Author: Christine Margaret Dodge
Television writers often jump into the post-production of a series without much training, yet editors know that the value of strong communication and collaboration between writers and editors cannot be overstated.
That’s why the WSC’s Women’s Steering Committee (WSC), in partnership with the Writers Guild of America’s Western Women Writers Committee and Writers’ Education Committee, hosted its first “TV Writing and Post-Production” education panel on September 19 to discuss the most important issues. Important Things Production Professionals Wish Screenwriters Knew, and Vice Versa.
More than 180 people attended in person at WGAW headquarters in Los Angeles and online via Zoom. Panelists include MPEG WSC co-chair and picture editor Amy Jennings (“S.W.A.T.,” “The Other Black Girl”), post-production supervisor Jacqueline Hernandez (“Forever,” “Riverdale” ), television director and former editor Claire Scanlon (The Office, The Spoils of War), sound mixer John Milo Train (Chicago P.D., For All Mankind), and United Series producer and WGAW board member Delin Rodriguez (“The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Queen”). The discussion was moderated by author Molly Mosley (Call Me Kate).
After hundreds of emails and months of hard work from two guild-specific committees, the plan was finally completed. The idea is part of the Guild’s WSC’s Lift Up Women mentoring programme, which launched in March last year to support women across all post-production categories to develop their skills and find meaningful progression in their careers.
“We are all storytellers, we just work in different mediums,” said Diana Fishman, photo editor and co-chair of the association’s WSC, before the event. “So think of it as a partnership — we’re trying to help them tell the story they envision, and we’re on the same team — and then we can help each other.”
The panelists discussed the typical timeline and workflow for a TV series, from production to the editing process, all the way to network or studio commentary. They also discuss note-taking etiquette and basic post-production terminology/vocabulary.
“If you’re lucky [to be] On a show where you have time and a little money…start with a concept meeting, which is your first day on the job,” Scanlon said. “In concept meetings, everyone throws out pie-in-the-sky, blue-sky ideas. Then, when you have a production meeting in the middle of the week, people start killing the dream. We don’t have the money, we don’t have this, we don’t have that. And Start answering these questions. It’s kind of like a call and response, the concept meeting is where you get your feet on the ground, and then the keynote meeting is where you really lock in the story.
Jennings says one of the best ways to build a bridge between writers/showrunners and post-production while shaping the story is to provide feedback to editors to help them better understand your intentions for specific scenes. , rather than giving overly standardized annotations. “It would be offensive to an editor to tell me which frames to delete,” she explains. “I do like the general line, ‘This scene feels slow’… a slow feel that I can live with. If you want to speed things up, I can make a note of that and can start where I see fit Cut some fat.
Pros also recommend that writers try to get involved early in post-production, even before a specific episode, to provide input and help build relationships, but they note that this may come down to showrunner preference.
For Rodriguez, for example, she thinks it’s all about sharing knowledge.
“When I took on Queen of the South, … I didn’t have a lot of editing experience, so when I sat down with the editor of the first episode of Season 4, I took one look at him and said, ‘I don’t have a lot of editing experience. More experience. I need you to teach me. I may have an intuition about something, but I’m not sure or I don’t understand some of your vocabulary.” she said. “I just have a gut feeling about the story because I’m a writer, but there are some things that I can’t understand, or I can’t understand why you can’t do something like miraculously figure something out in post… There are things I need to learn, and when I say to him, ‘I need you to teach me,’ … when you do that, people are invested in your success.
To that end, panelists said they believe producers should invite writers into the entire production process, from pitch meetings to the mixing stage, to get their input and see their work come to life on screen.
Still, post-production pros warn, remember: We can’t “fix it in post” without impacting schedule or budget, which is why ongoing collaboration between production and post-production is so important.
“You have to go back to the triangle of life: If you want life to be good, you need to pay the price. If you don’t want to spend money and you want good things, it takes time. If you don’t want to spend time and you don’t have the money, , that might be bad. “Now, if you ask before you post, you can go a long way in avoiding things like, ‘Oh, I think we need to do this, I want to shoot it through the glass. There’s no glass. How do I get it? But I need the glass to shoot the glass and then we can make it work.
To elaborate on this point in more detail, Train added, “If you’re on the mixing stage, the Titanic is halfway across the Atlantic. You don’t have a lot of options at that point… You have to write it in from the beginning. In the script.
In the future, WSC hopes to cooperate with the DGA and PGA to set up such educational programs once a quarter.
