The Last Day on Set of Bite

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Bite Final Cut Pro timeline

The end is in sight! Today is the last day of principal photography on Bite and also my last day on set. But the work doesn't end there.

EDITING PROGRESS

  • Scenes cut: 48
  • Total runtime: 50:11
  • Number of crew birthdays celebrated on set: 3

Assembling the rough cut of Bite while here on set has been so incredibly smooth that I cannot believe the amount of progress we've already made. The cast and crew have worked TREMENDOUSLY hard to make this all happen.

There will most likely be pick-up days and I will get each day's footage delivered to me and will finish up the first cut of the movie. That's when things will get really exciting. Working with the director to finesse each scene, experiment with the arrangement of the scenes and trim the fat off of the entire film to get it to our goal running time of 83 minutes.

Updates will continue to be posted here as work. And I may have some video content to put up that goes more into depth on editing Bite during production.

In the meantime, be sure to like the Merc Media Facebook page to follow updates as they come out.

This guy is always an editor's BFF on set - Day 3 of Editing Bite

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All of that may look like gobbledy-guk to you but to an editor it is a mystical map leading the way to buried treasure (aka an awesomely edited film). In film terminology it is called a continuity log sheet.

But speaking about pirate analogies...did you know that there exists a music genre called Pirate Metal?! Because nobody told me before today. Somebody started cranking this at the start of the day and my life has been better ever since.

Back to continuity log sheets for a second...

There are many roles on a film set that most people are familiar with, unfortunately the script supervisor is not one of them. And on indie sets it is usually a job that goes unfilled because it's just not as important as a DoP or Boom Operator. Those who think that are wrong. So very, very wrong. The script supervisor is tasked with logging important details for each take of each scene. This serves two main purposes:

  • Helps maintain continuity in the final film (Is James Bond wearing the same suit when he arrives at the casino that we saw him wear earlier? Does Rick Grimes have the same amount of blood on his shirt in this scene from his zombie fight in the previous scene?)
  • Tells the editor the correct takes to use

If the director yells "Cut! Beautiful performance, Meryl! That was perfect!" the script supervisor labels that a "circle take" to indicate that the director loved it. If the shot was ruined or the director just didn't like it for any reason, then it gets labelled as "NG" or "No Good".

A lot of other information is included as well, like camera information and shot details, which help the editor know which footage is the best to work from and which to set aside.

This is why the script supervisor on this set gets a hug from me. Every. Day.

It takes a bit more time to go over these log sheets first before editing, but in the long-run it speeds up my work tremendously. Each of the clips in the FCP7 project file gets this meta information attached to it so I can quickly find the best takes as I work.

EDIT PROGRESS

  • Scenes cut: 7
  • Film duration: 10:35
  • Each of the scenes were uploaded privately to producers in Toronto so they can monitor progress