← Back to Non-Linear Production
By Erich Ocean
A motion picture project proceeds through three phases, sequentially, and once the next phase has been entered, decisions made in earlier stages are not re-visited. In technology circles, this is known as the waterfall approach to project planning. Software developers in particular have abandoned the waterfall approach in favor of more flexible "iterative" approaches, and with much greater success.
Pixar, by virtue of starting out as a technology company and not a film studio, inherited the "iterative" or "non-linear" approach that is standard in high-tech companies and went on to apply it to 3D animation production — with spectacular results.
Writers develop written plans for dialog and scenes (the ubiquitous "screenplay") and then directors and crew develop plans to get the actual pictures and sound recorded, in the phase known as pre-production. Once enough effort has gone into pre-production, most decisions are binding (the budget and production insurance depends on them) and the project is "green-lit" and moves onto the next phase, the first "waterfall".
Through a complex, labor-intensive and real-time process, the pre-production plans are turned into more-or-less final motion picture footage and sound during the production phase.
For live-action filmmaking (as opposed to animation), relatively little has changed about the production phase in the over 100 hundred years films have been made. Sound was added, then color, and later on, 3D. But the basic approach remains: lots of lights and people, physical sets, actors and crew, and a director doing the best he or she can given the available light, hours in the day, location, and budget.
Production is a grueling process, with long, hard days being the norm. While development and pre-production drags on for years, production happens quickly, typically in less than 60 days. The footage and sound acquired are the raw materials that are passed onto the next stage. This is the second waterfall.
Most importantly for our purposes, the results are all "final" in some fundamental way. An editor may later pick and choose which shots and dialog to keep, but whatever they do choose cannot be manipulated further in a fundamental way. They can't, for example, change the lines an actor said or the camera angle the director picked on set, or the performance that was actually recorded, or how quickly the operator moved a camera through the scene. An editor gets to use what was shot, and that's that.
When a director fails to acquire the material they need during production, occasionally (if the budget allows) they can get a "pick-up" shot here or there, or record some voice over dialogue to smooth over story problems, but for the most part, they're largely stuck with whatever they got the first time: the budget has been spent and the actors and crew have moved on to their next project.
Compared to the pre-production and production phases, the final phase, called post-production, has had major developments in both art and science, enabling vast improvements to be made to the footage and sound after production wraps, including editing, color grading, sound, music, ADR and most notably, compositing and visual effects.
Post-production has become indispensable to modern filmmaking, and most of the improvements are a result of applying computers in novel and innovative ways. As it turns out, applying computers to pre-production and production is equally beneficial.
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Last updated January 15, 2011.
Copyright 2011 Erich Atlas Ocean. All Rights Reserved.