Ever heard of the phrase:
We’ll fix it in post?
More likely post will fix you.
What is this ‘post’?
What is Post Production in filmmaking?
Post Production is everything that happens from the minute you stopped shooting your last take, to creating the last deliverables of your movie or video.
We used the cooking analogy in What is Pre-Production? Let’s continue with that. You’ve cooked your food, now what?
| Cooking | Post Production |
| You haven’t added salt. | You can add it in post, but it’s not going to be same thing. |
| You’ve forgotten an important ingredient. | You can’t add it post without paying a whole lot more than what you would have had if you’d done it during production. |
| You haven’t thought about the presentation. | It’s going to look average, unmotivated and patchy. |
| You hadn’t planned the portions correctly. | Your film is either too long or too short. |
| You spent too much time cooking. | There isn’t adequate time left for proper post production. |
| You spent too much money cooking. | There’s no money left for plates, bowls, cutlery, that all important candle, and just-the-right music. |
| You haven’t thought about the menu card. | You haven’t thought about the posters, website, or trailer. |
| You’ve chosen a bad ingredient. | This is what happens with audio. Everyone will hear it, no doubt. |
A smart chef will visualize the entire experience of eating – from the moment a customer walks in the door, gets seated and reads the menu; to the after-meal experience and the ‘good-bye-with-a-smile’ at the end.
A beginner isn’t expected to know the entire sequence of events leading up to a release or finished product, though it is important to understand the place of post production.
Can you really fix things in post?
Only those who have been burnt by fire will know how bad it really is.
Think of dreams. Many people – beginners, the lazy ones, the fly-by-night operators, and the wannabes-who-can’t-produce-excellence-if-their-lives-depended-on-it-but-still-want-to-be-the-boss – believe post production is a totally new dream, one which begins afresh regardless of what happened in production.
Wrong.
I can understand why they feel that way. It’s a new day, closer to home perhaps, with air-conditioning. You’re with new people, and it’s quiet and peaceful.
But it’s a false sense of security. It’s still the same dream (or nightmare), just a different scene.
The post production dream is a continuation of your filmmaking saga. If your pre-production was sloppy (or non-existent), your production was hell. Post production, naturally, is the seventh level of hell. Your nightmare will continue. It’s a given.
Post production is where all your bills come due. You’ve been running away from many things. They’re all going to catch up here. So, as a beginner, what you have to understand about post production before we dive deeper is, believe this before you started running.
Why is Post Production the least important stage of filmmaking?
If you have seen the end result in all its minutest detail at the beginning, and you have planned and executed your pre-production correctly, your production will go well (even when the you-know-what hits the fan).
Post production, then, just becomes an extension of your journey, kind of like running a home run after the ball has left the park. It’s still work, mind you, and you can’t afford to slip up.
It’s like American Football, you still have to run the last few yards to touchdown.
If you’re screwed up in planning your film, or shooting your film, then post production cannot fix that. It cannot create shots where none existed, nor improve bad performances, nor remove terrible camera mistakes or poor lighting or production design.
The camera is almost like a truth serum. All you can do in post production is try to make sense of the mess you created before.
Now it’s time to dig deeper.
In the different stages of Post Production I’ll go into detail about each stage and what it entails:
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must say. Very rarely do I come across a blog that’s both informative and
entertaining, and let me tell you, you’ve hit the nail on the head.