ODIE in Post, Week 2: The Footage Doesn't Lie

There's a moment after every shoot where the movie stops being an event and becomes an object. For seventeen days ODIE was a hundred moving parts: call sheets, company moves, ice deliveries, an actor in every single scene. Now it's a set of drives. Everything Danny Keinarth, our DIT, protected all shoot long has made its way to our editor, Jay Trautman, who is cutting from Los Angeles through the summer.

The numbers he inherited: 674 takes, 124 of them circled as selects on set. That's the raw ore. His job between now and August is the whole journey from first assembly to locked cut, which is a polite way of saying he has to watch every frame we shot, including the ones where a bus drove through the take, and find the film hiding inside.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about post: the edit is where you find out what you actually made. On set you shoot the movie you planned. In the edit you meet the movie you have. Sometimes they're the same movie. Usually they're cousins. Our script supervisor's continuity notes are the map between them, and I've come to believe those handwritten pages are worth their weight in hard drives.

Meanwhile the rest of the post team is warming up in the wings. Composer Anthony Cozza starts building the score this summer. Our colorist, Geraldo "Matondo" Alexandre, will take the locked cut through to final master from Lisbon, shaping the look with our DP Lester Platt and our director Nick Barr. It's a relay race where the baton is a movie about one man crossing Austin before curfew.

For those of us in Austin, post feels strange. The parking lots are quiet. Nobody needs ice. The movie is out there getting made and all we can do is wait for the first cut to come back.

It will. Fridays, we'll be here.