Making of: Spy Games (Post-Production and Reshoots)

When last we left our wild weekend, it was 3AM Sunday and we’d finished shooting about seven hours later than we had scheduled for.

3AM Sunday put me at 43 hours since waking up on Friday morning, with only the 45-minute nap Saturday morning to break up my waking hours. Although I was actually surprisingly energetic and alert during the last lap of the contest, I must confess that very little of what happened in the initial post-production phase managed to impress itself on my memory. But I’ll try and recall what I can.

I don’t remember the process of assembling the rough cut at all, but what I do remember is that we released Ryan to go get some rest, to come back in the morning when we had the necessary plates ready for him.

Because we’d shot on the RED, we couldn’t work natively with the footage in Final Cut Pro, nor in After Effects (though this latter case has since changed). The RED camera produces 4K footage in a proprietary format, “r3d” files, but also generates Quicktime-compatible “proxies” that can be imported and edited by Final Cut. We cut the short together via the 1K proxies and then rendered high-quality versions of only the footage we used out of REDcine, conformed via Crimson.

In editing we discovered another crisis: the sound was completely unusable. We had been recording audio directly to the RED via XLR, and it was low-fidelity and crackly as shit. (Many of the early RED sound boards were bad, but it has since been rectified in later cameras and early cameras, like mine, were later given free upgrades to the new sound boards.) So once the film was cut, we had to call our Ronald Donnellson, and our original Tanya, back in to re-record their lines.

Meanwhile we were rendering shots for Ryan to work on. Initially we were doing the effects work at 1080p resolution, so that we would have an HD master. But although Ryan did the tracking and compositing with rather stunning speed, we were getting bogged down in the previewing and rendering, and I realized that since the contest wanted only an SD delivery, it was foolish to be wasting time that way. So instead of round-tripping through REDcine — which involved exporting an XML from Final Cut, importing the XML and footage to REDcine, and then rendering the footage from REDcine — we could simply render plates directly from the 1K proxies out of Final Cut, speeding up the entire process considerably.

But even working on sound while Ryan did the visuals, it became clear as the deadline ticked nearer that, with render and travel time to the drop-off factored in, it was simply not going to get done in time to be included in the competition. So we set the final renders and called it a day, since there was no reason to kill ourselves to try and finish when it wasn’t going to happen.

But I found out that the film could still be eligible for screening, and for an “Audience Favorite” award — if I delivered it within 24 hours after the competition. So after a good night’s sleep, I dropped in the finished renders, burned a DVD, and delivered the film to the contest.

The film screened, people liked it, but it didn’t win. (This one did, and well-deserved I think.)

Making of: Spy Games (Production)

Welcome back you loyal checkers-of-my-blog you. The SPY GAMES series was delayed by a laptop theft combined with my gaining full-time employment, so not being able to write on the go and not having the energy to write by the time I’ve fought traffic home. (Excuses, excuses.) But my shiny replacement laptop has arrived and I’m ready to kick this pig.^[1]

When last we left the process, the script was written and the storyboards had been drawn by me and fixed by Brian. We finished this up at about 5 AM, with a call-time at the location of 7AM. So with nothing to do but kill an hour, we snuck in about 45 minutes of sleep.

Before the weekend began, we had determined that we were going to do this project on the RED. Why buy the camera if we’re not going to use it? We knew that the workflow was a little janky (which I’ll address more in the post-production post) but we felt it was worth trying. After all, if we couldn’t finish, it wouldn’t be a huge deal. And if we could, it would be one of the best-looking entries in the competition.

At the same time, we didn’t want to spend money on extra equipment just for a 48-hour film, so we didn’t rent a mattebox or ND filters. This meant that the exterior shooting (which, as of the script stage, was meant to be “daytime”) needed to be shot in the very small window between dawn and sunrise — before dawn, it would be too dark to shoot; after the sun broke the horizon, even with the RED’s significant dynamic range the image would become unpleasantly contrasty and harsh. So we had an early day.

Making of: Spy Games (Pre-Production)

Last summer, we participated in the 48 Hour Film Project. The film missed the competition deadline, for reasons I’ll discuss when we talk about production, but I was personally so happy with the way project had come together that I wanted to finish it as a short in its own right.

But before we get into that, here’s the final short as uploaded to YouTube (this is not the version that was entered into the actual 48 Hour Film Project):