Post-Production
Filmmaking - Post-Production
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Say it Again: How to Do No-Budget ADR for Independent Films
My first feature, Veer!, was shot primarily on Super 16mm, on an old Eclair ACL I got off eBay. While it shot beautiful images, the camera sounded like a helicopter taking off when rolling. Interior dialog scenes were especially nightmarish for sound, and one scene in particular retains no original production audio because of this. We had to re-create the scene’s audio — dialogue, background ambience and foley — completely from scratch. But when I point out which scene it is, people don’t always believe me. Indeed, good ADR goes unnoticed, and as much as I’d like to pat myself […]
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Kit: 10 Favorite Tech Innovations of 2014 (And Perhaps 2015)
I fall into that category of independent filmmaker who, as the need exists, writes, produces, directs, shoots, records sound, edits, even grades their own footage. (What we used to call color correction.) Then again, often times I’m “just” the DP. 2014 was my busiest year ever, and at some point I found myself taking on each of these basic roles. As a result, the scope of my “kit” is necessarily broad, encompassing both production and post. (Kit is a Britishism for one’s working collection of gear, a name I intend to lend to a series of brief tech reviews in […]
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Dealing with Archival Footage: Making The Prime Ministers
Documentary films often rely extensively on archival film, and dealing with different archive sources and the variety of formats involved can become a significant headache. For The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, co-producer and editor Nimrod Erez had to deal with hundreds of sources and dozens of video formats. As editor and co-producer, Erez ran the post-production department, overseeing the additional editors brought in to work on the picture and seeing the movie through grading and final picture. The film will be released this year and is the second and final part to follow The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, which was released in 2013. The […]
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Red Giant Universe Effects Package Review
There are a number of things that are different about Red Giant’s effects package Universe. It’s offered as a subscription, but you can get access to a sizeable number of effects without paying a thing. Members of the Universe community get to vote on effects that are being added to the set. Universe is cross-platform, works with a variety of software applications and supports GPU acceleration. You can even try out the premium effects for free with your first month of use. The effects and transitions of Universe support a variety of environments: Adobe After Effects (CS5.5 and higher) and […]
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Editing Boyhood: Dealing with Changing Technology
The filming of Boyhood, shot over 12 years, posed some unexpected challenges in post-production. At a recent meeting of the Boston Creative Pro Users Group, First Assistant Editor Mike Saenz explained the difficulties of the editing process, made more complicated by changes in technology that occurred over that 12-year period. Begun as what Saenz called “an indie side project” by director Richard Linklater, Boyhood was originally edited using Final Cut 3, as they couldn’t afford to rent an Avid system for 12 years. A couple of years into the project, they switched to Avid Xpress, a lower-end system from Avid. They […]
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Red Giant’s Shooter Suite: Video Acquisition and Image Processing Software
Red Giant have been expanding their software offerings. Well known for their easy-to-use color correction tools Magic Bullet and Colorista, they’ve also built up a wide collection of tools for keying and effects. Their latest suite consists of some new tools and some updated ones and is geared towards content acquisition and initial image manipulation. The Red Giant Shooter Suite consists of the following applications: OffLoad, BulletProof, and PluralEyes, as well as the plug-ins Denoiser II, Frames, Instant 4K and Lut Buddy. I was most interested in the two acquisition tools, Offload and BulletProof, but it’s worth running down the […]
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The Sound of Helicopters in Apocalypse Now
A film’s first shot, its first image, is one that’s obsessed over by many directors. But how many put as much care into its first sound? Francis Ford Coppola did, along with sound designer Walter Murch, when constructing the opening of Apocalypse Now. The famous helicopter sounds actually enter over black — they are the first input of any kind an audience member receives. And, of course, those weren’t just any helicopter sounds. In the video above — a section of a documentary commissioned for the Paramount 2006 home video release and made by Zoetrope’s former head of post, Kim […]
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Watch: Behind Interstellar’s Sound Design
Deborah Stratman’s bewitching short film Hacked Circuit, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, presents a roving, unbroken look inside the foley post-production process at an LA studio. Along those lines, this featurette with Interstellar‘s Supervising Sound Editor and Sound Designer, Richard King, provides perspective into the blockbuster’s unusually naturalistic and practical sound effects. To capture the essence of a dust storm, King and his team built a sand gun and fired it against a rusty car; to convey a car ripping through a cornfield, they built a rig and did it for themselves. Just as Nolan eschews green screens, he refrains from the use […]
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Blackmagic Releases a Free Version of Fusion 7
Back in September Blackmagic announced they had purchased eyeon Software, developers of the high-end VFX application Fusion 7. And now they have done the same thing they did after acquiring DaVinci Resolve; they have drastically slashed the price of the application. You can get Fusion 7 for free, or buy Fusion 7 Studio for $995. The base version supports 3D compositing, paint, rotoscoping, retiming, stabilization, and titling. Fusion 7 Studio adds features such as optical flow, stereoscopic 3D, support for OpenFX plug-ins and distributed network rendering. Fusion Studio 7 also includes a multi-user workflow and collaboration tool called Generation and […]
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Watch: Stitching Birdman Together in Post
If I was at all restless during Birdman, it had little to do with the stakes of the plot, and much more to do with deciphering Emmanuel Lubezki’s visual pyrotechnics. Apologies for the spoiler, but you’ve probably heard by now that Iñárritu’s latest is designed to look like one sweeping take, a nod to its theatrical subject matter and setting. The camera ducks in and out of darkness more than once, but surely the technicians in post found points for incision that are barely visible to the naked eye. In this video interview with Variety, the film’s digital intermediate colorist Steve Scott explains […]
