The Wrap Party Is a Lie
Why finishing your film is harder than shooting it, and what to do about it
There is this major lie we celebrate in the film industry, and it usually has a DJ, a bar tab, and a room full of people who genuinely believe the hardest part is over.
The wrap party. There I said it.
I have been in post-production for 16 years. I have supervised and produced over 300 episodes for Netflix, Disney, Warner, and Paramount. And I am telling you, right now, directly, as someone who lives in the part of filmmaking everyone forgets about, the wrap party is the biggest lie we keep telling ourselves, and it is costing independent filmmakers everything. Every post-production pro out there is nodding their heads in agreement with me right now… 😜
Now hear me out
What is actually happening is, you spend months on an idea, researching writing, rewriting, living inside characters, obsessing over locations, prepping every single detail for production. Then you shoot it. You watch your vision come to life in front of a camera, scene by scene, day by day, the energy on set is truly exhilarating and nothing like you’ve ever felt before.. Then when it is done, your brain tells you: you did it yay time to celebrate!
But here is what you’re not realizing yet - you’re only halfway there 😬
Yes, and sometimes it’s less than halfway. I mean the insurmountable amount of things that we have to overcome to get our film, written, developed, produced and shot is already unbelievable and we really only WANT to think that the hard part is over. Films that spent a year in pre-production and production will often spend the same amount of time - sometimes double - in post. It sucks. I can tell you right now that the film I produced last Summer has lived in this limbo. I’m planning on doing a day-by-day series about how that shoot went in June, but yes, life happens and I have not stuck to my own post schedule like I should have and that project has been sitting on the shelf (literally, I’m staring at the hard drive right now.) That is just how it goes with indie films. And yet nobody in pre-production is talking about it, planning for it, or budgeting for it, at least not in the indie world of filmmaking. The industry celebrates the wrap as if the film is finished because it is easier than confronting what comes next.
What comes next is a completely different kind of hard
In production, the hard work is physical and visible. Long days at real locations, the never ending amount of decisions. The adrenaline carrying you through. In post, the hard work is invisible and internal. You are sitting inside your own head, trying to translate every creative intention you had on set into written documents or conversations for an editor who was not there, a colorist who is seeing your footage for the first time, a sound mixer who has never heard your vision out loud. The brutal part? by the time you get there, the energy that was carrying you is gone. I can attest to that first hand.
I call this the Post Energy Drain
It is not laziness. It is depletion. And it is the reason so many directors get to post and just want someone to handle it - to figure it out - because the thought of going back through the work one more time with that same level of intention feels impossible. You’ve already done the work for yourself you don’t want to have to bring a new team of people up to speed now.
The problem is that the work still needs to get done. And if the director is not bringing their vision to the table in post, the film becomes something the editor imagined instead of something the director intended. Often leaving first cuts a disappointment to directors. This is why so many editors get an undeserved bad rap, they are giving the director one possible version of their film but without the much needed context of what the director has in their mind it often leads to disappointment.
That’s not where I’m at on my film at least, since I produced it I had the benefit of being in on the creative vision from the start and my director is extremely collaborative he’s been waiting very patiently for me to get started (sorry Kiel.)
The Vision Gap
I want to talk about this thing I call the Vision Gap - the distance between what lives in a director’s head and what shows up in the first cut - is where films get lost.
I am not telling you this to overwhelm you. I am sharing this because the fix is not some magic wand, and it is not money (even though yes money can make it easier but if we all waited round for the money to show up we’d never get any film done.) The actual fix is planning. When you are in pre-production, and still feeling the energy from the creative process, still clear about why every scene exists and what you want the audience to feel - this is when you want to do the post work. You should write the creative documents during this phase. The editor’s brief. The colorist’s reference deck. The sounds you imagine hearing through every scene. The Foley direction. You should do all of these while the vision is still alive in you before you are completed drained creatively. I know it sounds like a lot but it’s not, a lot of it is just adapting what you’ve already done. Yes the script is a blueprint but honestly you don’t want to bog down your scripts with a bunch of post directives and lingo, so I always recommend breaking out that creative in their own separate docs.
Then when you get to your wrap party, you can actually celebrate. Because you will know the other half of the marathon has already been mapped out on paper at least. You just have to run it. Sure you’ll update those docs but I promise, your future self will thank you for having the foundation already laid out.
I’m going to walk through each of these docs in the next three posts to hopefully shed some light on how to do them quick and easy. Because as an indie filmmaker we often have to take on a lot of extra leg work the big budget projects pay Post Producers like me to handle. So if I can share you simple ways to alleviate that burden and save you money in post I’m gonna do my best to!
Let’s talk notes from post.
Until next time,
Shawna Carroll
Shout out to Culture House for the mention in their newsletter last week! As always it’s great to collab with you on some amazing projects and do SXSW with y’all! Like Nicole Galovski said “we don’t do SX without each other 😜” here’s to our next one 🥂
Being on the absolute end of the production chain, I’ve been invited to so many wrap parties where I’m knee deep in the mixing stage I couldn’t even go.