You've survived both preproduction and production when you've made it to this step. I salute you!

The Postproduction is the part of production where your film actually comes together. Arguably, it's the "part where you now MAKE your film" from everything you've planned and executed to work with.

Depending the style and genre of your movie, the postproduction can be so or so long, but commonly it's about the same length as the preproduction or even longer, when done right. A proper postproduction consists of much more then just "edit the movie", this is the part where a lot of the actual storytelling happens and where a lot of quality can still be lost or added to your movie - so don't take it on the light shoulder.

Similar to preproduction, the postproduction sums up a lot of different aspects that can hardly be put into a chronological order. Most of these parts depend on each other and go hand in hand. Still I have tried to bring them in an order that makes more or less sense in the following posts, explaining different aspects of each and again - filling you up with tricks, tips, theory and rules.

The process of editing is similar to the process of writing. Every cut is a full stop, and each shot you chose to edit in your movie must have a reason to be there and add a new information.

In todays popculture, editing has become a bit of a life of it's own with random cuts everywhere - upsetting a lot of more classic editors. While this can be achieved for stylish reasons, narrative editing serves a clear purpuse.

Let's first have a lot at the actual cut's you have at your disposal:

Straight cut



The most common one. You just cut from one shot to another. Try to cut to completely different shots when editing. For example from a Close-Up to a Medium Shot. Or in a 2 person dialoge from one person to the other. Ideally, your camera is standing somewhere different then before.

In the example, you see a long shot cutting to a closeup, then cutting to something in between. All cuts are straigt cuts and the angles are entirely different on all of them.

Jumpcut



Cut to the same or a similar angle with just some slight differences is called a jumpcut. For example, a shot where the camera was at the exact same point, just the zoom was slightly higher. Or where the camera just moved a slight bit to the left. This cut feels awkward and you should use it rarely and wisely. You CAN do jumpcuts if you want to, but be aware of the slightly weird effect they have, because of the unnatural nature of cuts.

In the example, you see a jumpcut because the angle is virtually the same, just cutting slightly closer.

Matchcut

An interesting blend of two shots. Some elements of shot A and B match. For example, you have your living room in daylight, then cut the the exact same shot at night. Or you pan to a mountain, then cut to someones curtain that has the same silhoutte. Or look at the War of the Worlds trailer, the traffic light and the sun. This connects scenes in a conscious and special way. Matchcuts are always cool.

Heh, unfortunately we don't have any matchcuts. But I'm sure you see the point.

Blending



A common transition. (the only transition really, try not to use iMovie wipes or funny A jumps on B's head stuff). It takes some time, which means you want to lead the audience to another place, calmly. Usually this is used at the end of a scene to cut to a new scene. Because this takes some time, you'll most likely communicate that these scenes are not happening at the same time, but have some space between them. Or simply that a long time has passed.


Narration

As already said, every cut happens for a reason. There can't be any other way this cut could be, it's there because it needs to be there, at that very frame. Simply put: You cut to another shot when this shot contains a NEW information/moment, the other shot can't deliver as well. That's the only reason to cut to another shot.

in reality, some shots might just stop being usable after a few seconds for whatever reason, that's a good reason too.
But you need to get a new information after every cut as a viewer, even if it just changes the framing, because the film wants me to feel different about the same thing (cutting from a TOTAL to a SUPERCLOSE for example).

Let's have a look at the following sequence:



The first shot is a long shot revealing the car that arrives.

- The first cut at 0:03 moves the sequence to a closeup of the weel when the car stops. This was used because we wanted the audience to "feel threatened" by the arrival of those troops. That intent was supported by cuttung to a closeup instead of just having the car stop on the long shot (remeber, the emotional distance with the shots)

- The next cut already at 0:04 happens so soon because we intended to put the stress on the "speed" they operate. This shot is also interesting because - as you can see on the number plate - it has been mirrored. Why? You guessed it, the shot violated the "crossing the line" rule because the soldiers ran away to the right - but in all following shots the arrive from the right and run to the left. So I had no choice but mirroring one of them. The moment were "Jack" arrives is important, which is why the camera remains on him for a while.

