Equinox – lessons learned July 28, 2008
Posted by joost in : film , comments closedI’ve submitted Equinox to the TCM Classic Shorts competition. This version has a duration of 3:53 and I consider it the “official” version. We worked on improving a couple of sub optimal cuts in the film, trimmed it a bit here and there and spent more time on the sound and the color grade.
Important lessons learned / (re)confirmed:
- Recording sound on location is hard and will usually result in dialogue with too much background noise. No wonder they re-record all dialogue (and other sound) on “proper” films.
- It’s one thing to visualize a film in your head, then to film it accordingly (with time, money and other resource constraints), and then to make sense of it in the edit. The resulting film will be different from the initial concept, sometimes slightly disappointing and sometimes pleasantly surprising you.
- Having a film on your screen looking good does not guarantee that people will see it exactly that way. The combination of (non color calibrated) monitors, film/video formats, export options and what have you, will cause changes in the look and feel of the film.
For the TCM competition I gave the film a color grade in such a way that I could check how it would look after several steps down to the final DVD version. This basically meant that on my editing screen it did not look as good as it could, but the DVD version looked close to what I wanted. - The amount of time spent on editing / postproduction has a proportional relation to the duration and the importance of the film. In this case, we spent maybe about 10 days in total for the Virgin version, another 5 for the TCM, so about 15 in total.
Three of these days were the most creative and were really about finding out how to tell the story of the film based on the available footage. Perhaps another three days were about fine tuning, and the rest was just a lot of “dumb” work on sound, grade, titles, etc. That period is more about discipline then anything else, just putting in the hours because you want the finished product to be as good as it can be. - You reach a moment with every film you make where you feel that it is done, where you know you have to let it be with all its flaws and comments in the back of your head. Just like the character in Equinox, even though the film is part of you, you know that it is better to move on and your attention shifts to new horizons, new ideas, new films. I have reached this moment for this film, which makes me symbolically come full circle one year after the first draft of the script.