ODIE in Post: Reel One Ships Last

A movie gets made three times. Once on the page, once on set, and once in the edit. ODIE is nearly through the third one, close enough that the people doing the work have started using the words fine cut.

Five reels. Beginning to end. A whole movie.

Here is the small, specific thing that happened last week, because the small specific things are where filmmaking actually lives.

On Tuesday, assistant editor Colleen Murphy sent composer Anthony Cozza reels two through five. Not reel one. Reel one stayed behind on purpose, and she flagged it right in the email: reel one to follow later today.

It did not follow later that day.

Editor Jay Trautman had a reason. He had cut the opening shorter. A shorter opening means different timing, and different timing means any music written against the old version is work somebody has to throw away. So he held it. He wrote to Nick, "we haven't sent R1 because I wanted you to bless the shorter opening before Anthony does too much work to that timing."

A big part of this job is right there in that sentence. Protecting somebody else's hours before they spend them.

Nick watched it Wednesday morning and answered in one line. "Jay that cut you shared looks great as a good to go for the festival cut."

Four minutes later, Jay to Colleen: "Thanks! Colleen, please ship that R1 to Anthony." By midday reel one was gone too. For the first time since the camera stopped rolling in June, the entire picture was sitting in one person's hands at once.

Colleen also sent over a music cue list she is keeping live against the current cut. That sounds like housekeeping. It is closer to a nervous system. A cue list is the map of where music goes, the cut keeps moving underneath it, and somebody has to make the map move too.

Then Jay asked Anthony for one more thing, and it is the least glamorous request anybody will read about filmmaking this year. Bounce the music as wav or aiff. Put the start timecode at the end of the filename. Add a date or a version number. A cue name, then 260907, then 03000800.

That ugly string of characters is how a movie stays organized. Every version anyone has ever lost got lost because two people disagreed about a filename.

Thursday night, music came back.

Anthony sent a batch, with a note attached to one of them. A cue called Trip to the Past ends by dissolving into Memories, the theme he wrote for the flashback that opens the film. "That's why it ends like that," he explained. He is not done either. "I have a much more solid idea for the flashback/main theme I am working on this weekend."

So that is where ODIE stands. Picture, essentially there. Music, arriving in pieces. An editor in one place, a composer in another, and an assistant editor keeping a spreadsheet honest between them.

Reel one shipped last. The movie got whole.