Anyone who has ever been to Hollywood can tell you that it is not everything the movies led you to believe. It’s dirty, the traffic is terrible, and parking is impossible. And if you’re trying to get in or out when there’s a show at the Hollywood Bowl, you better budget at least two additional hours into your commuting time. In other words, it’s not particularly glamorous. So just who exactly is adding all that glitz and gloss to TV and movies? Why, your friendly local post production facilities.
Post production is a giant umbrella that encompasses all the work that goes into making a production watchable after shooting is over: editing, ADR, music for the soundtrack, special effects, the transfer of film to video, and, of course, closed captioning are all part of that process. And since deadlines are the name of the game, many pieces of that puzzle are constructed simultaneously. You’ve probably seen pictures of a TV set, where a living room only has three walls and no roof. Well, putting the finishing touches on an episode of TV is kind of similar.
The video that a captioner watches will often have green screen instead of CGI, questionable language, temporary dialogue, and extremely dark un-color-corrected video. If you’ve ever watched an episode of television where the captions only ID the main character as (man), you can begin to see why. It’s because when the captions were created, the captioner was probably staring at a near-black screen while listening to an unknown production assistant attempting to recreate the lines that the star will later record in ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement, which involves actors re-recording all the lines which were unintelligible during the original shoot). While this process often leads to some pretty hilarious temporary audio (Shot of Macho male star “I need to get my hands…” Shot over his shoulder as a cheery female voice finishes his sentence “On Aimee’s computer!”), what’s more impressive is the way that all these processes are able to come together for the final delivery.
With tight deadlines looming over everyone’s heads, the last minute details that post production covers are finished and passed on from one facility to the next like a baton in a relay. Urgent emails are sent at 3:00 a.m. Line substitutions are communicated over the phone. A final video may not even be available until the morning of the episode’s airdate. Final captions will be emailed, messengers on motorbikes (to better navigate the insane traffic) will deliver masters from encoding facilities, and shows will air looking as slick and polished as if they were produced with all the time in the world. And that final illusion is what makes “Hollywood” so impressive. Week in and week out, every level of production from the initial story breaking to the captioning, will work crazy hours to deliver a show. And if you occasionally see a stray microphone or an slightly puzzling ID in the finished project, know that what you’re actually getting a glimpse of is the real Hollywood magic: all the missing microphones and correct IDs. Which is pretty awesome, when you think about it.