Dailies - Creation

Creation

During the typical filming of a motion picture, a movie camera captures the image on 35 mm film and a separate audio recorder (such as a Nagra tape recorder or digital hard disk recorder) records the sound on-set.

The film negative is developed and printed or telecined so that the images can be viewed on a projector or video monitor.

The sound is synched to the film using a clapperboard as a reference. The clapperboard is labeled to identify the scene, shot, and take number for the camera. The numbers are also read aloud to label the audio recording. Once camera and sound are rolling, a camera assistant will close the clapper creating a visual and auditory reference point. During the synching process after the film has been developed, the technician will look at the numbers on the slate board and then match the numbers with the verbal slate. Then the technician looks for the frame where the clapper first closes and for the beep or clapping sound on the audio tape, adjusting one or the other until they happen simultaneously when played back. This needs to be done for every take. Systems exist which record synchronized timecode onto the film and audio tape at the time of shooting, allowing for automatic alignment of picture and audio. In practice these systems are rarely used.

Before computer-based editing tools became widely available in the late 1980s, all feature-film dailies were printed on film. These pieces of film are called the workprint. After viewing, the workprint is used by the film editor to edit the movie using a flatbed editor. Once the workprint is edited and approved, the negative is assembled so it is identical to the edited workprint.

Today, most editing is done on computer based non-linear editing systems which use a video copy of the dailies. When the film is telecined, keycode numbers are logged which assign a number to each frame of film and are later used to assemble the original film to conform to the edit.