WP4: Post-Production, Post-Reflection

Spending this past semester studying the invisibility in post production has caused me to reflect on how unseen my future work will be.

Considering post production is the field I will be going into after graduation, I felt that I knew everything there was to know about a novice in the department. I knew the technical side of things and the creative aspects that go into the job. I know all the teams that make up my department and everything that needs to be done in the post period. I even knew from the beginning that this department is the most invisible part of the filmmaking process.

But over the course of these three assignments, I’ve found myself sitting and contemplating how this will affect me in my career.

I understood that the work me and my department on films would be doing would be behind the curtain and not exactly glamorous, which I was fine with. I called it “invisible” without even knowing that invisible work is an actual phenomenon, created by Arlene Kaplan Daniels.

I discussed Daniels’s theory at length in WP1, and used it as a building block for my other ideas in the next two papers. But, to learn that this was a genuine circumstance workers in every industry found themselves in was startling to say the least.

Obviously, Daniels’s invisible work theory did not dive into the specifics of the emotional consequences of being an invisible worker, or what that even looks like in the 21st century. Still, her article propelled me to consider whether or not a thankless career could be emotionally fulfilling.

After WP1, I almost felt discouraged. I laid out how basically no one in or out of my industry knows about the work me and my department do, much less cares about it. My contributions to films are lost in the void, as directors and producers and other public-facing roles get to take the credit for the project.

Obviously, I want my dream job to be emotionally fulfilling and satisfying. So, I devoted WP2 to proving to myself that there is worth in this work, even if not deemed significant by others. I spent the essay reaffirming to myself (and by proxy the audience) all of the different ways that post can affect and impact a movie, taking a regular film and making it great.

It definitely helped how I viewed post, but I still felt uneasy about post’s lack of visibility. I felt wrong identifying the issue and then not speaking about the consequences if the issue continues to thrive.

That feeling was the inspiration for WP3. I thought, well, people may not care about WP1 because I’m highlighting a department they know nothing about. And they definitely won’t care about WP2, because that paper was more self-serving and would only appeal to others that appreciate the artistry of post, as well.

I wanted WP3 to serve as a big warning sign to those in the audience that would skip or gloss over the previous two papers. I wanted to show with the last paper that continuing to ignore post production will have dire consequences for the department.

Further, I wanted to expand the piece to show that anything that negatively affects post will affect films as a whole, since post production is an integral part of every movie. I knew that in doing so, a reader would feel more concerned about the issue, since I’m now highlighting how it affects their form of entertainment.

Overall, I am happy with the arc of my three papers. I feel like, while I was approaching my passion through a scholastic lens, I’m still telling a story with WP1, WP2, and WP3.

Looking back at all three of my papers, I feel like I possess more self-esteem for my future career. I’ve laid out all my cards on the table with these assignments, and reinvigorated myself as I transitioned between being a full-time student and a full-time employee.

In all honesty, reading bell hooks’s “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope” heavily inspired this scholastic journey, and I’m grateful it came into my life. To see someone be so open and raw with the realization that they were falling out of love with their career was so inspiring to someone like me, already entering the workforce with doubts.

Also seeing how she combatted this dissatisfaction head-on, working through it throughout the book, really pushed me to do the same (maybe just not as eloquently, but still). I wanted to examine post through all of its flaws and perfections, as hooks does with teaching.

Like hooks, I needed to distance myself from what I love doing to see what’s not working. To see why the center was not holding. I didn’t approach it with the same depth or resources, but it felt just as monumental to me.

While obviously everyone else in our class chose different avenues to study over the course of the three papers, I would highly recommend utilizing this course, primarily meant for seniors, to inspect how they really feel about the future career they want to pursue.

At the precipice seniors find themselves at now, this course feels like such a fantastic opportunity to explore your true passions and reckon with the next step in your journey. I’m happy I took advantage of this time to take a pause and reassess why I do what I do, and whether that’s enough to keep pushing on.

Treating work as both a passion and a scholastic subject was a really informative endeavor. Making post production an academic concept, fitting it in with peer-reviewed sources, and studying the effects it will have on the industry if left unchecked was easily the most fulfilling assignment I embarked on this year.

I needed to utilize these papers to really reflect on the next chapter of my life. I need to dissect and examine the thankless career I’m embarking on, and determine whether it’s even worth it. And I have decided, yes, it is worth it.