Chess Film: Directing Everything Together

Our sound designer and editor had the heaviest workload during the post-production process. Although, as the director, I still had to make sure everyone's vision was reflected in the film. This was more challenging during post-production because, while I was very hands-on during filming, I wasn't always with the editor and sound designer while they were putting the film together. Luckily, our editor and sound designer were very communicative with the choices they were making. This way, I had the ability to suggest certain ideas if something wasn't aligning with our original intent. 

Sound ideas 

One of the ideas our sound designer had was to incorporate a ticking sound during one of our most intense shots. While watching our film, I noticed that although our actor followed our direction (looking left to right), it didn't come across as intensely as our sound designer had envisioned. So, we decided to include a quick sequence with alternating shots of our actress's face and the chessboard, bringing us back to when we discussed using montage editing during pre-production. The issue was we hadn't filmed the chessboard with this shot in mind, as we hadn't planned for it beforehand. My solution was to reuse a shot from the beginning of our film. Since the shot would be split into really quick cuts, it would be difficult to tell if it is the same shot from the beginning of the film. 

Our editor splitting up the original shot into smaller cuts