eli5: what’s a rough cut in filmmaking?
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Typically you edit a movie at the end to produce the final cut that gets shown in cinemas. But this makes it hard for people to know how the movie is going to end up and work towards that goal. So it is very common to create one or more rough cuts of a movie while it is being made. This rough cut uses whatever have been made up to that point and is not made to be perfect in any way. There are usually missing computer graphics elements. Entire scenes may be missing and replaced with drawings from the story board. The sound is usually not mixed and may be missing music, effects, have background noise in it and the volume of different elements may be far out.
They might make a rough cut of a scene after they are done filming it. This way if they notice something does not work they can quickly reshoot it before dismantling any of the set and before they send the actors and other staff on to the next scene or on to other jobs. You may therefore see rough cuts being ready every evening or every morning for people to see. After principal shooting they can also make a rough cut of the entire movie. This will help put together the music, the folly artists, the CG team, etc. The rough cut acts as a partially filled canvas where they can make their piece fit to and then when they are all done their pieces will fit together nicely. This rough cut can also be shown to people to get their opinion of it. This may help uncover some of the story issues and confusing parts. It is much easier to change scenes around or even reshoot scenes at this stage rather then when the final movie is done.
It’s the same as a rough draft in writing. It’s the first finished product with a beginning, middle, and end. You put together all the scenes that were shot, usually how it was all scripted. You can run the rough cut from start to finish, and it should essentially make sense and appear to be a complete movie (minus any VFX or sound work that still needs to be done). But it’s a rough draft. Dialogue will get cut, scenes will be cut, subplots might seem irrelevant now that you watch the whole thing and so they get cut, etc. The order of some scenes might be rearranged to pace the movie differently, stuff like that. There’s a saying: “a movie is made three times. Once in the scriptwriting, once in the shooting, and once in the editing.” A rough cut is the very beginning of editing.
Imagine you want to draw a really good picture of your house for your parents. It’s a big job: you have to draw the house and the people around it, things like grass, the sky, the sun, trees, maybe even a fence. Then color it all in.
You want to make sure that the house looks right before you take the time to do the rest. So you draw the outline of it first, and show that to your parents. When they say it looks great, you can go and do the rest, knowing that the house is drawn correctly.
In film, things like sound, color, transitions, special effects, etc; those things are done by specialists, and take a lot of time and money. You don’t want to put those finishing touches on a scene that ends up getting cut. So in a rough cut, you’re making sure that all your raw footage tells the story you want, so that the rest of the finish process can be done.
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