Post Magazine

October 2010

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what’s up doc? POST: What did he use in terms of tools? CHILCOTT: “He created the animations in Photoshop and put them together in After Effects, but he used real paper tex- tures on cycles to give things a more organic feel. For the more complex shots, like the proficiency maps of how well students are performing by state, he used Maya so we could have dynamic 3D moves, but kept the same paper textures and line drawn anima- tion to give it the same organic feel.” POST: Can you talk a bit about the post? CHILCOTT: “We started post immedi- ately, from even before we shot the first day. Unlike the others documentaries I’ve produced, we shot 72 days, which is a lot. Part of that had to do with the fact that we were actually following these kids and their families throughout their school year. Our editor and assistant editor started digitizing and logging right away. Our assistant editor and spent a whole weekend upgrading it. There were absolutely no problems. “One of the challenges of the edit was we actually started following more families and more reformers and had to whittle it down as our story unfolded.We all made an agreement never to count the actual hours of footage because we didn’t want to know. We upgraded to 4.0 halfway through the film, and as we were finishing 5 came out, but we weren’t going to change at that point.” POST: Who were the editors on the film? CHILCOTT: “The main editor was the wonderful Greg Finton, and he was on the project from beginning to end shaping the story.We also had the amazing editors Kim Roberts and Jay Cassidy editing later in the project as well. It took the talents of all three to complete this very complicated subject.” POST: So you had a ton of footage, how did you get it down to what you needed? CHILCOTT: “With the families we were Waiting for Supermanwas edited on Avid Media Composer 4.0. Michael Azevedo became adept at After Ef- fects and temped in some of our anima- tions using Keynote, which we used on An Inconvenient Truth.We started doing temp charts and graphs on Keynote (our re- searcher Ryan Gallagher would source the facts, then Michael Azevedo would create them) then turned them over to Sean Don- nelly for animation.” POST: What editing system did you use? CHILCOTT:“We did everything on Avid Media Composer 4.0, and we had three sys- tems — one for the editor, one for the assis- tant and another for stock footage searches and logging. We finished the film in the spring and actually started on another ver- sion of the software and were completely paranoid about upgrading — we were working on this for two and a half years, but we realized we had to do it.We did it sys- tem by system with everything backed up 18 Post • October 2010 following,we went through that footage and edited it as we were shooting.We did some- thing interesting — until we heard we were going to Sundance, we kept the movie as two separate movies. Our editing room had three walls covered with tiny little colored index cards that had whole ideas on them or names of the kids we were following or names of the amazing reformers. One Davis called ‘The Folly of the Adults,’ explaining what has happened over the years as we have devolved into fighting about issues amongst adults and many times the kids are not put in first position.That was film one, and was about an hour-and-a-half long. “The other film was also an hour-and-a- half, and that was the story of the five kids and their families that we were following. Those were kept as separate movies right up until December — we were going to Sundance in January.We had the challenge of all three editors very bravely combining the two movies into one. It was a very chal- lenging way to edit but very productive in the end because we found natural jumping off points.” POST: Did the editors work alone and show you different versions along the way? CHILCOTT: “We did a lot of shooting then editing, shooting then editing. It really was simultaneous because as we were fol- lowing these kids as they were applying to get into schools — schools that didn’t have enough spaces.We would shoot for a while www.postmagazine.com and we knew we had downtime until the next event came up, so Davis Guggenheim and I would be back in the office in Santa Monica working with the editors. For the first year it was just Greg Finton and Michael Azevedo.” POST: Where did you do the finishing and how much did you touch the look of the film in post production? CHILCOTT: “We did all our finishing at Company 3 and we did it the way we did on It Might Get Loud. For this,we colored in film space with Stephen Nakamura. The only thing we did differently this time is we did all the conforming in-house, at Jay Cas- sidy’s suggestion, which was fantastic for us because we could rent the equipment that we needed but we could do it on nights and weekends. “Mike Azevedo did it all.We took every- thing on a drive to Company 3 and we conformed the entire movie with the ex- ceptions of special sections that had Flame or other effects work they were doing for us, and they would just drop that into our conform.We did the film-out at EFilm and did our prints at Deluxe, and home video at DDM.” POST: Where do you do your audio post? CHILCOTT: “The incredible Skip Lievsay, along with Joel Dougherty, designed and mixed at Warner Bros, and all of our narra- tion was done at Margarita Mix as well as our temp voiceover sessions.” POST: Knowing what you do now, if you had to do this again, would you change anything? CHILCOTT: “I don’t’ think so.The only thing I was ever nervous about was the up- grade process, and I would definitely take on the conform ourselves.The reason being the conform makes sense to do internally when you have a project like ours with so many different formats. It would be one thing if we consistently shot only our main camera, which was tape-based with DVCPRO tapes, but we would shoot with the card system in the Sony EX3s and edit those at full resolu- tion.We would lower the tape-based stuff to 14:1 or whatever made sense at the time, but if you have 20 minutes of stock footage that might be on DVD, QuickTimes,VHS, HDCAM, HDSR, Digi Beta, it could be really expensive to conform out of house. It made a lot more sense for us to digitize at full res- olution our DVCPRO tapes and drop it in ourselves and then let Company 3 know what was missing.”

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