Emma here, post-production supervisor on BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!*. With just one day left in post-production I should be panicking. A bit worrying that I'm not, but I'd like to think that everything is going according to schedule! So I will spend my free time informing everyone interested about the post production process, or rather, "The making of BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!*".
As always with documentaries, the amount of footage that is captured during the shoot is enormous, and BBGB is certanly not an exception. Because of the situation we were in when we started shooting for this film, with Fredrik still traveling a lot with his previous film BANANAS!*, we tried to combine his world tour with shooting the new film, which resulted in hiring a different cinematographer at each location...
So when the film was done we had footage from over 20 different camera crews, not to mention recording formats! On top of this, we were also collecting an enormous amount of archive footage, from all the TV news coverage around BANANAS!*, along with news clippings, letters, YouTube videos etc. So we were facing a very scattered project, with tons of different formats, frame rates and resolution settings. And I guess thats when you start saying to yourself, even when working in post-production: "We'll fix it in post!"
After many weeks of editing, with top-editors Benjamin Binderup and Jesper Osmund, who together with director Fredrik Gertten and dramaturgist Niels Pagh Andersen found a good narrative structure for all this footage, they made an excellent story. At the end of October it was time to say good-bye to editing the film, as it was facing a long journey with five different and crucial paths: sound design, music, animation, subtitling and color correction.
And here we are now. The work of composer Conny Malmqvist, sound designer Alexander Thörnqvist, animator Charlotte Rodenstedt, translator Ingrid Eng and the great color grading artist Michael Cavanagh has finally returned to us. Today Michael Cavanagh is doing the final touches, and it's a really cool thing to put all the parts together, it's almost magical. Now we can be totally honest to our senses and see, feel, and hear the film for the first time. And especially we hope that you as an audience do so, too. Because we who work in post-production, can never watch a master without feeling a bit worried, I guess that's the price you pay for having the pleasue to work in such an interesting environment. And also to be able to live up to everyone's expectations of "We'll fix it in post!"
