POST CONTENT REMOVED BECAUSE IT WAS AN ADDENDUM TO AN EARLIER POST WHICH HAS SINCE BEEN EDITED TO INCORPORATE IT.
I done a bit of editing myself, Maurice, and I must say that chart you supplied is DAUNTING! I practically needed to pop an aspirin just reading it! What a nightmarish web! Hats off to your persistence!
Once again Maurice, thanks for this. The level of insight you are offering into how Exeter was done is unparalleled and it just makes me wish there were some way to do it all up in a book. I'm a big believer in "keeping" everything when it comes to production materials -- footage and sound obviously being the first two items on that list. Years ago when I joined Darker Projects as a freelancer, I was writing for one of their audio dramas and had wanted to flash back to a previous episode from before my time with the company. I found the episode online, transcribed the dialogue but inlcuded a note with my email to the producer -- "This is all set up so you can easily splice in the audio from the older episode." His reply that he didn't have any of the audio from the previous show astonished me, but given that this was a no-budget, amateur production it didn't astonish me that much. And the end result was simple -- the actors simply re-recorded their lines, so it was a simple fix. Still, it further reinforced my belief that you keep and catalog everything, particularly with filmmaking (learned that lesson the hard way in college.) Looking forward to more (I hope there will be!) posts about Exeter and the making of it.
PART 6: HOW'S AND WHYS 1, ANDORIAN ANTICS Now that I've covered the backstory and challenges of Act 4, I'm going to spend a few posts on some specific things done to illustrate editorial approach. Let's begin at the very beginning of the Act, where I needed to bring things to a relative calm prior to the "distration" sequence. I decided that the first thing that should happen in the act was to show B’fuselek (Josh Johnson) bringing the ship under control, thus buttoning off the climactic action of Act 3. Trouble was I was essentially inventing a moment that hadn’t been scripted or filmed, so I had to take existing footage and somehow try to create this moment out of thin air. Luckily, there was a jib-shot (camera moving vertically) which began looking down upon the Andorian, then dropped down right in front of his face, and finally down to the front of the helm. Since Josh's eyeline was basically right past the camera (camera neutral, meaning not to the left or right, but slightly above or below the camera), I realized I could easily intercut this with a subjective POV of his view of the main viewer, where I could show weirdspace spinning by and finally stabilizing, with the ship pointed at the target destination. My thought was that I could sell this by shooting an insert of his hands operating the helm to illustrate the action of him struggling with the controls, which would obviously not require more than a small section of control panel, a uniform, and blue makeup. I cobbled together a placeholder control panel, put on blue nitrile (think TSA) gloves, donned a red sweatshirt, and shot my hands doing the actions I could foresee using. This footage was to be edited in as placeholder, and also provide a reference for later shooting of a more polished version of the action. The crude helm and blue gloves used to shoot the placeholder shots for the helm inserts. All through the old edits of the Act I felt like B'fuselek's struggles were sort of forgotten. They hadn't even gotten very many shots of him at the helm. I felt he was key to selling the danger, so I went through all the footage trying to locate any useable bits of him that I could cut to, adding the previously established "pain ripples" to sell his increasing agony. Anyway, so I cut this together, mixed it with shots of the Exeter spinning around and then finally stabilizing, and the result looks totally planned, even though it's purely editorial invention. Late in the Act, Garrovick was to order "Lieutenant! Get us out of here!" and the ship peels off. But, again, what didn't work for me was that we weren't seeing B'fuselek's agony. As I really wanted to ramp the tension up throughout, I decided to show him struggling to carry out the order. I decided to use two different takes of Garrovick speaking to him, so the first time he says the complete line but B'fuselek doesn't respond, like he's in so much pain the message doesn't get through. I then have Garrovick repeat, "Lieutenant!" which gets through and then I cut to the blue hands clumsily stabbing at the buttons as he complies, and the ship then peels off. I saved his scream and collapse for the moment the prototype device hits the BFD, so they lose their helmsman right at the critical moment they're trying to get out. All of this is intercut with the action in the transporter room to milk the tension to the max. After I turned the edit over to Scott for the fine cut he tweaked this slightly, splitting the aforementioned "Lieutenant!" lines and the lizard beamout each in two and cutting bewteen them. I was skeptical this would work but Scott proved me wrong, and it was better than what I'd done. As to the inserts of the console: as above, I had shot crude placeholders for the inserts of the helm, but knew we'd need something much nicer to use in the finished shots. The Project Ajax folks, who had obtained the Exeter Bridge set (now with Starbase Studios), were