Speaker 1: Now it's time to put the movie together called post-production. So now your movie is shot, congratulations, you had fun, you had a great shoot, it looks good, your footage is fantastic, everybody had a good time. Now it's time to put the movie together called post-production. So again, like production, I'm not going to talk about all the elements of post-production. I'm not going to talk about editing and sound mixing and all this kind of stuff. I'm going to talk about things that you might not think about on the business side that you should be cognizant of so that you can finish the film again as best as possible and on time. The first error that most indie filmmakers make, and it's amazing to me that they do this, is that they actually don't have a budget for post-production. Like when they were doing their budget, they only budgeted money for shooting the movie or they spent too much shooting the movie and now they ran out of money or didn't have any money budgeted for finishing the movie. That's crazy. Like why would you bother shooting a movie if you don't have any money to post it, like to edit it and mix it and color it. So rule number one is when you're doing your budget, you budget for post-production. The rule of thumb is post-production is usually somewhere between 20 and 25% of your overall budget, depending on how many special effects you have and what elements you want to add in. That's a big number. 20% of your overall budget is a lot of money and maybe more than that. It could be up to 30%. So make sure that you have money tucked away for post-production. If you are one of those producer-director people who say, hey, we went a little bit over budget in production because we wanted to get the best footage possible and things happened and we had to deal with stuff and all this kind of stuff and you use your post-production money to shoot your movie during production and you say, don't worry, we'll figure that out then and then we'll go raise money. You're going to see what happens. It's not so easy to go and raise post-production funding, especially from your investors who already assumed that they had already funded post-production. Be very, very well planned and calculated. Tuck that money away for post-production and don't touch it during production. People always do. You shouldn't do it. It's a bad habit to do that. So you do very, very good budgeting for post-production the way you would do for production. During your shoot, everybody should do this. I mean, it's standard operating procedure to do this, but some people actually don't, which again, I marvel at. You should be doing what we call an assembly edit during your shoot. Now, remember, you're not shooting in order. So you're not necessarily telling your story from, you know, scene 1 through scene 80 or something like that. It could be scene 46 and 52 and this all over the place, all right? But you should be reviewing your footage and putting it into order so that the story starts to tell itself. The rule of thumb on set is take a minute or two to review the take that you like so that the sound person hears it back and make sure that everything is clean. The cinematographer and the director look at it, make sure it's all in focus and everything, because even though you're paying attention and you're holding your script, he is hopefully watching closely. You just want to make sure that everything was shot properly so you have stuff to use when you do the edit. Because if you don't, you're not going to have the money to go back and reshoot it. So you need to do an assembly edit where you put everything together in order of the scenes. I like to generally do the wide cut. So even though it's boring, you know, it's the setup shot. I generally do a setup shot for each scene so I have something to cut to if I need it. And I just tack those all together, non-edited, just so I see that the story is complete. That we got all the scenes and that they all work and that they tell the story. The reason you would do that first is because, and you should do that like literally the last day of shooting or the day after shooting. Because just in case you miss something, for whatever reason, you marked it down wrong, you thought you had it, or something doesn't look the way you thought it was when you reviewed it on set. Just in case there's something there, you still have your equipment, your crew, hopefully your actors. I mean, it's tricky because you're gonna have to plan, say another day of shooting, get another location or anything like that. But just in case, make sure you do that assembly edit like right away, like I say, the last day of shooting or the day after. So that if need be, you can get what you need. Because bringing everybody back, say two or three weeks later, a month or a couple months later, is gonna be a nightmare scheduling everything. Whereas getting them the next day is usually viable. Alright, so that's just sort of a safety check. You don't have to do that, but I strongly recommend you do. And by the way, you're assembling this as you're going along anyways. So all you really have to do on the last day is take the last footage and stick it in in order and watch it that night. Or you know, I know you want to do a wrap party and everybody's excited and everything like that, but just take the time to watch it so that you know you got your movie. That's key. So people often ask me, how long should the movie be? What should the running time be? You know, the general rule of thumb is that a page of script is a minute of movie. But obviously after you've shot, it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes it comes in 95 pages, after you do your edit comes in at say 87 minutes, or 105 minutes or something like that, or even 120 minutes because you love all your takes and they took longer and people you have to figure out, you know, do you want to trim? Do you want to cut more? Do you want to add more? What is the actual running time that you need? Years ago, before digital distribution, digital delivery of movies, there was a standard. You wanted movies to be about 90 minutes because they fit into a two-hour television time slot and you know, with commercial time and that type of thing. Today, with digital delivery, running time really doesn't matter because nobody cares. Okay, there might be some TV channels or some fast channels or something like that that maybe care, but they don't really care that much because you're watching it more or less on demand and it's not programmed in a certain block. Unless you're shooting obviously a TV series for, you know, for a network or something like that, then the rules are different. I say running time is based on what you think is the most entertaining way to tell your story. So after you've shot your movie and you've done the edit, if you think that 90 minutes is too long, it's a little too boring and you want to trim it down to 85, then do it. Alright, if you think you need another 105 minutes or something, so be it. As the director and editor, you're probably going to want to do more because you love everything you've shot. You want to try to have a critical eye, maybe get some third-party input to say, hey, this is running too long or these dialogue scenes have gone too long, you should trim them or something like that. Because remember, it's not about you, it's about your audience and it's about what they're going to enjoy or not enjoy. You don't need to kill yourself to fit into time slots anymore because nobody's going to care. Now in post-production, I think everybody already knows this, but I'll say it anyways. After you do your assembly edit to make sure you've got your film, the first thing you should do is cut your trailer. Why cut a trailer when you haven't even cut your movie yet? And the answer is you want to be able to try to start the distribution process and distribution is going to need a trailer. Trailers now are about 90 seconds, okay, they're not two minutes or two and a half minutes. People like 90 seconds, sometimes even a 60 second trailer works. It's hard to cut a trailer, you don't necessarily have to cut it yourself, you can get somebody else to cut it, but that'll get into the hands of the distribution people so that they can get a jump start on getting the film sort of creating excitement and anticipation for the film before it's even finished. You're going to need that time because distribution can take a long period of time. It's the most important tool that you're going to need in order for the distributors to start creating excitement about your movie. Next comes music. Music is so important for storytelling, whether it's a gigantic huge Hollywood big-budget film.