Typical Day
Ahhhh, Sunday morning in beautiful Los Angeles. Finally, a day off. You've got time to take a shower, do your yoga, and have brunch with some friends. You could sleep in a bit longer, but the air feels perfect and you didn't move to California to lie in bed all day.
Just as you're taking the last bite of that artichoke and Gruyere waffle, you hear the familiar "Synthesizer" ringtone. It's your director.
It's Sunday, the day you'd been led to believe was a day off everywhere else in the universe. Didn't you deserve a good old-fashioned day off after working non-stop for the past three months?
Didn't you deserve to have just one thought to yourself?
For the past three months, your brain didn't belong to you. Well, your head was technically still on your neck, but professionally? You rented that space out a long time ago. Your every thought was "The Final Countdown," the highly anticipated conclusion to the epic series about the three superheroes, Rock Man, Paper Boy, and Scissors Girl.
Even though you were on set to view the dailies, everyone who worked on shooting the movie went home months ago. The actors were already acting in new movies, the scriptwriters had been paid, and the sets taken down and props put in storage.
It was just you and your small post-production army.
The assistant editors did all the knob turning, but you were the one in the wheelhouse. Your wife started to get worried about the constant stream of phone calls between you and your AE.
Film editing used to be linear, meaning you had a roll of film or a length of tape and you slowly built your movie the way a novelist typed a book. Now you're swimming in the deep end of nonlinear editing. You and your director may be comfortable working out of sequence from the original script, but you have to keep track of the final storyline and every variation of every twist and turn along the way.
Digital editing meant you could work on several sequences at once. (Yeeaahhh, that's great, I'll go ahead and redo those TPS reports right away.) The editor for The Matrix is your hero: He cut the last two movies in the trilogy at the same time.
Last week, for instance, you worked on the scene with Paper, Rock and Scissors trying to decide what to eat before they fight crime. They're in a loud restaurant (the Hard Rock Cafe—guess who won that round?), so audio levels will be tricky. It's supposed to be a tense scene, not a funny one, so your pacing has to be perfect. You really want some of those great reaction shots—Scissors grinding her teeth while Paper only has a blank expression.
In addition to all that shot swapping and pacing, you had to keep in mind that none of the characters were aware of the bomb ticking under their table. You had to trim out any shots of the actors whose faces betray their own awareness of the bomb and be on the lookout for the parts where the characters didn't.
The audience needed to see the waiter put it there when he took their drink orders, and you needed to keep track of the bright red digital readout with the countdown display. It was a lot of work.
You wanted to get to the "thirty seconds to go" mark around midnight so you could get home and get some sleep. Tomorrow you'd pick up where you left off, with the scene your partner is editing right now.
At the thirty-second mark, the three characters decide they can't decide, so they walk away from the table. In the last second, the evil Doctor Fist sits down at the table, unaware of his henchmen's plot to blow the place up. Just before he was blown up, Doctor Fist would pound the table in time with the ticking display.
The sound effects were crucial: The background sound had to drop as the other diners turned to watch the cranky customer, the sounds of the wooden table cracking and the tick-tick-tick of the counter had to crescendo just in time for a shot of Fist's face.
The shot would end with a fast zoom into his eyes, which flickered with an animation that looked like fiery silhouettes of Paper, Rock and Scissors. And then the explosion: The geniuses in VisFX were the best in the business. Their explosions were good enough to send heat waves through the audience.
And after all the technical work was laid in front of you like a giant deli tray, you carefully, painstakingly, took the rough cuts and assembled them into a single, coherent sandwich—er, story.
That's right, a story. That's what you do. You tell stories.
"What?" said your nephew when you paid a visit to his nursery school on Career Day. "Don't they just turn on the camera and film people reading lines? Like they do in a play?"
"Yeah, whatever," said your niece. "Don't you just follow housewives going to the plastic surgeon's office to spy on their husbands and confront that conniving little ex-model with hair like a flaming haystack at the front desk? I mean, it's reality, what's to tell?"
"Oh yeah, right," said your kid sister's boyfriend, "like Al Gore did when he stood there narrating a slideshow and then got an Oscar?"
"That's right, I tell stories. Big deal. Go ahead, kid," you snapped (a little too harshly, really; he's just a kid). "Tell me about one of the cartoons you saw this morning."
"Yeah, so okay, there was this dude, he was like huge, like seriously? If you put him next to something super tall…he'd be taller. Anyways, he was trying to save this lady who was stuck in an elevator and because he was born in this glowing blue pond on another planet he burned open the doors and when she came out she wasn't really the lady but a huge bug with gripper arms that were made of Bluthozene—"
"Bluthozene?"
"Yeah, you know, from that other time? With that one guy? Anyways, the guy's name was Comet or Gigatron or Gigantrictron—and, and, he was super cool!"
Exactly, you thought. (Whoa, that was awfully smug for a guy talking to a kid…sheesh, take a vacation, will ya?) It's a good thing you're not a Girl Scout, because I'd be canceling my cookie orders right about now.
What time is it?
You're awake and covered in a cold sweat. It's okay, it's daylight. It's Sunday. The film was done and you could finally, gratefully, do one thing today: Evict "The Final Countdown" from your brain and have your own thoughts for a while.