Feature Film : : Valley of the Sun

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Time to talk about the post-production stage, where everything you’ve worked so hard for comes together in a tangible form. It’s a complicated process, and an important one.

The first step, of course, is to get your film footage into a form that can be edited. Now, this step, along with the whole post-production process, is dependent on what type of camera you’ve decided to shoot with.

For Valley of the Sun, director Stokes McIntyre has decided to shoot with a Red Camera. Basically, a Red Camera is a digital camera whose recordings are saved to a disk and easily transferred to a computer, and thus, video editing programs. Unlike film, the process is simple and doesn’t require you to send your materials away to be processed, and it also makes the physical process of editing your footage easier. The Red Camera itself shoots a high-quality 4K image on a 35mm lens and produces a shorter depth of field. According to Stokes, using the Red Camera will allow him and his crew to capture the best looking image they can get for the price of the camera, and one that has a more authentic, film-ish feel.

Next you need an editor—hopefully you’ve had this person lined up all along, and he or she is someone who understands your desired feeling for the movie. The benefit of using an editor who has not been present during the filming process is that it allows him or her to come at the movie with a fresh perspective. In low-budget films, this is not always economic. In our case, it is highly likely that Stokes, the director, will also be editing the film. Positively, this will allow him to have more control over the final product.

Now, as you delve into the editing process, there are different ways to go about things. If you were using film, you would want to review your unedited film footage, often called “rushes” or “dailies” (because film can be processed quickly enough that it can be reviewed daily, to give you a sense of whether things need to be re-shot). With digital, you can easily review what you have shot thus far.

It is a good idea to devote a nice chunk of time to simply watching all of your material. Note the things that stick out to you— gut reactions are important because an audience will likely receive them as you did. This gives you a whole sense of what you’ve done, and allows you to instantly know which scenes will work and which won’t.

The next step is to create what’s known as an assembly cut. This version is even rougher than the rough cut; re-order the scenes that you think have potential so that they appear in the order they would in the movie, and get rid of the ones that are completely un-memorable. If the structure isn’t working, rearrange the scenes until you feel it’s right. There is no editing done at all for this cut—it is an opportunity for you to observe the flow of your movie, and decide whether things need to be re-ordered or re-shot.

After the assembly cut comes the rough cut. Here, you’ve got your sequences in order, though they’re not really fine-tuned. You’ve cut out the scenes that weren’t working in the assembly cut, so your material is almost down to what you’ll use in the final cut.

Last is the final cut. All the final touches are put in place—performance rhythms, transitions, visual effects, etc.—it’s all there. Once you’ve got your final cut, it is incredibly beneficial to hold a trial screening. Fight the urge to defend or explain your movie, and instead just observe people’s reactions—where do they laugh, where do they seem bored, etc? Continue to show your movie and get feedback. Take the information you receive and make changes that seems necessary.

When you are satisfied with what you’ve got, you move on to sound mixing. This is where your soundtrack enters the picture, and where all other sound editing occurs. Valley of the Sun has a musician in place for the soundtrack, who will be writing music to the movie. This process can differ from person to person—while some may come up with music before they see the final cut of the film, others will sit with the final cut and compose to it.

All of this, and voila!—you have a movie! The truth is, it’s not over yet. Don’t forget about the fact that you have to distribute your movie in order for it to be seen. But we will save that discussion for another time.

If you’ve got comments, post them!

And a final quote from Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics by Michael Rabiger that I found to be rather poetic: “Intelligent editing coaxes our imaginations and lends enormously to the overall impact of the film by aiding and abetting performances and creating the grounds for us to infer thought, feeling, and reaction.”