- The cut at 0:13 starts as an extreme long shot, but the soldiers again run towards the camera changing it into a medium shot.

- The next shot at 0:15 shows the soldiers stoping. That's why we did cut to a separate shot.

- The cut to one of the soldiers face at 0:19 was a dramatic decision: We wanted to show that they feel unpleasant with what they see - which is also why the camera does a slightly odd rolling movement in that shot to support the feeling of "loosing ground".

- The shot at 0:21 is a so called POV shot - the audience finally gets to see what the soldiers actually are so worried about.

- And at last at 0:23, another extreme long shot showing Jack's arrival between his soldiers who are still in position. We cut to an extreme long shot because the audience needed to have an overview to who is standing who for what's going to happen next...

Continuity

Hell for every editor. The shots actually need to have a good flow and need to match. If your actor is walking to a chair, and then suddenly you cut to a shot where he's already sitting, it'll look wrong (except of course, you deliberately want this moment to feel awkward, but this has to be very very thought through). Or if he runs, where is the weight of his legs? Where is the glass on the table? Is it full? Empty? All this needs to be taken into consideration.

A good solution to continuity problems is cutting to a completely different shot. Continuity often forces certain cuts, because the actors moved differently on each take or the sunlight changed color or whatever else. Another reason why it proves invaluable to have shot more takes from more angles then you are planning to use.



The above example was a forced cut. I didn't originally intend to cut to the corpse lying on the ground, but unfortunately I was forced into doing it for continuity reasons:

The actors perfomances were different on those takes. BRIAN turned his head at different moments, so I couldn't cut from shot 1 to shot 3. I had to find something to cut in between where he had time to turn his head and isn't in the shot. Fortunately, I had a shot of the corspe on the ground, so I could cut that in - making the scene work perfectly.

"Sound is half of your image" is a common saying amongst soundengineers and sounddesigners. And they're spot on. Proper sounddesign is probably one of the most lacking aspects of amateur filmmaking.
Film is an audio-visual media, in which we combine sound and visuals into a whole. So do everything you can to make your sound GOOD!

A soundset of a movie consists basically of 4 elements:

Dialogue

The dialogue is the most important one. No one wants to see a film where you can't hear a word of what's been said. So the dialogue part of your sound most be crisp and clear (and in terms of volume, is usually the loudest).
Using an EXTERNAL microphone is inevitable to achieve that. Using your camera mike will not give good results. Even a cheap 10 $ mike will do a better job.
Alternatively, you can resort to ADR, which will be covered later...

Ambience

Another part is your ambient sound. Every location has his own ambience. Be it a city, a park, a living room, a hospital or a park late at night. They all have their ambience - such as these examples:



And the according AMBIENCE SOUNDFILE



And the according AMBIENCE SOUNDFILE



And the according AMBIENCE SOUNDFILE

The ambience is important to sell a location and make it feel right. 99% of all amateurfilms lack that kind of ambient sound and that's one of the things that has a large subconscious impact - something just doesn't feel quite right...

Soundeffects

Soundeffects are all the layers of sound that an audience can pick up consciously. Not just explosions, lasers or stuff that isn't there, but also simpler things as: Footsteps, a moving coat, a doorbell, etc etc.
Where the ambience is not really connected to the moving images directly, the soundeffects are. Whatever happens on the screen must have an accompanying sound.

Music

I'll talk about the music in the next topic in a more detailed way...


SOUNDQUALITY

While it's always cool to download soundeffects off the internet, I have to be the one to break it to you: 99% of those are simply unusable because they're recorded either in Mono or less then 48 KHZ (which is the sample rate most MiniDV camera record their sound in).
I've heard LOADS of movies where soundeffects were used that were 24 Khz or even 11 Khz ones. Not only does that sound terrible, it also makes it painfully obvious that the sound doesn't actually belong to the video, because experienced listeners can easily seperate it from the rest of the sounds, which defies the purpuse of Soundediting.

