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E D I T [ cont. from 12 ] so amazing and well shot” they could be used in big-budget commercials. Walker and company also looked for structure — one storyline, understandably, is the passage of July 24’s 24 hours.The staff found one “fantastic shot” for starters — the full moon at midnight, filling the screen — submitted by a Dutch videographer who managed to capture the silhouette of a passing airliner as it di- agonally bisected the orb. Daily doings from around the world often start with what Walker termed “ablutions,” such as brush- ing teeth or showering. Later, there’s lunch. July 24, T H I S 2010 was a Saturday so there were more activities outside of work to be documented, including a bare- foot skydiver in freefall. Darkness falls in Life in a Day, changing the mood. One dramatic sequence Walker cut involves footage from an outdoor concert/rave held in Germany called “Love Parade.” Planned to accommodate 300,000 attendees, about 1.5 million actually showed up and a stampede ensued in a tunnel resulting in 19 deaths and hundreds injured. As Life in a Day was locking picture by mid-De- cember, the documentary comprised 900 clips, sub- W O R K F L O W [ cont. from 21] DI SCREENING & OUTPUT The DI theater at Filmworks/FX doubles as a VFX screening room. Globalstor and BlueStor RAID units power Assimilate Scratch, which is used for conform coloring and playback. Reviewing VFX shots on a com- puter monitor or even a 72-inch flat screen doesn’t serve as a good quality control (QC) reference on im- agery that will be projected.We screen off a 10-bit NEC 2K DLP projector on a 20-foot screen for re- view. Even if we are working in 4K,we can quickly ren- der cache the files in Scratch to play at 2K without having to do lengthy rendering of the files at 2K. This type of high-end play back would have been too costly for many post firms to acquire 10 years ago. Current high-quality 2K projectors, including the NEC projector in use at Filmworks/FX can be had for a relatively low outlay.You won’t have one in your house unless you are wealthy, but being able to re- view VFX work and conforms have saved Film- works/FX countless hours in redoing shots as well as being able to receive timely approvals from clients. Final Cut Studio and AJA Kona 3-driven Apple G5 hardware are also used in the DI theater for visual ef- fects versioning where an entire film is typically watched on HD straight from the Final Cut timeline projected via SDI into the 10-bit NEC/Texas Instru- ments DLP projector for continuity and secondary quality control. A QC process that may be repeated hundreds of times in production. As an instance of QC at 2K 10-bit resolution to DI screen, filmmakers on a recent show were shocked to find something new when their film was projected at the DI theater. One scene had a central character of the film with a prop knife sticking out of his chest. During editing for the small screen, editors, producers and the director had not noticed the prop knife sticking out of the actor in casual conver- sation with other players. This was a quick fix for the visual effects depart- ment but it could not have happened without high- end projection where troubleshooting problems come down to being able to literally see them com- ing. And isolating and solving issues are what it’s about across the production pipeline. [ cont. from 40 ] based around AUDIO FOR INDIES Harrison MPC consoles.The larger room is outfitted with 320 channels and can be expanded further. Four Avid Pro Tools|HD 2 systems are used for playback, and a fifth Pro Tools rig is used for recording. “Every job is different, but typically one rig is used for dialogue [and] one or two rigs for effects,” explains Ed Ballard, technical director, re-recording operations & engineering. “The music might be a part of the dia- logue rig, or depending on how big the dialogue is, may be put on with the Foley somewhere else. Every job is different in how they decide to spread it out. Usually the dialogue guy takes care of the music, so it’s convenient to have it on the same rig.” Robertson sums up by stating Deluxe’s goal is to make each client feel like they are the most impor- tant person in the building.“We really treat indepen- dent filmmakers like they are the studios, and we try to make sure that they don’t feel like they are sec- ond-class citizens.” SATAN HATES YOU — A DIREC- TOR’S PERSPECTIVE Writer/director James Felix McKenney’s Monster- Pants Movies worked with producer Larry Fes- senden’s Glass Eye Pix to produce the horror film Satan Hates You, which had a week-long screening last month in Brooklyn. The film tells the stories of two individuals and their personal struggles with the devil himself. Marc is a depressed, self-loathing alcoholic, who flies into fits and murders people because he can’t accept who he is.Wendy is a party girl who hangs around with the wrong crowd.Two devilish imps push them along to do bad things. McKenney has worked with Glass Eye Pix on sev- eral projects in the past, and the teams often use the same ensemble cast and production resources. Satan Hates You is a film that McKenney says he originally planned to produce on a much bigger scale, but simply didn’t have the production budget. “It’s based on Christian scare media,” he says of the synopsis, “films they used to show in Sunday school basements, or to Boy Scouts. Any child that they wanted to scare straight. It’s like the Christian version of a driver’s ed film. I wanted to do something like that — not imitate it or make fun of it, but just do my own version of it.” The feature was shot using early edition Panasonic P2 cameras, and was edited by McKenney using Final Cut Pro. “That’s generally how I work. Not that I am the greatest editor in the world, but that I’m the mitted by approx 400 users. Often, clips would be used to make montages meant to introduce a seg- ment. The final runtime was coming in around 90 minutes — not bad for a trip around the world.Tech- nicolor London graded the movie on Spectre. One thing Walker took away from his time on Life in a Day was “how poor sound is” when you put a camera, with its built-in mic, in the hands of ama- teurs. But as Walker prepares to star t on a new movie by writer/director Steve McQueen (Walker edited his Hunger in 2008), he has one vow: “I’ll never complain again!” cheapest,” he jokes. Production sound was recorded right into the camera. David Groman operated a boom and had a mixer hanging off his hip, sending the signal to the Panasonic camera.While the production used two cameras for the shoot, only one captured audio. After McKenney performed a basic mix, he turned it over to sound designer Graham Resnick. “He’s done sound on the Glass Eye Pix films for the last six years or so, and he does all the sound design and the mix at the same time in his home studio. He uses Pro Tools. [He] gets the mix until it sounds great in there, and then we take it to a real room.” The final mix took place at Dig It Audio (www.dig- itaudio.com) in New York City, with Tom Efinger serv- ing as re-recording mixer, and Jeff Seelye acting as sound editor. Dig It, says McKenney, gave the film “a little bit of a polish. I think our final mix was no longer than a day. We went in there and paid for a day, and I think we only used part of that.[We] went back later for a final polish with the remaining hours we had left. It was ba- sically a one-day polish.” The film was mixed in 5.1 and stereo. And with more of a cult appeal, McKenney is hoping Satan Hates You sees DVD or VOD release. www.postmagazine.com January 2011 • Post 45