Speaker 1: Post-production on Ballistic was kind of a beast to manage. There were over 140 VFX shots, 11 terabytes of footage, and all of my collaborators in different states than where I am. First was the editing. Lucas and I cut the film in Adobe Premiere in his office in St. Louis, and if you haven't seen it, we have several episodes on editing the film done in vlog style, which you can find on our website for the film's page on filmriot.com or a link in the notes below. But after the edit was done, we realized that some of the moments that we shot locked down would work a lot better if it had more of a handheld feel. For this, I tried a few things, but in the end, I used Red Giant's Universe plugin called Camera Shake. I've talked about Universe on the show before. It's a subscription to a ton of amazing plugins from Red Giant. This collection of plugins is always my go-to, especially some of the more fun things like VHS plugin, Holomatrix, Retrograde, and some stuff that I use all the time, like Chromatic Aberration, and there's some excellent text plugins in there as well. I'll put a link below for the site so you can take a look through all of them. But I'll grab that Camera Shake plugin and drop it onto our footage, then I can come into the effects control and into the preset where you have a bit of a preview. I'll pick one that makes sense for what I'm trying to do, but I'm not locked down to that. I can customize this a lot, starting with the master amount. We can crank this up to 200% to really exaggerate the effect or go the opposite direction to minimize the effect. Below that we have frequency, which is basically how often it will act on this move less or more. Then we can jump into the shake controls and adjust the X and Y amplitude, which is the distance in the direction the effect will travel. So if I jack that up, you can see that the move gets much bigger. And if we go frame by frame, you can see that the plugin is automatically tiling the edges so that the image doesn't go off screen, which you can turn off inside of the crop setting. So if I do uncheck this, you can see what it's doing. Then you can also turn on motion blur here and set it to match your camera settings for best effect. And the rest is really self-explanatory. I just mess around with everything until I'm getting something that fits the look that I'm going for. But it's all so customizable and easily adjustable, so it ends up being a very easy way to pull this off. But after we locked the cut, it was time to send to VFX, sound, color, and music. And we'll jump into some of the VFX for the film in another episode. But I kept track of all of it in the same way I did for Sentinel. I created a Google Doc that I shared with everyone so that we could see who was doing which shot, a bit of detail about the shot, and where it was in the process. It made it easier for adding and deleting shots too. It just made it all very accessible. Though I think next time I may try Airtable. Then there's the note process. For me, by far, the absolute best way to go about this is with Frame.io. Now Frame.io has nothing to do with the episode. They didn't sponsor the film or anything like that, which I have to say because I'm about to gush all over them. This really is just one of the more brilliant and mandatory apps for me. I use it in every aspect of post-production, and now that they're coming out with the ability to throw in PDFs, I'll be using it in pre-production too for treatments and scripts. What makes it so brilliant is its organization and clarity. So during the edit, Lucas and I threw the rough up and sent unique links to a bunch of people so that we could get notes right on the frame that the person was talking about. And that function is even more important with VFX. I can draw on the image, leave a note to go with it, and soon I'll be able to add references and a play area. They're constantly innovating and pushing this towards the best direction possible. So if you run post with collaborators at all, this will make your life a lot easier. Okay, gushing session over. But inside of Frame.io, I created a project for each collaborator so that things stay organized. I can also send them assets in the projects, and they can send the final shots here as well. I also use the same process to kick off the music and color grade. So Google Docs, Google Drive, and Frame.io really became the structure for all of post for me. Okay, quick breakalicious, and then we finish off the post process. Here's the thing, I've said it before, using the internet without a VPN is like changing with the window open. Don't let a pervert peek into your private party. It's so easy to shut those virtual shades and get 77% off of a three year plan by using the coupon code Film Riot and just go to NordVPN.com forward slash Film Riot. Of course a VPN is a virtual private network, and to be honest, using a VPN is something I only started doing this year, which is crazy given what I do for a living. Basically it works like this. You get a VPN account, download the app on your computer and your phone, then sign in and turn it on, that's it. And what it's doing is hiding your IP by redirecting your connection through a remote server. Doing this makes it seem as though your location is somewhere else entirely, and on top of that, your ISP no longer knows what you're doing. So no more targeted ads, and more importantly, if you're experiencing throttling, this will stop that as well since your ISP won't know what site you're on to be able to throttle it. Another great feature is once you've activated NordVPN, you can select which of the thousands of servers in 61 plus countries that you want to use. Again, making it appear as though you are in that country. So if you wanted to watch something on Netflix that's only available in another country, you can switch over to that server in that region and you're in. Of course the main reason I'm using VPN is safety, especially when connecting to public Wi-Fi like at a coffee shop or a hotel. The second you do that, you're broadcasting everything you do to anyone who cares to look. When I was traveling and working on Ballistic, I was sharing a lot of that info over public Wi-Fi connections. So NordVPN was mandatory in making sure all of that data stayed protected. Plus they have a Chrome extension that makes it all crazy easy, and Android and iOS apps, and military-grade encryption, no data logging, and it's the only VPN with a perfect score from PC Mac. So do yourself a favor, jump over to NordVPN.com forward slash Film Riot, use the coupon code Film Riot to save 77% on a three-year plan of awesomeness. Logo. Logo. So at the end of the process, I made one last trip out to LA to sit with the music, sound, and final grade to get everything done, starting with the music. Daniel and I sat together for five days, knocking everything out, and being in the same room was so beneficial. We have extremely similar tastes, so our shorthand made the whole process a lot more smooth. Of course, before I got there, Daniel did a full pass on the film, so then we could just dive in and tweak. Plus, Daniel is so insanely talented and works so fast that making the changes happened so quickly and allowed us to try things, similar to when I was cutting the film with Lucas. The craziest part to me was watching Daniel write the entire end credits music track from idea to completion in 45 minutes. Dude is on another level. After that, I met up with my colorist, Asa Fox, for the final grade. Before getting to this point, though, I had already done a temp example grade for a lot of the film to help give a vibe of what I was thinking. The end film doesn't really look a lot like the temp, but it's all about the tone, not the actuality of what you're looking at. Just like temp music, it's there to convey intention, then you throw it all out and start from scratch. But for that temp, just like with the trailer, I was using Colorista and Magic Bullet looks inside, I can throw on a LUT, which we were using an Alexa LUT as the base, then I could warm it up and do some tweaks until I got the vibe that I was thinking. Asa also did all the balancing before I got there, which is matching all the shots together and any basic corrections to get the footage ready for the actual grade, which is the style that you throw on your footage. After that, I headed over to Rob Kreckel for the final mix, which on this one, we used Foley Walker. So Rob didn't have to cut the Foley by hand, which means literally placing every footstep, every hand touch, and so on. It's what we've done for all my other films, but for this one, it would have been an insane nightmare. And we actually have a video in the Ballistic Special Feature Pack that solos out the Foley for two scenes so you can hear what it's doing. Here's a short example of that. If you want to see all of it, check out the link below to look at our full pack. I also did a full podcast episode with Rob where we dove in to a lot of the ideas behind the sound for this film. Link in the notes for that as well. But once I was finished with Rob, that was it. We had a few other VFX shots that Andrew Kramer and team were finishing up, so I sent those along to my colorist after the fact on their own, then placed them in after he sent them back graded. It was really helpful to be in the room with all of them. It's great to be able to collaborate remotely. The fact that that's a possibility nowadays with things like Frame.io makes it so much better, but nothing beats being in the same space to give those nuanced and specific notes. That's it for today. We are going to give some tutorials on a few of the VFX shots from Ballistic in another episode, but I'll see you next week when we shave our heads and fight dragons with our shirts off.