This is How We Roll ...
Monday, January 25, 2010 at 11:07AM (I'm not going to apologize for not posting here in nearly a month, I'm tired of apologizing ... if you need a more frequent dose of my crazed ramblings, feel free to follow me on Twitter)
It's a little into the second official week of post production now on Andrew Cymek's "Dark Rising 2" (feature film) and "Dark Rising: The Savage Tales of Summer Vale" (TV series) and in the same way that the shoot on both connected projects were experiments into just how much material you could cram into a low budget production (a resounding success, by the way), the editing, CGI and polishing of the final product runs along the same lines.
DR2 post production central.
If you've been a regular reader of my blog, you know where I stand on big budget films and how major post-production effects houses rub their greedy mitts together, with dollar signs in their eyes when they see your multi-million dollar cash cow coming along. On most big films, you see, producers and director have little or no clue what actually, technically happens in some of the steps that take place once editing starts. I have been in meetings where you can see their eyes glazing over while some vendor bidding on a chunk of the po$t production pie goes through what needs to happen and when and how much it's going to cost. And I've seen vendors submitting laughably large quotes, for relatively minor work, which, the production is willing to pay, because, well, even the post production supervisor is in the dark and the guy with the goatee said that's how much it's going to cost.
Thankfully, these projects do not fall into that category. Partially because of the budget, but mostly because there are some clever creative people involved all across the board who actually know how each step of the filmmaking process works, what's technically involved and how each can be done simply and cheaply and well.
Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that any punches were held creatively. Interdimensional portals? Check. Apocalyptic global chaos? Check. Giant sand slugs? Check. What working like this means, apart from willing personal sacrifices and long hours, is the ability to tweak and change things on the fly. Normally, on a moderately-sized production (if you're Peyer Jackson or George Lucas, things are much different I'm sure), you tell an effects house what you want for a specific shot (that is, one of the handful of effects shots the budget and producers have allowed you to have), then they go off and work on some concept and low resolution test shots while you continue working on the edit. Couple of weeks (or months, depending on the shot), you get your effect. If you want changes, it's going to take probably nearly as long to get a revised version back, meanwhile, you're up against deadlines and can only afford so much time for tweaking, so, at some point, there's going to be a compromise.
Working on a lower budget, with off-the-shelf software and without the overhead of a large staff, huge offices, beanbag chairs and pool tables, you can put together pretty much as many effects shots as you want (well, as many as time and your collected energies will allow) as you come across them in the edit. I mean, what's better: send your two-second shot off to an effects house for some wire removal for around $8000 (last time I checked, anyway), or spend 20 minutes, do it yourself, then move on?
Sure, it's a little bit exhausting and sometimes tedious (dealing with staring at screens of shots rendering ain't a whole lot of fun, but that's why God invented XBox, right?) but very liberating in that you can continue molding and shaping the story not only in the edit, but beyond the edit at the same time. There's really no reason in the world that the creative excitement of the shoot should end when you back up the lights and send the camera back.
Maybe I'm wrong. I dunno. Maybe all independent productions are doing this (I have seen a few in the last year, which is encouraging) and the medium-sized and big budget productions are more than happy to continue feeding the post production foodchain the way they are now. All I know is this is the way I like to roll; it gets results and being hands-on right through the whole process is a hell of a lot more fun than just handing everything off to some third party, hoping it comes back looking okay.
I guess what I'm saying is that it should be possible to just make a film without a lot of hand-wringing and endless, pointless, pessemistic discussion about how oh my God, we'll never be able to afford to do this. Cut the chatter and just do it yourself, dammit.
Yes, it's another brave experiment and it's only just beginning, but, I can already see, from how the first eight minutes of "Dark Rising 2" are shaping-up, that this will seriously be unlike any independent low-budget production that you've seen...
Stay tuned!
Doug Lentz
