lines or a simple pan to show the audience the geometry of the characters in the room and where they are standing in relation to each other. It’s a simple thing that might have taken five seconds to shoot, and there’s absolutely no way to ‘create’ it in post."

For this reason, legendary Jamaican filmmaker Perry Henzell, the writer-director of The Harder They Come, reportedly saves 10 to 15 percent of his budget for shooting inserts, links and all manner of transitions. The perverse irony is that many filmmakers think they’re saving time and money by not shooting these seemingly insignificant elements.

"Very often people will say, ‘You don’t need to shoot someone entering or exiting frame – you’re just going to cut that out anyway,’ but sometimes that’s exactly where you need the cut to go," says Gill Holland, who produced The Pink House, starring Heather Matarazzo. "I know that in Getting Off there was a scene with two people sitting on a stoop talking, and in retrospect, we really needed one of them to get up and walk away – it would have been the perfect transition – but we didn’t have it, and so the cut always felt like an awkward edit."

Other filmmakers forget to shoot coverage that establishes where the characters are or how they got there. "If you’re shooting in Chicago, shoot three minutes of outdoor B-roll on one day," says Williams. "You’ve got the crew, you’ve got the camera and the actors are in character. What does it take to shoot one of the stars walking down the street with the Sears Tower in the background? Nothing. Now, think about how much work it’s going to be in post to find the right stock house, review different stock shots of Chicago, get them approved by the director, match the color balance and then buy the footage. Three minutes of B-roll during production will save you three days and thousands of dollars in post."

The way to avoid coverage problems is to involve an editor in the discussion of shotlists in preproduction. Also, a good script supervisor will be on the lookout for what will and won’t cut together because of missing transitions .

No Singles? No Problem.

In today’s filmmaking world, though, where financiers expect, realistically or not, any problem to be fixed in post, editors reach for optical effects like digital push-ins and optical reframing to change shot compositions and create new coverage.

Comments Brian Kates, editor of HBO’s The Laramie Project, "Opticals can do a lot of things. You can flip a shot horizontally or vertically, you can do a push-in, flips and flops, and all kinds of superimpositions and layerings."

But there are limits to how far this kind of trickery can go. As much as he would like to be able to now and then, Tellefsen says zooming in on a wide shot to create a new take is difficult. "It’s very hard to make complete singles out of two-shots, because you’re really pushing it if you blow anything up more than 20 percent," he says. "Even on 35mm you see grain, and [the new shot] just feels different than the rest of the film."

"Anything captured on Mini DV is going to start showing pixelation or distortion the minute you push in," says Philip Miller, a postproduction supervisor and DVD authoring engineer with Santa Monica—based Ezee Studios, about trying the same trick in the "prosumer" format. "You’re going to have to affect the shot in some way to compensate, like with a [digital] soft blur to pull the ‘jaggies’ out. Well-lit Mini DV footage can handle about a 10 percent blowup. On HD, filmmakers have zoomed in as far as 40 percent on some shots, with acceptable results."

Kates notes that the new trend of creating a digital intermediate – a high-resolution digital tape version of the feature which a film negative is then created from – has inspired many editors to shoot for the moon when it comes to effects and radically altering footage in post.

"Digital intermediates allow the filmmaker to suddenly be freed from all the constraints of traditional negative cutting and optical [creation]," he states. The process, which has been used on films as diverse as Coastlines, Panic Room, and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, allows filmmakers to render effects cheaply and more accurately in video before mastering their film.

Agreeing with Tellefsen, though, Kates says, "I wouldn’t recommend ‘pushing in’ more than 20 percent [with a digital intermediate]. But, people do it all the time. Whenever I watch TV I’m shocked that people are doing snap-zooms from 300 percent and then back into full-frame. Almost every trailer you see today uses [this technique] to create these fake digital zooms."

Of course, rather than reach for cutting-edge post effects, the easiest solution to the coverage crisis is to simply cover scenes with basic singles and close-ups and to use well-known tricks to cover lapses that may become evident later on. Francis Ford Coppola famously advises young filmmakers to always grab medium shots of a few lead characters talking on the phone with their faces away from camera. Then, missing plot information can be dropped in long after the production has wrapped. Another smart safety measure is to grab two lead characters on set and shoot them casually heading away from camera – as in the opening scene of In the Company of Men or the final scene of Jaws – which can be used in a pinch as a lengthy plot explanation or a Casablanca-like button.

But the Sound Was Good. . .

As evidenced by The Blair Witch Project, audiences are willing to forgive jittery handheld camerawork, but as the saying goes, the sound always has to be good. "When you’re shooting in formats where image quality might be a little marginal, good sound is even more essential. Well-recorded audio seems to improve the image quality," notes former Next Wave Films president Peter Broderick. "With bad sound, you notice every picture flaw. Good sound allows you to be fully engaged with the movie. Either you’re in it or you’re not, and if you’re not, the movie can die the death of a thousand cuts."

