“We’ll Fix It In Post”

Just had the experience of dealing with the “we’ll fix it in post” mentality.

It’s the belief that one’s lack of planning can be deferred onto people later in the chain of something being created. In film, you have the writer who comes up with the story and writes the screenplay. Then the producer hires a crew and a director who are responsible for capturing the story. Then in post-production you have editors and others who put the story together along with the sound, the music, and the visual effects.

If the writer writes a big action scene but doesn’t explain in enough detail, then that decision gets deferred to the director and the production crew. If they fail to address it and capture it in a way that makes it easy for the post crew, then it’s deferred to post. With the budget quickly draining and the deadline for delivery approaching, the last thing a visual effects supervisor wants to see is that there is an entire action scene that needs to be created entirely with visual effects because no one before them thought to address the problem.

The same belief can affect any number of situations in your business and your personal life.

The more you plan up front, the less you have to stress in “post”. I was half-way through an editing project and realized I didn’t know what the final deliverable needed to look like, or what content needed to go into it. I hadn’t been given enough clarity going into the edit, or even when we filmed the project last week, to know what I was working towards.

I had to stop, get some clarity, reassess where I’m at and where I’m headed, and plot a new path forward. It’s frustrating because in that moment you are acting in fear of making a wrong choice. That’s not a great state to be in if you’re trying to make creative decisions.

If you find yourself lacking clarity in your work or your life, stop, get some clarity, reassess, then plot a new path forward. It may take some time, but it will be better than the work you do in that state of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.