Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/629103
PRIMETIME www.postmagazine.com 13 POST JANUARY 2016 the day. So, like anything, you plan the one thing, the reality becomes a version of that plan that you hit slightly and the goal for me, specifically, in my mind, is al- ways trying to nudge everything back to that perfect ideal that we had. If you find along the way, if we go a little bit off the course from what we once thought, we'll see if that is advantageous in any way. But we plan from the get go and I tend to think about it like a train that wants to jump off the tracks. There are so many moving pieces and each department is a part of that train and it's hard to stay in- sync when you're moving so quickly and you're going from one episode to anoth- er. Things change and you're always try- ing to nudge everything and you're just trying to keep making sure the communi- cation lines are really open. That's one of the biggest things. Just making sure that communication is open." Whitman says that the project ran from May 2015 to when final post com- pleted just before Christmas. "It was a long schedule for just six episodes," he says, but without many hitches. "Let's be honest. Technically speaking, this went pretty smoothly. The Alexa to Avid for- mat was pretty rock solid. There haven't been many bumps in the road at all." One of the few challenges the team did encounter was with the 3D shots, involving lots of camera movements. "Whether it be handheld or panning, those shots tend to be the ones where they are more like keyframes you have to hit. The shot is the shot and it's one big shot, but within that shot there may be 10, 20, 30, a hundred different keyframes or certain things needed to happen and it's a bigger visual effect with 3D or matte paintings or whatnot. Those are the ones that always require the most attention. Really, anytime you're using multiple plates for visual effects and add- ing an artist's touch, those are the ones. First, you have the comp work to put the shots together and then you have the artists come in and make models. So those are the ones that typically require the most work." When asked if the team felt any pressure to not disappoint die-hard fans, Whitman shares a final thought, "It's been so long since those times. When I got called to work on this show, it blew me away. I was 15 when the show was on the air and I certainly watched it. So, for me, it was unbelievable and surreal to know that in the weeks and months to come I would be producing post on such a famous and well-known show. I thought, 'Wow, this is going to be an undertaking,' but I never once saw any hesitation or concern about any of that from anybody on the show. It was really about getting the gang back together who had done this for 10 years. At this point, it was second nature to them. The only thing that's really changed is the television landscape — there's more television and more mediums and there are more serialized projects in the television landscape. Shows like 24, Homeland and Walking Dead, so each story is a continuation of the previous episode. And that was not the way the original X-Files was and it's still not that way. So one of my biggest questions was, how will today's television viewer respond to television that isn't serialized? But I think the fans of the original series are going to think, nothing much has changed. A decade has gone by and that's where we are. Plus, for me, David and Gillian and their chemistry and the title music that Mark Snow wrote, it just throws you back. Here we are. This is The X-Files again." The X-Files 2016 maintains the same dark, mysterious look as its 1990's iteration. Original cast and crew returned for the reboot.