Of course, getting the sound right can be a tall order, since playback equipment is rarely ever the same from theater to theater. "Your film will never sound as good in any theater on the face of the earth as it does in the mixing room during postproduction," explains Bregman. "That’s just because the acoustics of the mixing room are carefully balanced and perfectly calibrated, and you also don’t have a bunch of moviegoers absorbing the sound, opening bags of M&Ms, crunching popcorn, slurping drinks, crunching tortillas, coughing or letting their cellphones go off."

Nanette Burstein, co-director of the 2002 Sundance favorite The Kid Stays In the Picture, says a sound mix can turn into an endless tug-of-war that never feels 100 percent right. "It was a total nightmare," she says of the film’s Sundance premiere last year. "It was really hard getting the right levels, because there’s music throughout the entire film and Bob [Evans] doesn’t have the clearest voice in the world. We were constantly fighting music and sound effects and voiceover leading up to Sundance, and even after five days and nights of sound mixing, we were still far from finished. We hesitantly brought this unpolished mix to our Sundance premiere and screened it to 1,400 people in a theater that is also used as a high school gym. In other words, the acoustics were far from ideal."

During the screening Burstein and co-director Brett Morgen were pulling their hair out, she says. "Bob’s voice was too separated from the music, and we kept getting nervous and communicating with the projectionist through a walkie-talkie to ‘turn it up, turn it up,’ which just made it worse," she remembers. "After Sundance we completely remixed the sound over the course of a week for our theatrical release."

Other filmmakers make the mistake of mixing for a giant theatrical presentation at The Eccles, when 99.9 percent of the people who screen the film will be watching it on a VCR. "If the final exhibition medium of your project is video and people are going to be screening it on a TV, make sure the sound engineer at your ‘sweetening’ session is mixing to a television monitor and not to perfectly imaged cinema speakers," exhorts David Tarleton. "You have to at least listen to a final playback on a crappy little TV before you leave. And don’t be afraid to make changes if it doesn’t sound the way you want it when it’s played on a television. Even though it may be against a sound engineer’s religion, you may want to mix right to an old TV from the get-go."

Another postproduction sound headache that is easy to prevent on set has to do with actors stepping on each other’s lines. Robert Altman doesn’t seem to mind, but most filmmakers want every line of dialogue to be heard. "If the actors are talking at the same time during the take, there really isn’t a way to separate them in post – they’re married together," says Garrard Whatley, president of the Santa Monica—based audio post house RocketWerks. "Sometimes it can work and seem vérité if it’s in the middle of an argument, but it’s much better to have the individual lines recorded clean and then create that overlap later if you want it. It gives you more choices in the editing, and it’s a much safer way to go."

Where this overlap becomes a dire problem is when it spills over during a close-up. "Say you’re in a tight single, and the offscreen actor starts talking before the person on camera stops speaking," proposes Whatley. "The offscreen actor is in the room only for performance, to enhance the performance of actor A, but they’re messing up the close-up because they may be delivering a line you already heard actor B deliver in the medium shot over the onscreen actor’s close-up."

The "solve" in this case, says Whatley, is to shoot the argument at the same emotional level as the wide shots but make sure the actors give each other a beat or two before delivering their lines. "It can be a difficult thing for actors to do, but if they’re good they can pull it off," Whatley says. "One of the biggest problems and one of the biggest reasons to have to ADR and foley the whole scene with ambient sound and sound effects is because actors have stepped on each other’s lines during someone’s close-up."

Location noise not picked up on the day can also lead to extensive dialogue looping, at a considerable cost to the production. "We had to have 9 million ADR sessions for Spin the Bottle, because none of us realized how loud everyone’s shoes sounded clomping around on the wood floors of the old house where we were shooting," remembers Holland. "It would have been so easy to avoid by putting a blanket down where people were walking and then just not showing their feet or by having the actors just take off their shoes. How hard is that?"

The good news is that looping, or ADR (rerecording dialogue in postproduction), can be used to mitigate or, in some cases, salvage bad performances. "You can fix performances with looping if you have an actor who may be accenting the wrong word," explains Lane. "You can fix the accent on the words, the impact, the emphasis and the inflection, but you can’t change how fast or slow someone says a line. You can also just reloop them with totally different people, but it never sounds exactly the same, and there’s only so much you can do because a bad performance is not just in the voice; it’s also in the body movements and in the expressions that you see."

With all these technical challenges and gaping pitfalls to avoid, it’s a wonder any film ever makes it from the hard drive to the telecine to the big screen. "There are so many things that can go wrong in production and postproduction – in addition to so many different personalities thrown into that mix – that it’s a rare thing, a miracle perhaps, whenever a film is finished and has a single, coherent vision," says Paramount Classics’s Ruth Vitale, who executive produced several features, including Joe Mantello’s Love! Valour! Compassion! and Harmony Korine’s Gummo. "Anyone who’s actually been through it knows what I’m talking about."