As exhausting as being on-set and shooting may be—12- to 16-hour days are typical for directors—it is matched by the emotional ups and downs of the editorial and finishing steps that follow. On the set, you were running as fast as you could, trying to shoot as much footage as possible, to give yourself options in the editing room. Now, as you step into the editing room, you confront the inevitable: the difference between the film you set out to make and the movie you actually shot.

This part of the process involves two activities: collaborating with people who will help you finish your film—the editor, the visual effects supervisor, the composer, and the person who does the final color correction so that your film looks the way you want it—and getting to the point where the movie is locked, or finished. For your project, you may find that you are your own editor and finishing team, or you may have fellow students who are your collaborators in these areas. And, depending on how your project came together, where you’re shooting it, and how it is being distributed, you may or may not be the one to decide when it is done.

Finishing the Movie

Although your class project may not require all of the following steps or functions, they are a good way to think about the process of finishing your film. These steps will also prepare you for directing an independent feature.

For most class projects, you won’t go through all of these steps. Recording additional dialogue or reshooting scenes may simply not be options. However, it’s important to keep in mind that all of this finishing magic is possible, and it’s the end product that counts; you want your movie to be as good as it can be when it is done.

“Final” Cut

But when is it done—when you run out of time or money? when you think the movie’s right, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs? when your teacher says it’s time to move on?

You may have heard the phrase final cut, referring to the final version of a movie, which is sometimes called the final master; it is the version the public will see. Final cut, however, has two connotations: whereas one relates to power, the other relates to time. In the first connotation, final cut is the director’s authority to have complete artistic control over the movie. This means the director may determine what scenes are in or out, the running time, the rating, and every other aspect of the completed film. Such authority is rarely granted to directors; at any given time, there are less than a dozen professional feature film directors in the world who exercise this level of control.

In the entertainment business at large, true final cut typically rests with the financiers, or the studio, in almost all cases. Why? Because filmmaking is a business, and a movie’s financiers want to make sure they have a reasonable opportunity to recover their investment and make a profit. For example, investors who believe they are financing a G-rated family film don’t want to end up with an R-rated movie.

More commonly, a director might have conditional final cut. In this circumstance, a director may exercise authority over the finished movie so long as certain conditions are met, such as a specific running time or rating. In your school project, you will likely have conditional final cut authority. Your instructor may set certain parameters, and as long as you observe them, you may finish your movie as you like. If you don’t, your privileges may be taken away from you, or you’ll have some other consequence, like a poor grade. Common classroom parameters are based on minimum and maximum running times, shooting in color or black and white or with specified equipment, using dialogue or not, and maintaining a predetermined budget.

The second, more practical, connotation of final cut refers to time: at some point, you have to share your movie; in this sense, final cut simply refers to the final version of the movie—the version you had when everyone stopped working on it. Films, like all art forms, are works of passion and toil; as such, although they can be worked infinitely, there is always a due date or a release date. At that point, the film is “locked” so that the release version can be screened. Star Wars director George Lucas is reported to have said, “A film is never finished, only abandoned,” but he was paraphrasing French poet Paul Valéry, who said the same thing about poetry, and Valéry, in turn, was paraphrasing Leonardo da Vinci, who said the same thing about art.

Indeed, today, movies need never be “final”—they are only made final, or abandoned temporarily, at discrete moments in time. George Lucas, for example, continues to revise and create new editions of his Star Wars films. It is common for movie studios to release the “unrated” or “extra scene” versions of movies for home video in an effort to increase sales with tempting offers of forbidden or tasty fruit. Everything can be upgraded and revised in the course of time; everything can be remixed or become part of a mash-up, extending its creative life (and potential for earnings) into the indefinite future.

Yet for the filmmaker-artist, pressing the “save” icon and voluntarily abandoning a movie is a good thing: that’s the time to move on and start your next film.