Since Underwire’s inception in 2010, we have been supported by the amazing team over at VET Post Production. Like film, festival’s rely on an incredibly collaborative workforce powering away behind the scenes often doing a ridiculous amount of work with absolutely none of the glory!

The festival literately wouldn’t appear on screen without the support we have from VET and this year we wanted to tell you a little more about the epic amount of work they put in to help us. Here’s the Underwire prep journey, through the eyes of the Post Production team there:

At times, here at VET, we get phone calls asking for advice on how to manage a crisis with a pet - but we are not animal handlers! As data wranglers extraordinaire we can safely say that no animals are harmed in the process of our work. Especially with what we’ve been doing for our friends at Underwire – the festival celebrating women’s short films.

For the past month the VET Post team has been managing more than 60 films that have been entered into this year’s festival. Films were delivered on tape, as files on pen drives, data discs, via ftp server, in the post, and by hand. Each one of the films has been hand sorted, labelled, and collated for the award categories. These were prepared for the judges viewing, and finally for screening at the awards themselves.

Every film was checked for aspect ratios, frame-rates and levels to make sure that they could be viewed at their best, knowing that the final files would be shown at the Ritzy.

The films came in a variety of formats and through the encoding process we made them consistent. The files were converted for viewing online in a secure space, and for screenings. To give you an idea a film of roughly 10 minutes in length would have had around 45 minutes of individual attention.

So all in all we’ve seen the entries in their entirety! We’ve watched their waveforms, inspected their audio levels, and monitored signals from deep under the surface image. The magical and invisible technical elements that combine to make a film are deconstructed into digits and represented in our equipment. And so we make sure that the films are ready for their special night at the Underwire Festival.

Have a great Festival!