TF: The Movie
Production/Post-Production
Different filmmakers vary in their opinions on which segment of rewriting is more important. Some like to start with a pristine script and doggedly shoot it; others start with a loose script and encourage improvisation; others shoot endless alts and puzzle it together in post. There’s no right way of doing it. If there were, everybody would be doing it that way.
The rewriting in production of an animated project mostly happens during storyboard and voice recording. Usually, storyboarding comes before recording, but there are no laws about this. Sometimes the film kind of grows up organically together with a lot of retakes. Sometimes an actor delivers such a transformative performance that the entire film changes (think Robin Williams in Aladdin).
The movie you have in your head when you’re writing is very different than the one that appears in a storyboard processed through somebody else’s vision. That has to be reconciled. You realize things when you see the script visualized. In the case of Transformers, sometimes the size of the characters is utterly different than what you saw in your head. Sometimes characters have dropped out of the story, and you have to decide whether to put them back in or dial them further back. Sometimes the visuals convey things you didn’t expect and the dialogue isn’t necessary. In a standard episode, I tended to over-explain, knowing I could take the dialogue out. A movie is such a massive effort that there’s little chance anything will slip by. And, of course, sometimes additional dialogue is needed to explain the visuals. The point is that story editing is in some ways very much like game design: the filmmakers make a series of meaningful choices.
Animated movies usually start with an animatic, which is sometimes called a leica reel. The directors and producers will put in scratch track dialogue—which is them reading the lines more for timing than dramatic purposes. And then as production grows, newer and newer elements are laid on top of the assembly reel. First, there are animation tests, then real voices, then fully animated scenes, then rough music tracks, then songs (which differ from the dramatic music tracks), then sound effects, then processed voice tracks, until finally every scene is animated and scored and sound effected and the dialogue is all in.
In live action, most directors get a “master” and then go in for coverage shots and close-ups so that when they are editing, they’ll have a number of ways to put together the puzzle of the film. It doesn’t work that way in animation. Very little extra footage is shot. It’s expensive and wasteful, so picture editing is minimal.
The animatic is the first time the filmmakers get a chance to see how the film will play. Is it too fast? Too slow? Can you follow the story visually? As animation by its very nature is highly planned and the goal is not to waste animated footage, there is rarely much choice as to what scenes to use in post-production. Animation doesn’t shoot coverage like live action. A probably apocryphal story about Jeffrey Katzenberg watching The Little Mermaid illustrates this. Eventually he asked, “Do you have another angle on this?” In animation, there are no other angles.11
There is an opportunity to add sequences and scenes if they’re necessary, so the process isn’t as rigid as it might seem. It is a different process. And for the record, of course, Jeffrey Katzenberg was a very fast learner and went on to have a string of hits rarely seen in Hollywood.
In order to explain what post-production on Transformers: The Movie felt like to me, it’s necessary to talk about how animation production works—or how it worked in the eighties.
As production goes on, you write the “music cues” to somehow compare or contrast to the emotion of the scene. Sometimes whole songs are inserted (“The Touch,” “Dare to Be Stupid”) and they define the scene and even the movie itself. Sometimes you call music “stings” to highlight the mood. For instance, an ordinary scene of the Autobots rolling down the road feels very different when a menacing music cue goes over it. You’re waiting for the attack. Sometimes the right music cue makes dialogue unnecessary. Point is, usually you want to go with the images, but sometimes you want to work against the images.
Then you really go into post. As I say this, note that there are about a hundred asterisks to what I’m about to say, and the “friction” of production ensures that not everything happens when and how it is supposed to, but at some point, the picture has to be “locked” and the whole thing viewed in its entirety.
You have a “rough cut” of the whole film, but now there are a whole new set of issues. Is the story clear? Does it flow? Somebody along the way told me that there’s only one question pros ask, and that is, “Does it work?” When you’re in post-production, it is all about solving problems. In fact, every phase is about solving problems. From the first day, Transformers: The Movie was about introducing a whole new line of toys while “discontinuing” the old toys.
At some point, you have everything: picture, music, SFX, and dialogue. Now you have to decide how to mix them. Do you bury the dialogue under the sound effects? Do you bury the sound effects under the music? What is most important? What tells the story best?
It’s a fascinating process.
The thing that struck me about the soundtrack, watching it for the twentieth anniversary DVD edition, was how wonderfully eighties the soundtrack was. The Stan Bush and Vince DiCola songs, especially, took me back decades to Arena Rock, “you can do it” aspirational power ballads, and what I consider to be the last purely fun decade. The sheer guts of putting Al Yankovic’s “Dare to Be Stupid” in there and the optimized Transformers theme define a moment in time better than any other soundtrack I can think of (I understand that many will disagree).
Of course, during production, we’d get cassettes of tracks they were interested in. “The Touch” was almost used in a Sylvester Stallone movie called, ironically, Cobra, but it wasn’t, so Sunbow snapped it up. We loved it. We didn’t know why, but we knew it would work.
The movie version of the Transformers theme playing side by side with the TV show theme is a great exercise in musicology of that era.
11 Storyboards, which are part of production, contain extra shots and scenes, but excess is usually cut out in storyboard so that it isn’t animated. Thirty years after the movie, somebody found a copy of the “final” storyboard and asked me to write dialogue and scene descriptions for the unused scenes—it was a fight with Devastator at the Autobot Fortress. Not only was this flattering, but it might be the beginning of a new genre of animating left-out scenes long after the movie has been released. In the eighties, finished was final. In the second decade of the second millennium, nothing is ever final.