...that's a phrase that I heard myself saying a few times on-set during the shoot of Selective Listening.
(Hi, Tim here)
I have heard from certain folks in post-production that people use the fact that things can get sorted in post as too much of a buffer. The fact is, that when the sun is going down or you're otherwise pressed for time, it is comforting to know that things can get sorted in post. However – note (from self Editor/Visual Effects Apprentice) to self (Director) – it can save a lot of time and effort to get it right on the day.
To be fair to myself I was aware of this, and the things that we are now having to do in terms of VFX were somewhat unavoidable. Still, I'm having a lot of time to sit and deliberate with myself, currently at 3am on a Sunday night / Monday morning, while ploughing through a few VFX shots.
We are very happy to once again be working with top-notch post-production house OnSight for the colour grade and majority of our visual effects. Miriam and I previously worked with them a few years ago on our short film The Special Effect (click here to view).
The three visual effects I am working on are under my purview because it would have significantly increased the amount of days that we would have needed to be with OnSight and so I resolved to do them myself.
Unfortunately, I'm not au fait with moving visual effects packages such as After Effects (nor am I equipped with them) and so I am having to go through the painful process of altering frames one-by-one in Photoshop for re-importing back into the sequence later on.
To give an example, here is a shot that we had limited time with on the last day of principal photography. We were losing the light, had issues with traffic and I did see the problems that we would later encounter, but picturing how I would resolve it, the call was made to move on.
The issue we had was that our long-suffering puppeteers had to crouch and move at speed behind a hedge. Through no fault of their own, their heads occasionally popped into shot...
...I am therefore having to remove heads and puppets...
...and carefully put the puppet back into the frame...
With this shot and a couple of others with similar issues, I'm currently working my way through approximately 700 frames.
Off to bed now – more to do tomorrow!