Check your soundfiles and if they're any lower then 41.000 Khz an MONO, throw them away, they're useless. And NO, converting them to 41 Khz or 48 Khz doesn't make the slightest difference.

Quicktime is a good way of making sure your sound has the right Quality:



Reality is, you'll have to record your own soundeffects or find a highquality source. Recording your own sound effects is the best way, and it's also loads of FUN. A process that is commonly referred to as:

FOLEY WORK

Foley work (named after mister Foley - not Axel) is the process of recreating soundeffects in postproduction, record them and then apply them to your image.
Since you have a camera and a microphone (If you don't, get one... Now!) it's simple to do.

In NightCast, we didn't use one single bit of original audio! Yes, you read right. Every single crack, swoosh, bend, bark and cough you hear during the whole movie has been recorded in a seperate process to ensure the highest possible soundquality:



As you can see, recording each soundeffect seperatly takes time, but it's worth it - simply because you have absolute creative control over all your sound and can edit and downmix them all together easily. If something is too loud or needs to be inforced, you can simply select each sound seperately.


Soundediting

Same as with images, the editing of sound is a process involving several rules and needs to be done precisly in order to work flawlessly for an audience.



What you see above is an example of soundediting of a scene. Your job as a soundeditor is now to blend all those different layers - dialogue, ambience, soundeffects and music and all those tiny snippets of individual soundfiles together into one fluent piece of soundwork accompanying your movie.


Sounddesign

Apart from all the technical issues with sound comes the actual Sounddesign. Sounddesign means the process of using sound consciously to add something to your scene or tell something to the audience. Just slapping soundeffects on it doesn't cut it.

Does that punch really sound hard enough? When he opens that door, should it go smoothly or have a slight squeeky sound to it? how does that computer sound when it acknoledges an order, does it sound at all? Should I decrease the volume of the ambience to put the stress on the sad moment - because the cars driving by were cool before, but really distract from this emotional moment now?

Similar to costumes and makeup and the like, you also need proper sounddesign to make a loaction sound believable. Let's take the example from that script outtake:



We used pretty much every sound clichee to make the location work as a hospital: You can hear sirens, an EEG beep , an ambulance driving by and the famous "Dr Taggard, please report to..." over the speakers - all of this had been added in post to help sell the location.

Because there were such few people in there, we tried to still make it sound a tad busy by adding a very faint hint of a chat between a doctor and a patient into the background.

Together with the music and the soundeffects of walking, the computer running, the printer responding, the files she lifts etc. you have a fine blend of an interesting sounddesign.


ADR - Additional Dialogue Recording

ADR is commonly used on big movies. Basically it means this: Actors come back after the shoot and re-record their lines in a clean soundenvironment matching to the visual information. Those files are then added to the movie.

Getting proper sound direct on a shoot can be a pain, especially for small crew independent movies. We tried to do it, but quickly decided to do it all in post, because there was always something destroying a clean sound plate: Wind, Birds, Airplanes, People shouting, The Power generator... you name it, we had it.

Referring to ADR can be a lifesaver when you have bad sound. All the dialogue you hear in NightCast was ADR'ed:



Think about if ADR is an option for you. Because honestly, on a shoestring budget, it might be the only way you can actually get a crisp and clear sound...

Last edited by Sollthar on Mon Jan 08, 2007 3:10 pm; edited 2 times in total

My favorite part of sound, being the big filmmusic geek I am.

The basic rule is this: Music is something, everyone can relate to. Consciously AND subconscioulsly. So music can decide if your dramatic climax is really dramatic, or if your horror thriller moment really is thrilling. Don't just settle for your favorite song because you like it. Find the time to look for a music that fits the mood perfectly.