nice enough to share the actual helm “jewel button” panel from the set, which was first sent to Farragut Films, who put it on their bridge helm and shot inserts for us. Unfortunately, when we tried to cut their footage into the show, it didn’t match well enough to be useable (the lighting wasn't right and the blue makeup was far too shiny and thus wet looking), so towards the end of the project I cobbled together an insert helm segment using the jewel panel, thick black card, a laptop screen running a custom animation courtesy TOSGraphics.com, a heavily diffused light box to simulate the glow from the astrogator, and a bank of rocker switches literally made of printed paper. Dave Weiberg provided an actual B’fuselek wig and antennae, uniform shirt plus makeup from 2004. Some of the makeup was still useable even after nearly 10 years! With some canned spray smoke and the help of my insert crew (Ryan Thomas Riddle and Mark Farinas), we got the shots. These ended up being the final live action shot done for the film, only two days before our self-imposed final cut deadline! The final helm built for the inserts. Next Up: Doing the Splits
PART 7: HOW'S AND WHYS 2, Doing the (Digital) Splits Despite its vintage circa 1969 look TTI obviously wasn’t shot on film or edited on a Movieola or a Steenbeck or whatnot. As such no one felt married to having to live with the restrictions of actually shooting and editing it that way. The goal was to make it look like it was made in that era, and we’d use any tricks available to achieve that look and feel. One advantage to shooting digital and post in an NLE (Non-Linear Editing) suite was that we could use various digital tools to fix issues with the original footage, and sometimes create new shots out of old ones. Here are some for-instances: In Act 3, when Harris is listening to Thokess say “We find your attempt at diplomacy before action… interesting,” there wasn’t a suitable shot of her where her eyeline appeared to be on the viewer. So someone (likely Jimm or Scott) took a shot of her looking screen left and flopped (flipped left-to-right) it so her eyeline was to screen right. The problem was, her uniform insignia was noticeably on the wrong side, so they did some digital cut and paste to “fix” it. If you look at the viewers overhead, though, you can see the text there is all backwards. At some point Scott and Dave decided to try to create some dramatic tension by not showing Cutty after the shuttlecraft launch, and by having his voice come over the intercom create the false impression that he is piloting the shuttle. The problem was, for this to work Cutty had to be seen re-entering the bridge, and no such entrance had been shot. The only solution was to patch something together from other shots. So, his “reveal” when the lift doors opened was created by doing a digital split screen of a shot of him exiting the bridge from Act 2, isolating the turbolift doors and running only that part in reverse. Then there’s a quick cut to an angle on Garrovick as the ship shakes, and then back to another digital split-screen where Cutty heads for his seat. This latter shot was created by rotomatting Cutty out of a shot from Act 2 when he, Garrovick and Harris enter the bridge, and slapping it over a different shot where the other players are in positions that match those they occupy in Act 4. In both shots Cutty is literally pasted into the scene, but both cuts are so fast that no one really notices it. I can't take credit for this bit of trickery, other than to try to finesse it. The escaped Tressaurian’s ambush of the poor deadshirt in the corridor is also created by digital trickery. Unused footage from the Act 2 Tressaurian boarding was cut together to create this ambush, with a photo cutout of the Tressaurian hand superimposed over the shot of the redshirt being hit (in the original footage the lizard’s holding a weapon), and then doing a complete digital background replacement for the OTS (over the shoulder) shot of the lizard stabbing, this to put the brute in the correct spot on the ship to match what we see when Richards finds the body. Oh, also, I trimmed some frames out and digitally shifted the Tressaurian over a series of frames to better sell the stab action. Red alert lights. One of the more tedious jobs poor Scott took on was fixing continuity issues with the red alert lights. In many shots, especially those repurposed from other parts of the show, these weren’t flashing, so he had to go in and match-move elements of the lights to many of those shots. A great example of this is Richards’ run down the corridor, because precisely none of those alert lights were flashing. Finally, Richards’ entry into the transporter room is a digital split screen, because as filmed when in the corridor she ran to one side of the door frame, then we cut to the inside of the room, the doors open, and she steps into view. When I was editing the act I felt it would work better if she just goes for the door, so I cut away from the corridor shot just as she’s centered on the door, then in the transporter I did a digital split on the doors to reveal her already centered in the doorway. This saved several seconds of action and just flowed better. This illustrates what perfectionists we are. We used every trick in the book to tell the story, but for all this digital trickery, sometimes the best solutions were the oldest tricks in the book, as I'll cover next time. Next up: Going Old Skool