I know I mentioned that post production almost ended a few days ago, but given that the editor is still in town, we always find more things that we want to tweak. This is the story of how we tweaked that final flaw of the film. I call it the "Final Flaw" because I feel like we have corrected all other mistakes but this one had been lingering for a while.
The day began with the editor, the trailer guy (who also happens to be a good friend, actor, cinematographer etc. - but for the purposes of this blog, am going to call him the trailer guy) and I spent most of the day working on various things. Seemingly, there is no end to getting a feature film ready.
About 7pm or so, the three of us wrapped up our work. We took the MRT to visit my in laws who are staying with my brother in law, and on the way discussed several potential scripts and ideas for the future.
Half way through the journey, I mentioned how I wished we could sort out that last flaw in the film. And the editor said he completely agreed - apparently, it was he had been thinking the whole of last night! Seems like both of us didn't mention it to each other because, ultimately, no one wants to touch a fully locked edit, at least not for something so minor.
You may be wondering what this flaw is. There is one scene where the actor has a small tea cup in his hand which he moves a LOT during a conversation but also happen to pretend to sip from it. So it seemed like very evidently he is pretending and in reality there can't possibly be any tea in that cup - it was a blooper! It wasn't caught during the shoot nor at the time of the first edit but as time went by, whenever that scene comes up, a note goes off-tune in my head and I cringe.
The editor and I got pretty excited that we agreed with each other on this and both of us wanted to give one last shot in fixing it. So we gobbled up dinner at my brother in law's place and rushed back home to start working on it.
At first, it looked pretty hopeless. We simply didn't have enough footage to take out all that shaking of the cup. There was only one take of the scene from that particular angle, so there was not much that could be done. Then I had a brainwave. The issue was not just that he was shaking the cup too much. The issue was also that he pretends to sip from it. If he had not sipped, he could shake the cup as much as liked to. So the brainwave was to take out the sipping, vs. trying to fix the shaking!
And it worked! Our final flaw was fixed! We felt AWESOME! Of course, we also wondered why we didn't think of this any earlier, but I guess everything happens in its own time.
We were up until 4:30am fixing this (and a few other things, now that we were at it), but at the end of it all, I felt on top of the world because the film now is flaw-less (i.e. from a blooper standpoint)!
443 more to go.
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