Style

Chose a style that matches your narration / genre. Don't just use hip hop in your love story because you like hip hop, don't just used techno music in your star wars fanfilm because you like it. Think about the feelings you want to get across, then think about what style fits the scene. And as a general rule, try to remain instrumental. If you have a singer singing a text, you'll have the audience be distracted to what he's singing about. And if they do that, which they will, prey the text has something to do with the scene. Especially don't use a singer in dialogue sequences. You don't want to have several people talking at the same time.

As you can hear in the example video, composer Robin Hoffmann and myself decided on an orchestral approach for NightCasts main theme. NightCast is a very powerful and emotional epic kind of film, going for an orchestral score was a simple choice in our case:



But not all the music in the film is orchestral. In one of the dialogue sequences that takes places in a restaurant, we decided there needed to be music as well - but just slight background music. It was provided by a friend of mine who plays the guitar and sings:



Using an entirely different sort of music also helped to divide the "score" and this "background music" because obviously, the 2nd track is part of the ambienec. However, it needed to be chosen carefully not to bother or distract the audience.

Mood

Find a piece that fits the mood of your scene. Is it a fast paced action scene? Use music that is fast. Is your hero winning? Then use a music that sounds heroic. Is your action scene absolutely hopeless? Then find a music that sounds hopeless, don't remain at the fast paced technosong. Basic rules are these: Always be aware of what the momentaneos mood of the scene is. And don't forget, moods change! You need to keep your audience interested, so don't settle for a 3 minute all action. Find out moments, where to mood changes.

For example, there's different kind of action: The hero has the upper hand, the bad guy has the upper hand, the climax is near, the fight has just begun, the hero is threatened to die, the evil guy almost loses etc. A GOOD scene switched back and forth between these moods and keeps the audience interested. Make sure your music does the same! At the right time.

Don't have a scene that is "exciting" for 4 minutes, because the excitement won't hold that long. But if you change the mood regularly, your audience has to adapt.
Compare it with a roller coaster, you need to have both up and downs, all the time. If you'd always be going down, it would lose any appeal very quickly and you'd adapt. But if it keeps changing, it'll stay interesting.



Original Music or Not

The question of having an "original soundtrack" or not always comes up in a lowbudget movie... The same rules applies here as with the casting:

There is composeres out there who will love to help you with your movie you just need to find them!

Having said that, how easy it will be to find someone depends on two things:

1. How good your movie looks

Obviously, composers don't want to waste their time and work for days and weeks on something that looks pants. Plus a good film might has some commercial value - even if it isn't sold. But it might lead you to a job that IS.

2. How resourceful you are

Sitting at home looking at the ceiling won't get you any composers. Same as with the actors, you need to go out look for them. Look in forums, search the internet, go to a school for musicians, ask your friends, try it yourself - everything you can think of, try it.


And never forget: Music tells it's own story. Make sure the story your music tells is the same that your visuals tell.

Something to make clear from the start: Grading helps a lot, but it doesn't do miracles.

If your original footage isn't worth anything, your best go at grading a shot won't help much. Having said that however, there is a lot you can do with proper grading - but also a lot you can destroy with wrong grading and just randomly fiddle with colors.

You should also try to avoid having an "overly dominant" color - Always see that you have areas in your image that have a different color information and not everything is "green" or "blue" or "red".

THE FILMLOOK

Once again, the famous film look. Video isn't film and will never look like film. But there are a few things you can do to it to make it come closer to actual film. I'll explain the steps we did with the following
example:



Yeah, this is the original shot. The white balance is utterly screwed and the shot is typically video: Hardly any contrast and the colors are pretty comicy looking. The first step in making our shoots look better was always the contrast:



Changing the contrast meant in this case that the NightCast suit needed to have more structure. The whole shot is slightly brighter now too.
The next step now is the actual color correction. In this case mainly: To reduce the reds and give the image a natural color back:



Having done that, the next step is adding a slight "glow" to the image. That is being achieved by creating a 2nd layer of the same image / clip. This clip is then turned black and white and reduced in it's brightness (how bright the image is affects how strong the glow will be, in our case, I want the glow to be hardly noticeable). Then the image is blurred a bit:



This "Glow Layer" is then added to the colorcorrected image with the "add" or "screen" key (easily doable in VisionLab or CompositeLab). Which results in this:



The image again wins some important contrast and loses a bit of it's color. Film is slightly less colorheavy then video, so reducing colors will most likely help you to make your video look closer to film.



