The Final Touches

The whirlwind continues.

Since locking the picture edit last month, post-production entered its final phases with colour-correction, digital FX, music composition, and sound design. During these final touches, a new team of creative artists came on board. Beginning with a series of meetings to discuss the overall vision of the movie, each new member brought their unique talents forth to add a whole new level of depth to the film. 

Here's a basic rundown:

Colour Correcting

If you’ve ever viewed a movie’s deleted scenes, you'll often see what the raw untreated film looks like. Colour correcting makes the movie as lush and vibrant as possible.  This process was done at Vancouver’s Technicolor, and really added a new dynamic to the overall look of the movie.

Colour correcting can also augment the tones or mood of the story on a scene-by-scene basis. Working with the colourist, we found many creative ways to emphasize key moments and entire scenes with a slight adjustment of the palette (a darker, lonelier scene might see more blues and greys for example) . It’s a subtle thing, but it can create an unconscious effect on the viewer.  Some really interesting ideas evolved in this process.

 

Digital FX

Digital FX were created by artist Brett Keyes, who creatively enhanced various elements in the film, such as digitally erasing unwanted components in a shot (wires used in a stunt for example), to adding new elements (a few stars twinkling in an otherwise black sky), and even entirely digitally composed shots. While DE is certainly not an FX film, the subtlety of Brett's work has really added some additional overall value.

Music Composition

Our music composer is the very talented Terry Frewer. Terry has done an incredible job capturing specific emotional moments and heightening tension. His score is rich, beautiful, and even haunting at times, going above expectation.

Sound Design

Miguel Nunes led the sound design team. Miguel too has created some fantastic elements for DE, from low eerie drones and subtle background noises, to complex dream sequences and flashbacks.  Miguel's talent, ears, and imagination have really brought something special in telling Donovan’s story.

Final Sound Mix

Working again with Miguel, this last week has been spent at Vancouver’s Post Modern Sound for final sound mix. 

During this phase, all of the recorded sounds (music, sound design, etc) are combined into different channels involving each signal's level, frequency, and position. The process takes place on a mix stage, like a small theater. The goal, to find the right balance and emphasis on key moments: Is the music score more important here than the sound design? Can we adjust the audio slightly on these key words spoken? Should we fade away all of the background noise here, to put more emphasis on this moment? With ingenuity and grace, Miguel and his team did an incredible job. 

After watching our film many, many times throughout these last few months of editing, it's such a tremendous joy to see Donovan's Echo evolve into a whole new movie these last few weeks. 

I am entirely pleased with everyone's talents and efforts, and very much look forward to sharing the finished product with all of you a little later this year.