Post-Production
Filmmaking - Post-Production
-
Andrea Sisson and Pete Ohs on The Other Men of Dodge City
The following was written by 2013 “25 New Faces” Andrea Sisson and Pete Ohs in advance of the first screening of their film The Other Men of Dodge City, a re-edited version of The Men of Dodge City by fellow 2013 “New Face” Nandan Rao. The film plays on NoBudge from Wednesday February 19 at 7pm. Check back tomorrow for Rao’s response to seeing the reworking of his film for the first time. First and foremost, Nandan’s eye is a force to be reckoned with. When we first saw The Men of Dodge City, we laughed at the snail’s pace and non-existent […]
-
Commissioning Music for Short Films – 10 Questions a Director Might Ask
The following is a guest post written by composer Kim Halliday, a U.K.-based composer who has written music for shorts, features, documentary and fiction. You can find his work at www.kimhalliday.com, under “Kim Halliday – Music” on Facebook, and @hallidayk on Twitter. Many film composers learn their trade by scoring short films. Many continue to score short films, and many never get an opportunity to score a full feature. The truth is that there are many challenges for a composer with a short – how do you get coherent themes into so few cues, for example, and how do you […]
-
Sundance MVP Alex Bickel on the Role of the Colorist
The post-production process is an often underestimated one, both in the amount of work it necessitates and in its shaping of the final product. From an outside perspective, viewers may assume that a film’s visuals are simply captured on-set, in camera, and transferred to screen without much alteration. In reality, color grading the camera’s images is an art form unto itself. Over at Hammer to Nail, Chad Hartigan, director of last year’s Sundance NEXT inclusion This is Martin Bonner, interviews his colorist Alex Bickel, whose fingerprints were on a whopping six titles in Park City earlier this month: Blue Ruin; Camp X-Ray; Kumiko, The […]
-
Editing & Music: An Interview with Three Editors at the Sundance Film Festival
Music in cinema continually captivates audiences. Scores and soundtracks can become as renowned as a film itself and play a large part in an audience’s emotional engagement with a movie. Awards are distributed honoring Best Original Song, Best Original Music Score, Best Film Music, and Best Music Direction at multiple film festivals and award ceremonies. But music has also always been a fascinating subject for movies as well. Struggling musicians to sensational bands, and everyone in between, have been captured in film. The Sundance Film Festival is often the first venue at which these movies premiere, and this year is […]
-
What Richard Stanley Learned from the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Along with Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, a book — an essay comprised of diary excerpts, actually — I recommend to all aspiring directors is Richard Stanley’s “I Wake Up Screaming.” It originally appeared in the 1994 third edition of the film anthology Projections, and it’s now published (with permission, the site claims) at the director’s unofficial website, Between Death and the Devil. “I Wake Up Screaming” documents Stanley’s attempt to make an ambitious Namibia-shot art horror-thriller called Dust Devil years after an earlier production fell apart. The movie Stanley went on to make instead, […]
-
Abnormal Frequencies: Sound Designing the Short Film Hum
When I made my first short film in 2011, the idea was to set a goal for myself and let that drive my process. The short ended up being Mr. Fitzpatrick, and my goal was simply to present a character and show a day in his life. That’s it. No story or anything complicated. I didn’t even want to get to know him very well–just get an impression. I’m pretty happy with the way the film came out, but the one thing people always comment on is its sound design. We shot the film completely MOS (with the FGV-PL7D and […]
-
Visual Effects on a Budget – Don’t Fix It in Post
Visual effects supervisor Scott Squires appeared this week in an online webinar for Moviola.com entitled “Visual Effects on a Limited Budget.” His number one tip? – Don’t fix it in post. The presentation began with a look at the different roles in Visual Effects and the factors to consider when designing shots. Squires, who worked on movies such as The Mask and Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, then spent some time stressing how important planning is, and how shooting it right the first time, rather than fixing it in post, will save you time and money. It’s particularly important to avoid […]
-
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Editor Alan Bell on Editing for Performance
The day before its release, Alan Edward Bell A.C.E., the editor of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, as well as The Amazing Spider-Man and 500 Days of Summer talked about his career and his editing philosophy at a meeting of the Boston Creative Pro User Group. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bell’s father worked in the film industry, and Bell was sure he didn’t want to do that; he wanted to be a rock climber. He became, he said, pretty good at it. But to pay rent he took people out rock climbing, and most of them were from the […]
-
DaVinci Resolve 10 Adds Editing to its Toolset
DaVinci Resolve began life as a high-end grading tool found in expensive color suites. Its purchase by Blackmagic hasn’t lessened its sophistication – they’ve continued to expand its tool set – but it has seen the software’s price lowered substantially, a free “lite” version released, and a redesign of its UI that has made it a lot friendlier to new users. Resolve is still a complicated and sophisticated tool, and color grading is a skill that can take a lot of study to master, but if you’re doing any image manipulation to your footage you shouldn’t ignore the functionality Resolve […]
-
The State of 4K
Technology tipping points – when something goes from the unusual to the commonplace – can happen with unexpected rapidity. Has 4K reached a tipping point, and if so what aspect of 4K? Acquisition, production, distribution, or all three? If you’re shooting a film today, should you be shooting in 4K? The answer to these questions is complicated by cost, complexity and the long-term shelf-life of your project. Today, a convincing argument can be made for shooting in either 4K (future proof) or HD (cost effective and most people won’t see the difference). One thing seems for certain; we will be […]