This last step then adds a bit of artificial depth of field (only really doable in static shots, unless you want to mask out an actor in every shot) and sime detail grading to bring out important elements (such as they eys of both actors and the details on the right shoulder of BRIAN.


Different mood sets

Applying different grading can affect the mood of a scene very heavily. If you use cold colors (cold colors are colors like blue and green) you can make you scene look darker and gritty. Use the grading to support the mood that is currently in your scene. If you're doing a romance, then don't use cold colors. If you're doing something exciting and coldhearted, giving your image a slightly blueish tint will support that.



This is a very distant emotional and pretty dark scene in the movie, so the look had to represent that. The grading therefore needed to reflect that coldness and darkness with the chosen grading:




Grading gone wrong!

Grading is - in most cases - something that should be picked up subconsciously. If you look at an image and immedieately spot it's been tempered with, you've most likely overdone it.

What you need to look out for most is the shadow colors. They should remain BLACK. I've seen images roughly looking like this:



One or more color were all over the place, which is just shouting "I've no idea what I'm doing" out loud.
Grading can be done extremely, of course - and let's face it, the above examples are quite a difference from their original - but you still need to be carefuly not to slap on random colors.

Skin tones are the easiest way to spot bad grading: Ever seen someone with a green face? Or a yellow cheek? A blue ear? Most likely, this is resulting because the grading has been done way too heavily.


Hot Spots

Something to generally avoid, not only in your grading process, but also during shooting, is to have a "hotspot" anywhere but in your outline caused by the outline light.

A hotspot is a part of the image that has lost all it's detailes due to being overexposed to light.



This ungraded image already has a big mistake: It contains hot area that are far too bright and have lost it's color and structure information. Look at my forehead - it's way too brightly lit:



Having a closer look at the area you can see that there are pixels that are entirely white - eg have no more color information. There's nothing you can do to fix this. Grading will just result in this pixel having another color information then white, but it'll still just remain an area lacking the information needed to be properly graded.

Hot spots are a common problem with videocamera. If you look through the fxhome cinema, you'll find them everywhere. This is because most amateur filmmakers don't look out for those (even if you do, it'll still be tough to avoid them)

The one trick is to use the manual shutter speed, or manual lens setting on your camera (most cameras have an option to do that) and match it to the lighting conditions. Always make sure to avoid WHITE in any image you shoot. Shoot your original images a bit darker then you want them if necessary, but avoid hotspots whenever possible.

Visual Effects are a big aspect of filmmaking, on a site called "fxhome", I don't need to tell you that. However, there is certain things to say about the use of vfx in general.

Most people think of the wrong things when they hear "visual effects". To them, a visual effect is something WOWing like a starship, a T Rex, a CG character or something else that is wicked and can only be achieved by a VFX wizard. However, a visual effect can also be something small that most people probably don't even see.

Using VFX to add objects to your story

Visual effects come in where practical effects on set fail. There is something you want to do in your film you can't afford to do for real or that is simply impossible.

For example, we could not afford a real military truck. So we ended up shooting a plate like this:



Since the empty plate was filmed in a random garage and was a handheld shot, the shot had first to be motiontracked. Motiontracking means extracting 3D information from that shot to import in any 3D application, so your composited objects follow the motion of the camera.



The objects were then modelled and textured and placed into the shot. The truck that is coming down, a jeep on the left and a poster on the right to make the garage look more "military". The most difficult part is to match the lighting of the original plate.



The finally rendered shot looks like this. When compositing 3D into a lifeaction shot, what you need to be careful of is to match light and shadows. Match the contrast of the shot - first examine your shot and look for the DARKEST spot of a material that has roughly the same color as the material you're rendering. Your render mustn't be darker nor brighter then that in order not to look out of place.



