ParaDocs Files
My Imaginary Human
We are on our way through post-production on Marmalade, the edit is locked at a fraction over 10 minutes. Now is the time to look at Colour Grading, Post FX (only a few composite shots), and sound. Everything is on track to have Marmalade finished by the end of March 2019.
It’s been a while since we put out an update, so let’s get up to speed. Pre-production went well, all the paperwork and Chain of Title is sorted and other than a few post-production contracts it’s complete.
Marmalade Days
Filming went as well as can be expected, no real weather issues. The only problems we had were with timing and planning around Harmony Higgins who plays Young Sally. This was mostly communication and scheduling changes at the last minute. We had one car break down thankfully Louise Franklin saved Jennifer Higgins from sitting in a car in the middle of nowhere most of the morning. Mr Bump visited us and pushed filming one scene back a few weeks. Another scene was rescheduled to give us more time for the money shot on the beach. There is shot to film, that can be done late in the day as it’s a single shot for after the credits. So watch Marmalade to the end.
Shooting on old lenses, like the Helios 44-2 58mm, was interesting and a challenge. Each lens had their quirks, and getting the best out of them wasn’t as easy as expected. We managed to get the right look for the flashbacks, colour grading will be fun, and maybe hair ripping. Sound wise we had wind and sea to deal with, we have yet to hear the audio to see if we are going to need to ADR. Today is crunch day as we are laying down the dialogue today and we will soon find out if we need to ADR. Fingers crossed Fred.
Marmalade Post
Post-production is coming along, the rough-cut of was 14 minutes long, we got savage and cut 4 minutes out. Scenes that weren’t pushing the story forward had to go, others lost some dialogue that seemed to only be hammering the same point over and over. The second rough draft was brutal, yet the final piece has a good pace, it doesn’t feel rushed or drags.
We’re hoping that at the end of today the dialogue will be laid down and we can start looking at Foley and mixing. The music is being put together by Emma Bluebella Lovering, with a rough version ready by the end of the month. Then we can start to get the final sound mix and colour grade.
Take Away
The takeaway is, you can never plan enough even though we planned every shot, lens, and blocked everything. Things change. We picked some sacrificial shots before filming started and some that could be done with a minimal crew for pickups. Planning saved the production as no matter what went wrong we already had a solution to save time. Always ‘Plan Hard’, as planning through preproduction is cheap and you save so much time on set. Never overachieve, we aimed for 2.5 pages of script a day but ended up doing just under 2.