How to make a movie in 7 Hours: The making of Fear Itself (Part 3)

Post-Production

After we finished filming (except for the last scene of course), the next morning after very limited hours of sleep, I logged and transferred all the footage to final cut pro, which is pretty much the only way to go when it comes to editing. Side note for people reading this, even though it's important to log all the footage you put onto the computer, it takes a hell of a long time just to name what shots are what, keywords like "Mack-A two shot bad sound" or whatever to give you as much detail as possible what that shot is so when your editing you can go right to it and you know what you want. When editing Fear itself, one of my big issues was trying to have the least amount of continuity errors as possible when your cutting between shots, such as how the actors are positioned between shots, and for the most part I think it's hardly noticeable, but there's some continuity errors that unfortunately I couldn't re shoot and to the actors credit they tried to stay in the same positions and blocking they were in previous takes which for the most part helped a lot, but there's the odd time it didn't match. A lot of continuity errors were in the audio also, in some cases the audio wasn't good because of the crappy microphone on the camera so I would just use the audio of another take, and it wouldn't match no matter what I tried, so instead I just tried to make it as unnoticeable as I could, which I personally think worked, no one's complained about it...yet.

Considering I couldn't re shoot like I said, I can't really complain with the continuity errors. All those transitions were done because actually I had some others to make everything more dream like, and later I took them out because there were simply too many of them and gave away the dream ending too quickly. However the ones I have now pretty much just cover continuity errors pretty poorly. Another important feature which worked amazingly well for me in editing was a smooth cam feature which nine times out of ten smoothed shaky cam shots which really helped my film which was about 95% shaky cam, made it look a lot better, and in some shots making look better then what it was, such as tracking shots that were really me walking backwards, which really made the film look better then it was.

After I got a rough cut done the second day of editing (the end of the first night I think I got to the pay phone scene) I showed a version to my roommate and he just hated it, and to his credit as a rough cut I understood a lot of his points, and I changed them. And the next day I got Spencer who did Gunfight! that I helped with to come in and help me refine some of the sound and editing, since all the sound was from the microphone in the camera, the audio for the most part sucked, so he helped refine it, and especially Nicole's monologue the rough cut was much much darker, almost to the point you couldn't see her, so Spencer showed me how to boost up the brightness to the right level where it didn't distort the shots which helped a lot. Also there was a line that was taken out in the first scene where Tom says "We decided to eat instead of study", there was a line after where Victoria says "This is how you two were studying?" kinda jokingly sarcastic and then Tom says "We got kind of bored", but it just seemed to drag the moment.

Overall, I'm happy with the film considering the factors in making it. I don't think i would have changed the actors for anyone else after how much they gave for the sake of this film, and keeping me sane in the late hours getting those last shots in, and I know I've said this before, I just hope they see the finished product and are proud of it.

Rich

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