Re: ''The Holiest Thing'' (Star Trek Phase II): An Update
Mr. James Cawley posted an update on the status of "The Holiest" earlier today on the Star Trek Phase II Facebook page. Here's an update for folks who aren't Facebook users.
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Here’s a bit of an update on our episode “The Holiest Thing” (as of April 4, 2014).
“The Holiest Thing” was shot back in June of 2013. Mr. Daren Dochterman took the Director’s seat and Mr. Alex Ibrahim was our Director of Photography for our original script written by Mr. Rick Chambers.
Our intent was to significantly improve upon our usual turnaround time in getting this episode out the door, and we were shooting for a Saint Valentine’s Day release on February 14, 2014. We were rushing on getting the episode all together in time, and we actually screened it for an audience at the Alamo Draft House in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on the evening of February 13th. As we made arrangements to push the episode out to the Internet on the morning of the 14th, and as we took a good look at the more technical aspects of the episode, we became increasingly dissatisfied with the coloring of the edit. The coloring seemed rather uneven throughout the final cut. Some scenes were dark, some had the color blown out, and some were washed out. It actually wasn’t too glaring; in fact, we were uncertain whether to just release it as is, or miss our self-imposed deadline and improve the color correction. The unevenness just wasn’t that bad, so it was a difficult decision. Ultimately, even though we screened the episode in Kalamazoo, uneven color and all, we decided to go back and even it all out.
Our hopes at the time were that our colorist would be able to perform some fairly simple “evening out” process on the episode to make things more consistent—not quite as simple as the push of a button, but we hoped that it would be fairly simple to make the whole episode more consistent en masse. But not only was our colorist without power and unable to do any work on the project, as it turned out, we actually need to go into every shot in the episode individually and correct them one at a time—which is, well, more of a time-consuming headache. It turns out to not have been a simple action to be quickly handled once our colorist got his power restored.
The uneven color seems to stem from our conversion process in converting the episode footage from its original 4K definition into something more usable for editing. So it might actually make more sense, rather than to tweak each shot in the episode as necessary, it might be better to go into the original 4K footage of each take, and “simply” re-covert it (“transcode”) to our usable format--fixing the color during this re-transcoding process. We would then, basically, reassemble the episode from scratch using properly-colored footage.
Either way, whether we try to go into each shot in the episode individually, or we, instead, decide to go back to the original 4K footage and re-transcode it and reassemble the episode from scratch, either way, it’s going to be a lengthier (and likely more expensive) project than we had initially anticipated. So, while we lost no footage, and we have multiple copies of all our footage, it seems to have changed from, in effect, a color-correcting project to a whole re-editing project.
There were other contributing factors: the harsh winter weather took an untimely toll on many other key post-production volunteers, too; our production company is also in the throes of relocating to a new studio facility; and we are all busy ramping up to our next shoot in two months from now. So it turns out to be a busy time for us to also work on "The Holiest Thing." (I'm reminded of Erich Brenn, spinning plates to the "Sabre Dance" on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
So, we have no new expected due date for the safe delivery of our newest baby. Please, don’t pay a daily visit to our website, looking for the episode. It is likely still months away. The good news is that our fans will be the beneficiaries of a better product.