As you can see, the GRADING part of the shot is the last step you do - as well as some final touches (lost the pedestrian sign). Never grade your shots before you've done visual effects work on them. Grading happens LAST. Because otherwise you'll have a terrible time to do proper compositing. Plus the right grading can help you sell a compositing a lot better.

Using VFX to add locations to your story

Apart from adding objects like the truck above to your movie, visual effects can also be a solution when you're missing a location or not to enhance one you have. This is where bluescreen / greenscreen comes in.



Since we needed an operationroom for about 4 shots in the movie and couldn't find one, we decided to go with the VFX approach and do it greenscreen.

When you do a greenscreen shot, there's a few things you need to look out for: First of all, try to have your screen as evenly lit as possible. With the power of Visionlab, a simple green piece of cloth will do (The scene is shot in the garage). Make sure your actors are fully covered by the greenscreen and don't overlap - In our case there was a bit of a problem zone on the arm of the older surgeon, which could have been fixed using masks easily. In our case though, that wasn't necessary because that area was going to be obscured.



Now the background plate, which was again modelled in Cinema4D - As you can see, quite quickly with some simple shade and textures stitched together in Photoshop for some structure.



This element was an additional lighting element added to support the bright spotlight in an operation room. Having slight beams of light can do incredible things, try it on your shots. And it's quite quick to do as well: You can draw some white lines in Photoshop and then blur them: Viola.



The final composite looked like this, with having two additional greenscreen elements added and blurred to give the shot a feeling of depth and hide even more of the background and the problem zones in the shot. Finding creative ways of hiding problemativ areas can save your shots.



And the grading to give it that cold OP look we wanted.


STOCK FOOTAGE

Every VFX artists best friend is stock footage of effects. Because they save you a lot of time.
Stock footage are basically pre-recorded elements of various things... dust, smoke, fire, explosions, blood, sparks, debris, muzzle flashes or whatever else you can think of.

Numerous FX shots in NightCast were only possible because of the large amount of Stock Footage we have shot for it. Especially elements like smoke and dust can help sell shots immensly. But also different fire elements need to enhance or in one point fix certain shot's that were never intended to be an FX shot.

This sequence for example need to be enhanced with sparks and smoke to look as menacing and exciting as we imagined it:



So called "light based" effects are easily compositable. Smoke, blood, sparks, fire recorded against black result in something you can pretty quickly add to your footage using the "add" or "screen" key, which can be done even in EffectsLab.
So a vivid selection of different sparkey and smokey footage plus a little play with the lights of the scene and the added grading made it look like this:



In another example, a visual effect was needed to hide something of the original footage.
When you look at this picture, you can see the rebel in the background holding up his arm. I just couldn't stand the way he fell, it looked absolutely ridicolous.



So the explosion, which was a practical effect done on set, need to be digitally enhanced to obscure his weird wheel move in the background. Another change of stock footage to prove to be an invaluable asset to have. I could simply take a standalone recorded large flame and add it to the real explosions. The two together combine to a large mix in which the mistake could be corrected.




There's a lot of different visual effect techniques and while I'd love to explain all of them - at least the ones I know - I hope the above examples can help you to a certain extent.


That's it. Sollthar's filmmaking guide 2 ends right here for the moment... Now go out and shoot a proper film!

And the new Filmmaking Guide is officially online! DONE!

Fantastic Sollthar!! Well Done, and Thanks for Sharing!

You're welcome! Hopefully it is helpful to the one or the other here.

Awesome stuff! *downloads all the clips

Very great post... A pdf version with all the clip in a zip file could be wonderfull.

Shadu

Nightcast!

SOLLTHAR, WE LOVE YOU. This is the best Filmmaking FAQ I've ever seen. It also makes me want Nightcast. Now.



This image induced nervous laughter.

Heh, looking at that FCP sound design screenshot, it makes me think my 99 audio track FCE won't cut it if I ever go feature-length...

wahwahweewah. it nice... very nice jagsemash