Ipostini, the Marina Del Rey post house that handles Showtime’s original features, has been using Final Cut Pro for more than four years. But when it came time to cut the extravagant demon-weed musical Reefer Madness, Ipostini turned to Avid Xpress Pro to help editor Jeff Freeman keep his wits about him. "When Reefer Madness came up, with all the music and multiple-camera shoots, Jeff and I just looked at each other," recalls Showtime Executive in Charge of Post Production Tim King. "I said,‘OK, Jeff.’ I wasn’t going to make him use Final Cut Pro this time."
Xpress Pro made more sense because of one specific feature: group clipping, which allows an editor to set up an interface showing the footage from multiple cameras and toggle between angles in real time. That was crucial to handling the project’s big musical numbers. "It’s kind of like editing live, except you have more time to put more thought into it," Freeman explains. "In many cases I had so much to show in less than a stanza [of a given song], and it became overwhelming. We had multiple cameras and multiple takes, and we also had variations in the action. There were so many choices because we had all those cameras working."
Freeman and director Andy Fickman pored over 75 hours of dailies taking up almost 1 TB of drive space. "We went through every piece of film — every take, every angle. On one of the takes the dancer might drop a shoe, and you would have to be very careful not to use that piece. Every cut was very carefully examined." Each frame was coded so that Freeman could match it immediately to the correct audio track.
The vocals for the film’s 18 songs were pre-recorded in Vancouver just before production got underway. As changes were dictated during production, the pre-recorded tracks had to go back to the Vancouver studio for a new mixdown before being sent to the editorial team in Los Angeles. The files were exchanged over the Internet via FTP, and on-set Pro Tools engineer Kelly Zombor was charged with keeping careful track of what had been changed and which were the preferred mixes. Final music tracks were recorded with a 40-piece orchestra in Los Angeles with conductor Kevin Stites, replacing the demo-quality music from the Vancouver vocal sessions.
HDCAM became the workhorse format. Camera masters from the production’s Panavised Sony F900 cameras went to Rainmaker Digital in Vancouver, where dailies were created on HDCAM, DVD and DV. Sync masters of selects were sent to editorial on DVCAM. "On some of the musical numbers we would have three or sometimes four hours a day," says Post-Production Supervisor Chad Tomasoski. Some effects — mainly wire removal and 2D composites — were handled in the HD suite at Ipostini, output to HDCAM and dropped into the online at Laser Pacific. Elements for 3D composites were captured from HDCAM using a Final Cut Pro HD workstation with a Pinnacle Cinewave card, then sent to Lance Wilhoite at Santa Barbara’s CostFX on FireWire drives and DVD-ROM. A three-minute CGI sequence was created by Toronto’s Red Rover.
The result is the biggest Showtime production to date. "We’ve done over 200 films, but the scope and sheer magnitude of the musical numbers in this one put it in a stratosphere all by itself," says Tomasoski. Freeman, at least, thinks it has a shot at some kind of classic status: "My fervent hope is that one day it will be a midnight movie like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It would be perfect for that."
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