Dialogue Editing

304 PREPARING FOR THE MIX
sedan or the background sounds of NASA’s Mission Control will come
in handy.
• Arrange shipping of your material to the mix facility. Find out how
and when the mixing stage will receive it if you’re not taking it
yourself. Although you no longer have to deliver mix elements in a
truck—a gym bag suffi ces—you have to make sure that everything
that must travel does. Of course, this is much more hair-raising when
you’re traveling to another city or country.
• Talk with the studio manager to fi nd out when your setup will take
place.
• If you’re never coming back to your cutting room after the mix, box up
what’s yours and what belongs to the production. Grab the things you
care about, since by the time you’ve fi nished with the mix, someone
else will be in “your” room.
• Archive your project. Make backup fi les to take with you plus one
copy for the production offi ce.
• This may sound a bit pessimistic, but make sure you get paid.
Overwhelmingly, most producers pay their bills, but if you’ve been
having trouble getting money throughout the gig, it’s naïve to assume
that things will get better once you’re done and can contribute no
other value to the production.
Check the Answer Print
While you’re sprucing up the dialogue, the picture is undergoing its own
metamorphosis. At lock, the picture department made a video EDL and a cut
list for the negative cutters—those people with the white coats, gloves, scissors,
and nerves of steel, who located each piece of original negative and
reconstructed the picture editor’s creation. When they were through, they
shipped it off to the lab where it became the fi rst answer print, which the
director and the director of photography use for making decisions about the
look of the fi lm. They’ll eventually spend many hours at the lab, adding a bit
of cyan here and a little magenta there and doing other painterly magic.
Meanwhile—on a fi lm with a reasonable budget—the picture editor is checking
that the fi lm is in sync or, more bluntly, whether the negative cutters made
a mistake. On a very low-budget fi lm, the picture department will be long
gone, so you’ll inherit this responsibility. Actually, it’s not so hard. You just
need to synchronize a copy of your session to the telecine of the answer print
and watch the movie. Take into account the name of the new video version
when you name the “Save As” session. If you notice a scene slightly out of
sync, make a note, but don’t change anything yet. When you fi nish the screen-