Post-Production Update

Spring 2010 was an exciting time for DCTV’s Post-Production department. We upgraded the sound monitoring system in our HDCAM Mastering Suite for 5.1 surround sound and doubled our storage speed with a new 12big Rack Fibre courtesy of LaCie, our new post-production partner. Online editor John Custodio has been putting the new system to the test, mixing for 5.1 surround sound at DCTV for the first time. We also helped several talented filmmakers prep their films for festivals. Titles included Mai Iskander’s Garbage Dreams, Slamdance short Poinciana Sunrise, Berlinale Teddy Jury Award winner Open, and Beijing Punk. We were very honored to host Rebecca Cohen and Francisco Bello for their offline edit of War Don Don, and congratulate them on their big success at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival! Our most recent online clients, Lynn True and Nelson Walker, premiered their exciting doc, Summer Pasture, at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival this year. They mastered their film for festivals and broadcast, made their blu-ray, and prepped their media files to make their Academy-qualifying DCP all here at DCTV (Summer Pasture will also screen this August at DocuWeeks™ at the IFC Center).

We managed to catch up with Lynn, during a short break in her busy festival schedule, for a short interview.

Q: Most people are unaware of the many Tibetan nomads living in China. How did you decide to make a doc on this subject?

A: Our film takes place in the Kham region of Tibet, which is partially located in Sichuan Province, China. We first traveled to Kham in 2006 as documentarians with a team of scholars from the University of Virginia. Part of our role on the trip was to train local Tibetans in basic film and video techniques. Through this training, we met Tsering Perlo, an artist and aspiring filmmaker who was in the process of starting an NGO to engage Tibetans in filmmaking and digital photography. We got along really well and talked about doing a project together. Nelson and I had become very interested in nomadic life, and Perlo had grown up in a nomadic community, so the idea came sort of naturally. We returned to Kham in the summer of 2007, knowing only that we would live in a nomadic community for several months. Whatever we documented would be the basis for our film.

Q: Many doc filmmakers, especially ones working in a vérité-influenced style, start out with a plan to make one film and find the film becoming something else. How did your concept evolve with the experience of being with your subjects?

A: We didn’t really have a preconceived idea of the film going into it. All we knew was that we were going to be living in an extreme environment and spending time in an insular community. Our preparation involved being adaptable to whatever circumstances we met with. We had the good fortune of meeting our subjects, Locho and Yama, almost immediately. They had such wonderful personalities that we pretty quickly realized that we wanted to get to know them more deeply, and that the film would become some kind of portrait of their lives. We filmed as much as we could and decided to work out the structure of the film later during the editing. [...] Consequently, the editing process was a huge challenge, but we hope that the end result portrays their lives honestly and intimately.

Q: What stage were you in with this project when you heard about DCTV?

A: I had known about DCTV for a long time, but more for its classes and filmmaking programs than as a post-production facility. As we were finishing Summer Pasture, we were looking for a reliable post house with a competitive rate. My friend Mai Iskander, whom I’d worked with on the film Garbage Dreams, had output her film at DCTV, and recommended that I try them out.

Q: Finally, we are always interested in better serving independent filmmakers and the public, by making technology more accessible. We want to differentiate
ourselves from the high-end houses that often treat indies as less important than their other clients. In that vein, what advice could you give us to help us make the post process easier for emerging filmmakers?

A: For emerging filmmakers, I think it can be a huge surprise that it typically costs so much to online a film. You’ve already put so much into making the film itself, but then to hear that to screen or broadcast your final cut, you have to produce a master tape that entails so much more cost—it can be a big wake up call. Even a simple chart that summarizes the different services often involved in onlining a film (color correction, sound mix, etc) plus estimated time/cost for these services depending on complexity of the film (graphics, running time, special fixes, etc) could be really helpful.

If you are budgeting for your edit, contact DCTV to discuss your plan. Cooperative planning with your post house saves us time and you money. It’s more efficient for both of us and enables you to focus on the creative instead of stressing about the cost. We understand independent filmmakers who must make a little go a long way—we’ve been doing that ourselves for over 30 years! To negotiate a post contract for your film, contact: Chris Arnold, post@dctvny.org.