LIGHTS, CAMERA, SPREADSHEETS!
Cheers to the premiere!
A toast to the hard work of our amazing collaborators on ‘The American Diplomat.’
When people think of filmmaking they think of travel to dynamic locations, meeting interesting film subjects, premiere events and red carpets – and those things happen, but only after months (sometimes years) of the actual work of filmmaking is complete.
As we approach the broadcast of our film, THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT, there will be lots of excitement, and screenings. It’s unquestionably an exhilarating time in the film process. However, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on the details and the hard work of our team to bring this story to light.
The final cut of THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT has over 600 pieces of archival media. That includes rare historic photos and film clips, newspaper headlines and audio archives. Over the course of researching the project, our team of archival researchers gathered nearly 2500 photos and videos for us to cull through for the film. We logged and reviewed each one of these and had to utilize a cloud asset management platform to keep everything organized, searchable and accessible for our fully remote team working from Virginia to Canada, Maryland to Finland. Our editor and director spent weeks together remotely collaborating on editing scenes. Getting down a 90 minute rough cut (which we loved) to a broadcast hour – just 51 minutes. An amazing team of our composer and music supervisor worked as we tweaked cues for a film that is very complex but also subtle in its exploration of its themes around race, representation and diplomacy.
As our deliverables were due to our broadcaster, our entire team worked late into the night and over long weekends to make sure every file was perfectly organized. We were tired, our kids were playing in the background, but we laughed as we screen-shared and double checked our work. It’s moments like these, when the pressure is on and you have to pull together to finalize the project for broadcast delivery, that you know you have assembled the best partners you could imagine.
If there is one truth that has been reinforced from this process, it’s that filmmaking is a collaborative art and business, and to succeed and execute well, you need passionate, talented, collaborators who are all committed to making a great product.
At the end of the day, documentary filmmaking is in the details, it’s in the budget spreadsheet with over 150 line items that you pore over every week, the hiring and managing of a multitude of talented freelancers who each have an important role to play, the fact-checking and re fact-checking to ensure accuracy, it’s working through the technical challenges of remote collaboration and editing, and examining every line in the film to ensure the tightest, truest form of the story is told. It’s late nights and long weekends, and carrying the weight of telling someone else's story on your shoulders and doing it justice. But the journey of filmmaking, while difficult, is also rewarding and exhilarating in a multitude of ways, not least of which is the collaboration of talented people who pushed to bring THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT to fruition – and when the title card rolls, and the music fades up, we can collectively agree that the seven year road was worth it.
Cheers!
Leola, Rachell & Kiley