Director's Weekly Post Production Blog WEEK 40 Friday August 08th...

I am now on a plane to Poland, to the land of golonka and perrogi where I will give a lecture on film-making. I am glad of the break as I am sick to death of post production on the film. This week has been the most frustrating week so far (that’s saying something), a slow motion car crash that I have seen approaching for weeks but as no-one else wanted to see it, couldn’t be prevented.

The day in the cutting room on Sunday looking at music alternatives for the sixth time was cancelled as Caroline became busy that day. Hopefully there will be time next week.

On Monday there was the one pleasant surprise of the week in the mail. At last the VAT form arrived. After that Ian at Synxspeed told me yet again there would be no time for mixing this week. He joked “Call again next Monday so I can give you more bad news!” Then Grace cancelled our update meeting yet again.

In the evening I went to Harpenden for the final time to check the tracks for the sound FX. Axle had done an amazing job with the FX for the tripping scene. Real brilliance. Along with the hisses, screeches and other FX, she has made wonderful use of a horse and cart sound that even exceeded my eccentric notions of how it could be used. Wonderful.

Tuesday was a ridiculously frustrating day. Despite getting the call to come into Midnight Transfer at 2pm, I spent until 6.30pm, waiting in reception and killing time by going to book shops while some Glaswegians pissed around with a commercial and I twiddled my thumbs. When I finally got into the grading suite I learned two things to my horror.

The first was that on Monday the spirit will be broken up to go to another site. That means all the shots that need to be re-scanned need to be done before then. That includes the shots that were missed from the original conform, (it hasn’t been fully checked yet, Ben Gable should have checked before we started but didn’t) and the shots that had bobble (movement in the gate) on need to be done before then. I have been telling people these need to be done for the last three weeks but finally they realised the urgency.

The second thing was that the SFX shots have not been brought into the grading suite yet despite being delivered by Daniel last week. The one that had been brought in was missing 5 frames. These frames had not been done because they were corrupted on the server. Daniel knew this and had not informed me. He had informed Ben at Midnight but Ben had not done anything about it including not telling John Claude. We were both flabbergasted to say the least.

The net result was a whole day’s work yielded almost nothing.

Straight after this I met Grace. I was not really in the mood. She, like everyone else, has moved onto pastures new while I am still slugging away. I told her that the constant changing of the meetings and the texts saying that things might not be done are not doing what they need to do i.e. removing burden from my shoulders and that instead they just making me anxious.

Wednesday was spent trying to get the conform check done before the imminently approaching deadline. It was hard work, stealing 5 minutes here, half an hour there. Also that day I discovered the spirit was not being broken up on Monday next week but Thursday night! John Claude, doing what Ben should have done, managed to get the conform check completed by Wednesday night. He was a real star. He said “You don’t need to be here for this. It should happen in the background.”
I replied “Background? Mate, this is only happening now in the foreground because I’m pushing it!”

Yesterday I thought we had made the deadline, only to discover in the morning that there was a technical fault with the spirit and the scanning couldn’t take place. I called everyone, and I mean everyone! - to try and get the break up delayed or the machine fixed in time, even for a few hours (3 hours is all we needed). All to no avail. It was futility incarnate, pathetic even. Mid afternoon I knew the game was up and that I had failed. I wandered Soho in a daze, utterly and completely gutted and alone in my misery.

It will take up to two weeks to have the spirit re-assembled and then it will have the same length of time in backlog of work to be scanned on it, which will take priority over our film. The net result is that at the start of the week we were 7 weeks away from completing. Now we are 10-12 weeks away from completing.

This week JD said to me “I started reading the post blog but I gave up as it seemed to be going nowhere”. It seems, he is more right than he’ll ever know.