Speaker 1: Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle podcast, episode number 32. Having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences, is very, very important to actually being able to make movies. George Lucas.

Speaker 2: Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood, it's the Indie Film Hustle podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.

Speaker 1: Welcome, my Indie Film Hustlers. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Head over to FreeFilmBook.com, that's FreeFilmBook.com, to download your free filmmaking audiobook from Audible. And today's sponsor is USC Film School's only online course directing the actor by the legendary Nina Foch. You can download that at IndieFilmHustle.com forward slash USC. Now guys, today we're going to talk about post-production supervisors and what they do. I've been a post-production supervisor now going on about 10 years or so, a little bit more probably. And I've worked on multiple different projects from varying sizes, little short films, music videos, commercials, all the way up to $3 to $5 million feature films, working in the capacity of a post-production supervisor. So I know a lot of independent filmmakers really generally don't have money to hire a post-production supervisor, but it's extremely important to have a post-production supervisor on any size project if you can afford it. And I've already kind of went over that in nauseam in my other podcast episode, episode 14, Post-Production Workflow, Understand It or Die. So I wanted to kind of go over what a post-production supervisor does and what you should look for in a post-production supervisor when you're hiring one. Post-production supervisors generally are there to help you or guide you through the post-production process. Now, if you hire a post-production supervisor or at least consult with one prior to your production, they can definitely help you out dramatically. So a perfect example is I've had a lot of movies brought to me towards the end, obviously, in post-production. So they've already shot everything. They've already made all of those crucial decisions prior to getting to post-production, which then they throw on me and they're like, okay, I need you to make this workflow work. I'm like, well, this is not going to work. This is going to cost you this. This is going to cost you that. Where if they would have just come to me in pre-production, it could have saved them a tremendous amount of time and money. What I mean is this. So let's say you're starting out a project and you consult a post-production supervisor and you go, I'm going to shoot this on a RED camera. Well, if you're going to shoot it on a RED camera, I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions in regards to how qualified your DP is, what kind of RED camera you're shooting at, what kind of resolution you're shooting at, and then work you through the process of post-production going down the line of the pipeline. So if you're going to shoot RED, what are you going to edit on? Who's going to be editing it and is that editor technically competent or they're just a creative editor? If they're going to edit on Avid, okay, great. So we're going to edit on Avid. Now getting the EDL out of Avid, we're going to go to a DaVinci. Are we going to be able to go to a DaVinci? Or are we going to go to a Baselight? All this kind of information I have to, as a post-production supervisor, plan out all the way down the line so everything runs smoothly and it doesn't cost the filmmaker or the production any more money than it should and that everything runs very, very smoothly. So that's one step of things of what a post-production supervisor does. It kind of organizes the workflow for you. A good post-production supervisor does this. Now another thing a post-production supervisor does is also organizes everybody and kind of is like the director of post-production essentially. So they're organizing and scheduling everything, creating a schedule like, okay, by this date we're going to lock – pictures locked at this date. We're going to have first edit done eight weeks later, this date. And then we have another week or two for recuts. And then we have another week or two before we final lock. Once we have final lock, then we go into color and visual effects. I'll get to visual effects in a second. Once we get that in, I need these elements in by this date and this date and this date. And they're just scheduling everything for you because, as a filmmaker, it's very difficult, if not impossible, unless you have post-production background, to kind of organize all this. And that's where a lot of filmmakers just fall flat on their face. And I've seen it so, so many times in my company, my post company. Filmmakers coming in the door with like, well, I just shot this and this and that, and they just didn't understand the full scope of the workflow and not understanding what a post-production supervisor could do for them. So post-production supervisors also work with budget and understanding the budget of post-production and what things are going to cost. So they're in charge of hiring editors. In a perfect world, they're in charge of hiring the editors or at least organizing and scheduling the editors, hiring runners, assistants, DITs, organizing anything that deals with post-production. Their hands are in it. So if you have a $30,000 budget, it's their job to get post-production done for that $30,000 budget or $5,000 budget, depending on what it is. They also organize audio. And audio is a whole other gambit. I don't do audio personally in my company, but I've obviously worked with tons of different audio houses. And audio has a whole other set of deliverables, all sets of workflow that needs to happen in order to get things done. And this is the job of the post-production supervisor to not only take care of it all, but at least with me, I always like to educate filmmakers that I work with and producers that I work with. So they're more educated in the process going down the line on their next project and their next project because it just makes life easier for everybody. It's always wonderful for me as a post-person to get a project that technically has no issues, that I could just kind of run through it and just do my job as opposed to having putting out fires constantly because filmmakers were just uninformed or didn't know or just ignorant to the process. And that's fine. But it's always a pleasure working with professionals who understand the workflow and understand what we do. And it's great to have that experience. So it's my job, at least the way I look at it, it's my job as a post-production supervisor, colorist, editor, what have you, to educate filmmakers who are working with me so as they go forward in their careers, they become more educated and become better at what they do. And hopefully later on hire me again or hire my company again to do more work for them in the future because they had a positive experience. So a post-production supervisor has relationships. Like I have relationships with different