Charlie Productions : Picture Post Production

Getting to play with the pictures in post is one of the most fun parts of the job, but can also be one of the most stressful. Because this is it, the last chance to get it sorted and right, and despite the comfort of the plush sofas, the steady supply of soft drinks and people running off to get you lunch from Wagamama's, the pressure is on because you are in some small part paying for the comfort of the plush sofas, the steady supply of soft drinks and people running off to get you lunch from Wagamama's as well as the incredibly experienced people doing very skilled jobs in a very swift and professional manner beside you, whilst you snuggle down in sugar-crazed comfort, munching on noodles.

When we started out, we got to go to Technicolor to do 'colour timing' on Crowd Scene For Existentialists. Which amounted to a man in a white coat going through each shot with us on a dimly-lit machine, winding the film through and pulling up differently coloured glass to make the shots match a bit better.

"Plus one red on that."

"Sure. Um. Yeah. If you say so. Oh, yeah, you're right."

The next time we got to go into proper picture post, it was to do a blow-up of Russell Square onto 35mm at CFS, and we got to talk to men in white coats who were at pains to stress to us that our mini-DV film wouldn't suddenly look like, you know, a film, just because we'd got it blown up onto film. We knew this. But we thought we'd ask.

"So what will it look like?"

"Well. You know. Like that --" he said, pointing at the video monitor in front of us, "but bigger."

And that is picture post production in a nutshell. The endless and seemingly unending determining of tiny differences - both ironing them out and enhancing them - and the stating of the blindingly obvious.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.

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