Film School Files: The Stages of Making a Movie

Terence Johnson April 28, 2016 Article

Read Time:1 Minute, 49 Second

If you follow me on social media, you’d have seen me post yesterday that I officially finished my thesis film The Debt Must Be Paid. I am overjoyed to make it to this point and figured I’d celebrate it (and actually do a post for the first time in weeks) by doing a fun post. So here are the stages of making a movie:

Coming up with a new idea and starting writing

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Only to pitch it to people and have them criticize everything

But you pull through and move on to budgeting and scheduling, and you produce stuff, even tho it’s a struggle you manage it.

You cast the perfect actors and think nothing bad will happen…

Even tho something catastrophic will happen (like losing multiple locations two days before you shoot)

You shoot the movie anyhow and manage to make it through

You look at your bank account and this gif makes all the sense in the world

But you’re editing the film, which is wonderful (cause davinci lets you sync sound files)

You do cut after cut after cut and think you’ll never hit picture lock cause everyone got some shit to say

You finally hit picture lock

Then you realize that you still have to work on the sound, color, music, titles, and credits

And that you’ll probably have 50 million tracks in your protools session. You finally finish and go to finally export, and something again goes wrong but you were prepared

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But then its all worth it cause you’re finished

That feeling when you walk out of the building having officially uploaded your thesis

A photo posted by Terence Johnson (@lenoirauteur) on Apr 27, 2016 at 11:23am PDT