Part 10: Wrapper’s Delight
As I’ve explained back in
PART 3: The Act That Wasn’t (link), I got involved in this entire process late. I poked around at it as time permitted, but other work, including Dennis Bailey’s
Polaris film got in the way of my being able to put much time into it. But after finishing the rough-assembly of
Polaris I finally had a breather and decided to dive into trying to get the entirety of Act Four roughly cut together. Part of this was because I feared someone would leak the unfinished Act Four just as a “here, this is how the story ends”, and part because I really wanted the participants to view the fruits of their labor in the manner it was intended.
Fools Gold
So, by Oct/Nov 2013 I had the rough cut of Act Four finally in a shape where I felt it worked narratively and dramatically. I shared it with Scott, and thus we hatched the plan to finish it. We discussed a reasonable deadline, and in batting around how many months of work it would take with a safety margin, it was looking like spring 2014. This is when inspiration struck: I suggested April 1st. Scott loved it, because no one would know if we were serious or not, and if things went terribly wrong, we could either release a big joke on that date, or release some kind of official announcement then of when it would come out.
One other problem we ran into was that the starshipexeter.com domain had lapsed. It turned out that Greg Schnitzer had picked it up for what I called “safe keeping” and handed it right over to Scott when asked. So the first order of business was what to put up there. In assembling the Act Four edit I’d made use of the chronometer, so we hit on the idea of simply showing a countdown, in days, hours, minutes and seconds (which STC also did later). It didn’t take long for people to find it and begin speculating if this was an all a cruel joke or if for real. We refused to say either way, knowing that anticipation was half the fun.
Of course, there was the small problem of actually finishing the film.
I’ve outlined a lot of the strategies and particulars of the process above, so I’m not going to repeat any of it, but in short I handed off the edit and all my working files to Scott, who would turn my rough cut into a fine cut, handling all the fine adjustments, color correction, etc., and work with the Ralph Miller on the sound and Ben Jasmine on the music. Meanwhile, I’d focus entirely on the VFX pipeline and get all those shots together, directing and coordinating with NEO f/x and Dennis to provide unfinished or newly required ship elements, while I’d figure out how to make fly-through-able Weirdspace, how to make the BFD “collapse in!” and a star shrink down as its mass is sucked into a rapidly growing black hole. Easy, right?
Except there were some...
Speed Bumps
A big one was that I kept forgetting to call Jimm Johnson, and in the meantime the rumor mill got churning to the effect that Scott had “gone rogue”. Once I finally got on the phone with Jimm I got things worked out and everything seemed good to move forward as planned, but there was a lot of water under the bridge over the past years and a number of tensions between various key players and even some lost trust, so I had to play referee and try to assure everyone that this was not only going to get done, but it was going to be done as well if not better than the previously released sections. At first I misapprehended Jimm's support and good nature to think he felt that he could be hands-off, but as we closed in on the April 1 deadline it became obvious that he didn’t feel good about not having his hands in the process. I totally understood that. Scott worried we’d risk the whole thing grinding to a halt again. So there were lots of back and forths over that, not all of them pretty, some downright ugly. In retrospect while I tried very hard to walk a fine line and keep everyone happy and moving forward, I didn't do it as well as I could have, especially insofar as keeping Jimm in the process more. Luckily Post-Production Supervisor David Weiberg was a godsend in terms of helping reassure everyone and smoothing down any ruffled feathers on all sides (including me). Finally we agreed to bump the release date to May 1, but that Scott and I would still wrap on March 31, then hand the edit back to Jimm so he could have several weeks to fine-tune as he saw fit. In fact, most of the tweaks he did to the few effects shots he touched made them better.
One thing I have to say about Jimm Johnson, he’s a tough guy, but fair. He’s got strong opinions. Hoo boy, does he! He can go from protective mama bear to total pussycat, and this doesn’t always endear him to everyone. I get that; he’s passionate about what he does and stands for what he believes in. But from my catbird seat I saw his heart was always in the right place (as opposed to where his liver should be), he was always concerned with the quality of the end result, and moreover he was always very respectful where my work went. He even asked if it was okay if he tweaked some of my VFX. He needn't have asked and was under no obligation to do so, but he did anyway. The fact that he's still speaking to me after all this says a lot! So my hat’s off to him for being a class act.
Final Steps
Concurrent with all this...
- Dennis built us a new bigger badder Tressaurian ship, a K-Class warship (where “K” stands for “Kickass”, but on the storyboards and emails I called it the BAMF, short for Bad-Ass MoFo). I requested this because I worried that the Tressaurians had been utterly outclassed by the Tholians in Act Two, so we needed a bad-ass Tressaurian ship to be able to take them on. I asked for a "Tressaurian Dreadnaught" and that's just what I got.
- NEO f/x got us all the extra spaceship elements required: shuttle drifting, Exeter swooshing away from the black hole, and notably several iterations of and elements for the "collapse in" element as the BFD/BMFM is destroyed.
- Kenneth Thomson created a CGI Tressaurian for the “money shot”… with no idea what it was for.
- On the audio side Ralph Miller delivered all the final mixes and sound effects work, which were 90% right on the first try.
- And for the music, Ben Jasmine…
Uh oh, we couldn’t find Ben Jasmine. I tried several times but never got a reply. His original music was one of the best things about the show to date, I thought, so how to replace him? I briefly investigated the idea of mining the cues he’s already provided—some of them unused previously—but was not convinced that would work, so Scott went after Hetoreyn, whom I knew from his work on
Polaris.
Like any artist, Hetoreyn didn’t want to just do arrangements of the existing themes; he wanted to put his stamp on it. But we had to ensure the music “fit” and didn’t feel like a completely different animal. After some back and forth, we settled on having him write a few brief motifs that evoked the Tressaurian march, etc., from Ben’s earlier work, but without being exactly the same. I think the final music is great, even if it is somewhat different in feel than what precedes it. I leave it to audiences to tell me if they notice the shift.
I only had one big note on the music that I would not budge from. Hetoreyn made liberal use of the
Exeter title theme, which itself is a riff on the TOS “Space Radio” cue from “Mudd’s Women”, which was okay, but right at the end, when Garrovick walked on the bridge, he carried that melody along into a few bars that had appeared nowhere else in the episode, and I said “we can’t introduce a new motif in the last shot because anyone who knows 'Space Radio' will zero in on it right during our last look at Garrovick and his ‘loneliness of command’ moment, undermining it." So Hetoreyn removed it… from the score in the show. It’s still there in the
version he released via SoundCloud (link), the sneaky so-and-so.
So, April 1 arrived and we used our backup plan: release SOMETHING. In this case it was a trailer for the arrival of the finale, with an announced release date. I wondered if people would still think we might be pulling their legs, but given how much new footage was in this trailer, it seems pretty much everyone realized we were for real. It was finally going to happen.
And it did. On schedule.
Okay, a
very prolonged schedule.
FIN
—2 POP—
P.S. A final big thanks to Jimm and Joshua for letting let me play in their sandbox, and to Dennis Russell Bailey, David Weiberg, Joel Sarchet, and, finally, Scott Cummins, who worked so closely with me for several months . Also, thanks to Michael Buford (my big bromance), Holly Guess, Joe Azzato, Elizabeth Wheat, Scott A. Taylor, NEO f/x, Kenneth Thomson and the other cast and crew.
