Final Pick-ups and Editing

Today, I was surprisingly called into an emergency production meeting for the pop promo video.

It turned out, that while the client was satisfied with the footage when he first viewed it, he got second thoughts over the weekend and wanted to change important bits of the footage he previously insisted upon and was adamant to keep in.

But since the client is always king, as a filmmaker you naturally need to find an alternative solution to keep the client happy. So our crew collectively decided today to film a couple of cutaway shots to replace the now missing footage and to enhance the feel as well as the production value of our footage. This not only entailed location scouting with a camera and taking footage of hotel exteriors, brick walls (a favourite design element of our client), but also retaking the atmos and sampling outside atmos of the cityscape, mostly the main streets to capture a bit of that New York feeling our client wanted to evoke with his video.

So we went outside and not only took atoms, but also a couple of cutaway shots of brick walls and hotel exteriors as well as interiors.

Before and after that, Katie and I went through the edit. As co-editor I helped her to slim down and smooth out the rough cut, insert the appropriate transitions, help choose soundtracks and reviewed my Production Log as well as her Edit Decision List to find the best footage possible (or at least the best compromise).

For I, once again, learned the importance of safety takes since we sometimes had a tough time integrating the footage that was shot on the very last day due to continuity errors and a lack of alternatives. So unless I am on a very tight schedule (and even tighter budget), I will never not take additional safety takes!

After that, we finally ventured into colour grading and talked about the colour scheme that I envisioned for the project, which Katie is going to implement on Thursday before we finally hand in the finished product for the client to review on Friday morning.

How awesome it feels when the project is finally finished!