Creation Phases | Post-production
A.K.A Mayhem

Well, if the last page wasn't enough to deter even the bravest of you, this page should. The end product of a standard shoot is a bunch of footage. Footage means lots and lots of shots on lots and lots of videotapes (or reels of cellulose if you're really lucky and rich).
The required question is - what do you do with all this now?

Simple. You take it all into an editing room, watch it once, then again, take down notes about the exact location of every shot on the bunch of tapes and how good it was (or wasn't!). After that you break down in tears either because:

• a) you suddenly realize you forgot to shoot a whole scene, or
• b) You've just spent 65 hours straight just cataloging your footage - and this is just the beginning!

Now that we've logged our footage we have to start putting it together. If you're using video there are two main ways of doing this (if you're lucky enough to be using film, well you're lucky enough anyway!):

• The Poor Man's Way - also known as Cut-to-Cut. That means you put cassettes in VCR's and fiddle around with them for a hell of a long time, usually late at night which is no time to fiddle around with things, wipe out half of your footage, kill your editor in a frenzy, and generally turn into a horrible person.
• The Rich Man's Way - also known as Non-Linear Editing. In this case you save all your footage onto a computer that magically puts everything together just the way you wanted it no stress or fuss included. Then you spend the rest of your life paying off the mortgage for the guy who owns the editing system you used.

The second film I worked on at high-school was a documentary about a deaf child and his family called "14 years of quiet" (or silence - we never really translated it to english). Since documentaries are inherently less structured and organized during preproduction, most of the piecing together of the film's development and body is done during the editing stage. Thus, my friend Tomer and myself spent many a night in the dark crevices of our film departments underground editing room, breathing Carbon Monoxide, Drinking flat Coca-Cola, eating things I wouldn't like to remind myself of and desperately trying to complete the film. It took some 9 different versions until we finally came out with something satisfactory. I think. During this period we found ourselves time and again in situations that would easily drive an observer to commit us to a mental institute (including filming an atrocious little videoclip to Madonna's "Rain" which we gave as a birthday present to another one of our friends).

And yet, like I always say, it is one of the most fun things to do in the world!

I originally put down one film's name to be included in this stage specifically. I must say that I feel there are so many films out there that deserve mention for their editing and that I just couldn't add to the site (at least not quite yet). These include:

• Jean-Luc Goddard's A Bout de Souffle, or as it was known in English - Breathless. Breathless is a famous French new wave film, that makes beautiful use of editing to create the uneffacing, loose sense, that film no longer has to conform to the "respectable" rules created by films of that time.
• Joel and Ethan Coen's films repeatedly make use of editing to portray character's phsycological states and set up atmosphere. This is quite pronounced in Barton Fink, where the combination of editing with the Coen's beautiful use of camera, defines Barton's room.