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Scheduling Post-Production

The movie is broken into reels. It works like this:
pages 1 through 10 in the script are "Act 1"
pages 11 through 20 are "Act 2"
and so on.

However note this: "Act 2" actually begins on the first full scene which begins on or after page 11.

This means that some acts might be fairly long — because they have a very long scene with which they end, taking them up into the "decade" of pages for the next act — and some acts might be very short because the previous act "ate into" their pages.

Are you over that? Because I sure am.

We want to keep the acts in 10-page sets so that it's very easy to figure out what act a given scene should be in. But you'll also write down which act which scene goes in, because you'll have to make a post-production schedule.
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Post production checklist example

 
The post - production punchlist is the most dynamic of all the documents we use. That's because as stuff starts getting finished, we might start deleting stuff from the punchlist.
The most important things on the punchlist is:

  1. what needs to be done?
  2. who is doing it?

Let's go over the steps in post-production to see what we're dealing with.

  1. The picture gets edited
  2. The picture gets locked
  3. (CG may or may not happen, but we know what the timing of any CG will be)
  4. (Color Correction may or may not happen.)
  5. OMF files are created
  6. Post-production sound happens

 
While post-production sound is going on we might be still finishing up CG effects and color-correction. We lock the picture in acts. As soon as we feel a given act won't have any timing changes — in other words we won't be moving picture right or left on the timeline — we can lock the act. Sometimes that means that an effect may not exist yet, but we know how long the effect will take, so we can lock the act in order to move onto the sound edit/mix.

In pictures like ours there can easily be hundreds of effects. As much as we might try to keep the number of effects low, we always end up with more effects than we've planned. The ratio seems to be about 3:1 of effects planned to effects we actually need.
Most visual effects really need to be finished before we go into a sound edit. If, for instance, you have a robotic dinosaur attacking an android before it gets thrown unceremoniously out of an airlock, the sound department is going to want to know where the dinobot's feet hit the floor so that they can add the appropriate sound effect.
At many post-production houses this would mean that the CG department would create a wireframe, and then a solid version of the CG effect. We... just don't do that. We'll go ahead and render full - frame "final" versions of things first. That's just the way we do things. It doesn't seem to really take substantially more time to create a final render and then a composite. I mean, it does, but it would make it a LOT harder to keep track of everything so be happy keeping track of proxy files isn't part of the post-production scheduling world of the Pandora Machine.

 



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