Welcome to a 13-part special series for Alumni Live: The Podcast.

These are conversations with Grand Valley State University film and

video students, faculty, and alumni about the film and video major.

Also one of my most favorite parts of filmmaking is post-production.

So let's talk a little bit about post-production.

Jordan, that is one of your main emphasis-- emphases.

Jordan, can you tell us, well, first of all, what is post-production?

Post-production is anything after shooting.

So you're probably editing the film, maybe you're doing effects, you're

doing the titles, all the graphics, the coloring, anything like that.

Josh, what tools do we use for post-production?

What, what are some of the programs, some of the hardware?

So at Grand Valley, we use Adobe Premiere Pro, and then we have

the entire Adobe Creative Cloud.

So that includes After Effects for any graphics or visual effects you're doing,

Adobe Audition for editing audio, and then we also work with, in our audio classes,

the Pro Tools suite, which is just a super professional, in the actual film industry,

they are using Pro Tools to edit films.

So we just have a wide range of software and you get exposed

and introduced to all of it.

And you're learning a lot of it practically, too.

You're not just sitting in a lecture.

You know, as you're working on your projects, you're being shown these

techniques and you're not just being taught software, you're being taught

a deeper understanding of it so that, as software gets updated, as you work

with different things, you're still relevant because you know these concepts.

You know what it means to, you know, edit and to make a good story.

Right.

And, so in my professional career, I've changed editing programs three times

now, and like you say, you know, those, those concepts are, you know, even though

the tools are a little bit different, the key commands are a little bit

different, those same concepts, like just stay the same throughout all of them.

And I think Grand Valley really prepared me well to not be

intimidated by new programs coming.

What are some of those, those concepts where like, you know,

that you use those tools to make?

When you're editing a film, how do you convey emotion through editing?

Well, you got to, you know, think about the pacing.

Why are you cutting where you're cutting?

Every single thing in film has a purpose, especially where you cut.

And so, you know, do you hold on a moment longer to get that emotion?

Do you need to cut away for it for a comedic effect?

And what shot are you cutting to?

Are you cutting to a reaction shot?

Are you cutting to like a pickup shot?

Maybe they're looking at a book and you have a pickup shot of a book in there.

Anything like that, you just need to be really purposeful with what you're doing.

That's so cool.

I think the, the whole, you know, vocabulary that we learn

around filmmaking is just, it's so useful and so interesting.

And you know, that vocabulary itself is even a, a tool for these

students who might be watching to, to end up learning and using.

Josh, tell us a little bit, so you mentioned like sound.

What are some things that happen in sound in post-production in a movie?

Yeah.

So we have like three different levels of audio courses here.

And so I had never really gotten super deep into sound.

So I didn't really have an appreciation, so this kind of

expanded my understanding because first of all, there's the recording.

And, you know, it's not just pointing a mic at someone there's a million

different mics and there's so many different ways that you can hook it up.

And it's not as complicated as you initially think, but there's a lot of

depth and complexity to it, and that's why you have, you know, professional

sound recordists and there's a lot of people at Grand Valley who are

interested in doing that kind of thing.

And then when you're actually editing, like I said, we use Pro Tools.

There's a class that does sound design on the summer film, which

sounds really, really cool.

I'd love to take a class like that.

But you just get to see how, you know, one shot that you don't really pay much

attention to the sound, it just sounds natural and good, there's actually 10

or 15 layers of different sounds, like a subtle wind noise, and you have birds

chirping here and footsteps crunching, and maybe they're wearing a belt and

you can hear like the jingle of the metallic, and there's all of these

little really subtle sounds that we just experience kind of in our day-to-day life

so we don't notice them, but if we're watching a film and they're not there,

it just seems kind of off or empty.

And so in actual post-production sound design, you're expanding that

and you're creating something that feels real and feels genuine, and

that is not distracting you and is actually adding to the final film.

Yeah.

There's just so many things that go into making a film that all of

which are taught at Grand Valley.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Alumni Live: The Podcast special

series about the film and video major.

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The Grand Valley State University Film and Video Alumni Network is here for you.

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Thank you for listening.