So I got some pretty good hands-on experience working on a blast for the network, which was pretty interesting.
A blast (I’m sure other networks call them something else, but whatever) in our case meant “a behind the scenes look at a film” where you take footage from the film and slice it together with soundbytes you take when you interview the movie stars at media day.
On paper it doesn’t sound hard.
As with all things post-related there were….complications.
I worked on two blasts while I was there- in one, the interviewer, while intelligent, “didn’t look pretty enough” for the producer, so we had to cut 100% of her lines from the bit. In the other, our replacement interviewer “sounded like a ditzy bimbo” according to the producer.
Here’s a thought- if you don’t want them to sound like a ditzy bimbo, hire an actual journalist and not an ex-playmate with no interview experience at all and maybe that problem handles itself.
But alas, you can’t have it both ways.
In the first blast, the rought cut I-(along with another intern who also worked on it) really made an attempt at creating an interesting narrative about what it was like to make that particular film. We took the most interesting soundbytes we could find, and cut them together with behind the scenes b-roll (since they gave us nothing else to use) to really try to create a story. I thought it looked great when we were done.
The company boss tore it to shreds. All he wanted was “some silly soundbyte, cut to the trailer, another stupid soundbyte, maybe something funny, cut to the trailer again, and you’re done.” No more, no less.
I was offended at first when my work was thrown in the garbage. But I googled a few more “behind the scenes” promos and that really is what they are- you just steal whole chunks of the trailer, throw in goofy soundbytes in between, and that’s it. So there’s another valuable post-production lesson right there: don’t overdo it trying to show off- just do what the producer wants.
The second blast I worked on went much faster- mostly because I put WAY less effort into it, and ironically, it went over a lot better. Though my supervisor fixed over the rough edges most of what I worked on made the final cut this time, and I’m pretty proud that the majority of my work made it on air.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMxUPHyZUac]