Still Life

Needing some inspiration for a project that I'm working on for a friend.
I needed to step away tonight and do something completely different.

Post-Production Supervisor #1

Lately, I’ve wanted to write about my job as a Post-Production Supervisor, mainly because it’s a rather unique position and I get a lot of questions about what I do. I also thought that I’d record my notes here for anyone else out there who might be struggling with some of the same issues as a PPS. So I hope that this is of some bit of interest or help to you.

Here’s a brief summery of what I do as the Post-Production Supervisor for Footnote:

In short, once the production team has completed shooting, my team takes over and begins to work with the footage to cut it into the show that you finally see on the air every month.

My role is to ask a lot of questions and do a lot of running around. When you’re working with creative people and tight deadlines there is a constant need to clarify what the director(s), in this case Jon and Alicia, want the show to look like, and then effectively communicating that to everyone on the team. There’s nothing worse then putting in three or four days on a segment only to find out that we were supposed to take it a different direction.

The other main aspect of my job is to always make sure that everyone has something to do. That is a full time job in and of itself and one I often fail at. When you have anywhere from 7 to 11 workers, depending on the day, working on an assembly line production schedule, everyone must be in sync. If someone along the line, from an editor to the motion graphics guy to the sound mixer to the colorist, needs an extra day to finish their job, this sends me scrambling to adjust the timeline and still make it to the deadline on time. 

Being a Post-Production Supervisor is like an endurance contest. So much of what I do is dependent on everyone, including the computers, completing their work on time. It stretches my patience daily. The long hours of waiting for my team to finish their latest edit, while I pace the halls trying not to pester them. The exorbitant upload and download times transferring files to my out-source freelancers. And then the Achilles heel of the production world… RENDERING the final file. Oh the agony, the pain, the horror! This is why I keep a collection of bad sci-fi in my office.

Hopefully that gives you a general idea of my day-to-day job. Luckily we haven’t crashed the train yet. If you’d like to see examples of our work, check out the Footnote website at fntv.com.

Stay tuned for next week. The topic: work flows.  (Ooooooohh, exciting.)