Today has brought grave disappointments in our drama presentation. As a result of the late stage at which we have had to shoot the project, brought on by a lack of motivation from most group members during pre-production to get shooting, and a series of late shows and lie-ins throughout by those crew, I went without any sleep last night in order to go back over the greenscreen effects as planned, and to tweak the cuts to improve the pacing of the film. I have been working remotely with the editor to do this, using dropbox to exchange files. This is due to a particularly tough funeral I attended yesterday, back in Leicestershire.
Once sound recordings had been edited individually, the sound mixing and placement through the video took place late. Though, having heard the full results, a fantastic job was done on the sound design and all of the recordings were clear and inventive, this last-minute rush has caused a disastrous issue. As they were initially working with the rough cut, the sounds were timed to fit with this. I later sent over my changed version in a FCP document via dropbox, although as neither the producer, sound designer or sound recordist informed me, they were unable to access it. As soon afterwards they could no longer use the edit suite as it became late at night, the plan was for them to make the changes from 9am this morning.
What in fact happened was that they had to finish the edits onto the rough cut, and though I arrived back as early as my off-peak train ticket would allow, they did not have time to readjust the mix to fit in with the latest (and much improved) cut. Another factor causing this problem was that they worked with an exported video of the rough cut, rather than sending the sequence from Final Cut Pro. The files were distributed across various computers, making an alternative impossible.
Thus, the efforts I endured throughout the night, and much of the work I have put in throughout two weeks of early mornings and very late nights to the point of exhaustion and copious amounts of stress, has been made irrelevant. In all honesty I feel despondent, and incredibly frustrated and let down. I feel cheated out of a better piece of work by a willingness by others to complete work at the very last minute, and annoyed by the many instances of late appearances, no-shows and distractible attitudes occurring during shooting of the film.
In reflection concerning the post-production process, in future perhaps a greater emphasis on data control and backup is needed, and I will certainly be maintaining my own copies of every file in order to prevent these problems occurring again.
The problems have stretched further than the technical aspects of the film; the late confirmation of our script has led to a late casting process, which coupled with a series of actors unable to help out at the short notice I had to provide, has impacted on my ability to hold any rehearsals or indeed to work with actors in advance of the shooting at all.
Story development has been stunted by a rush to organise shooting and obtain what was needed for the film, at the cost of having any time to consider the fine elements of the script and redraft them. The two redrafts we've had have been small changes focussing mainly on corrections of errors.
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