audio houses, different visual effects companies and visual effects artists and things like that where I can actually pull together a team fairly quickly and at a very affordable cost because I have those contacts, I have those relationships, and that's something that you're paying for when you hire a post-production supervisor is those contacts. They're the ones that are going to be able to like, basically if you say, look, I got five grand to do color, you're going to go, well, I know I got my $15,000, $20,000, $50,000 guy and I got a $5,000 guy. And let me see if I can get that $15,000 guy to come down to $5,000 or we'll work with the $5,000 and see if we can make sure the quality that he can put out is equivalent to the $15,000. This is the job of the post-production supervisor as well to be able to negotiate these deals, to be able to create the most production value for the dollar. Now, another thing that post-production supervisor does, he puts out fires, lots of fires all the time. Anytime you're dealing with these digital workflows from RED or ARRI, Blackmagic, GH, any of the DSLRs, any of the workflows that are coming in, there's always going to be problems. There's always going to be emergencies, things that just don't go right. And unless you technically have the expertise to handle it, it's really helpful to have a post-production supervisor on board. Sometimes filmmakers lean on their editors because editors nowadays are more technically, have more prowess in the technical aspects of filmmaking and post-production. But when you start getting into some deep stuff, they might get into the weeds and be a little bit over their heads. So post-production supervisors are there to get you out of the weeds. So that's another thing that a post-production supervisor does and can save your butt while working on your film. Now another part of the post-production supervisor's job is deliverables. Being able to get deliverables out to whatever your final output's going to be for your film, your project, your television show, for whatever form of media you're going out to. We're going to stick with film for right now. So depending on what your final output's going to be, 4K, 2K, DCP, which is a digital cinema package for theatrical digital distribution. If it's going to be an HDSR for a 1080p master. Depending on the different, if you're doing it to a distributor, if you're doing it yourself. There's so many different variables that are in play that if you don't understand a lot of the stuff that I'm just talking about here, it could end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars because you might do a whole bunch of deliverables because someone told you to, and they're trying to make money off of you, and you really don't need them. So one piece of advice I can give you is don't do deliverables until you absolutely, positively need them. Your deliverable obviously at the end will be a digital deliverable, which will be a QuickTime with a ProRes. QuickTime is more than enough at a 4K resolution is fine, and you can have all your audio deliverables embedded in that same QuickTime. And as far as DCPs, HDSRs, Beta SPs for God's sakes, or Digi Betas, any of those other kind of deliverables that you might need, wait until you absolutely need to have them before you spend the money to do them. Because a lot of times filmmakers, and I've seen this happen, will be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now, back to the show. They'll just go out and spend $15,000, $20,000 on deliverables, and then they're just sitting there on a shelf. They're never getting used. Just wait. Wait until the last minute that you can actually have to spend the money to spend it. So that's one piece of advice. But the post-production supervisor will guide you in your deliverables depending on what your final output's going to be. So again, if you're going to be doing self-distribution, going through a VHX or a Vimeo, that's one set of deliverables. If you need a screener for Sundance, that's going to be another set of deliverables. If you're going to a theatrical through TUG and you're going to be doing a self-distributing theatrical run by yourself, then that's another set of deliverables. So there's all sorts of different deliverables. And this is, again, a minefield of different options that can cost you thousands and thousands of dollars unless you do the research and understand what it all is or consult or hire a post-production supervisor to kind of guide you through this process. And one final tip here. When hiring a post-production supervisor, you should always check their credentials, check their IMDb and their resume to see what kind of budget levels they have been. Though IMDb can be adjusted, those budget levels can be adjusted fairly easily on IMDb. So something that says it costs $7 million or $5 million really could have cost half a million dollars and they just put $7 million on there to make themselves look bigger. So that does happen. I've seen that happen many times. But check at least what they've done. And if you can't call a filmmaker who's worked with them prior to see how their experience was, that would be very, very beneficial. Always try to find someone that you trust and that has experience to do it so you don't get— make sure they are actual post-production supervisors and not just editors saying, oh, I'm an editor but I also post-supervise. Make sure that they have credits. Make sure they have experience doing it because a post-production supervisor is a very important position in your crew. And they will either can bury you or they can help you sail across that sea with calm waters. Or if not, that ship can sink very, very quickly if you hired the wrong guy. Now you can get all the links and things I was talking about in the show notes at indiefilmhustle.com forward slash 032. And there I'll have all the links of anything we talked about in this episode. I hope this was beneficial to you guys a little bit. I do. I'm going to do a shameless plug. I am obviously a post-production supervisor as well. My company, Numrobot, does this kind of work as well. And if you need any consulting, if you don't have the money to hire a post-production supervisor throughout the entire process, just paying an hour or two of someone's time at the beginning of the process is probably the best money you'll spend in production. So you could always go to indiefilmhustle.com forward slash consulting if you want to have me consult on any of your projects. So that's my shameless plug. Thank you. I hope you guys learned a lot on this episode. Next week I'm going to be doing a visual effects supervisor episode to talk about how to work with a visual effects supervisor and what a visual effects supervisor does. So please head over to filmmakingpodcast.com and leave us an honest review of the show. It greatly helps our rankings in iTunes. So thanks again so much, guys. Keep that hustle going. Keep that dream alive. And I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast at indiefilmhustle.com That's I-N-D-I-E F-I-L-M-H-U-S-T-L-E dot com