Well in what has been our longest editing period ever, Hunted is nearly done, that’s what happens when you only edit weekends and go overseas for a month! Now we move into the last phase of preparing the film for exhibition – The Grade.
Hunted was shot on Super 16mm and received what’s known as a best light telecine – basically they run the film through a machine that transfers it to digi beta so you can ingest it into the computer and start editing. This process is like a rough draft of what the film quality will be, it’s done quickly so you can start editing and not too much attention is paid to tweaking the film to bring out the best in the footage. So we edit this footage that’s about 30% of what the final quality will be.
Once the broad brush strokes of the edit are completed we submit what we’ve got to the funding body to review and to some trusted friends who provide us with feedback to improve the edit. Then we refine it and resubmit it again for feedback, this is known as the fine cut. Once we receive all feedback we do the final tweaks and get ready to grade – we are now just waiting for feedback on our fine cut, then we’ll tweak and we’re done.
From here we supply our EDL ( edit decision list) and they re-scan the film at higher quality and then resupply it to us for the online process. From here we supply the full res images to our graphics guys who will get to work on titles and credits and output dmg sequences that the post house will use for the grade.
And while all of this has been going on we’ve been working with our lawyer to make sure all the contractual documents are correct and in order. We need all sorts of agreements in order to access funding through Screen Australia. At first this seems like a drag but these documents are there to protect everyone and while it’s been a long time coming it’s been great to learn about this part of the process.
We’ll upload a making-of doco of Hunted for you to watch just in time for Christmas…
