Okay, so it’s been about six months since I’ve updated this thread. Obviously, quite a bit has happened in that time, and I’ve had several people ask me for an update. So here I am. Reading through my old posts here was kind of cool… now I see why people keep diaries. 
We finished shooting the film on schedule. It was a 25-day shoot, which is very, very short. But, we managed, and didn’t have to lose too much of what we wanted. Our problems with the focus continued throughout the shoot. The 1st AC we replaced the original with didn’t turn out to be much better. This turns out to be extremely frustrating in the editing room, because there are certain shots you end up using not because they’re the one with the best performance, but because it’s the only damn one in focus. Grumble, grumble.
Other than that, the crew was wonderful. I made some great friends in Canada, and was very happy with the crew. Our 1st Assistant Director was absolutely the best one I’ve ever worked with. I miss Vancouver, and can’t wait to go back for a visit!
Editing the film took about twelve weeks, which is about normal. The producers, of course, wanted us to take much less time (saving them money), but we held firm to taking the time we needed to do it right. There were some money fights with the producers, but nothing major. In the end, we got pretty much everything we wanted, sacrificing what we felt could be sacrificed.
One of our biggest victories during post was music. This is a film that takes place at a night club. It’s practically wall-to-wall music, and because of the role music plays in the plot, it’s virtually another character. So we knew all along that the music had to be great. We wanted a D.J. to score the film, and we were able to get one of the world’s biggest D.J.'s, John Digweed. He’s a really nice guy, and doing a terriffic job. He had a few songs in the film Groove, and he made a cameo in that film as well, but this is his first full-on film score. The music he’s making is GREAT! Boy, do I wish I had a financial piece of the film’s soundtrack…
Currently, we’re just a few weeks away from being totally done with the film. This week and last week, we’re looping, which I talked about above. Looping is the re-recording of certain pieces of dialogue. There are a few reasons why this might need to be done. There might be noise over the dialogue, like you might hear a crew member walking or something. Or, the dialogue might be poorly recorded. Boom mikes are the preferred way to record sound on set, but sometimes it’s impossible and wireless mikes must be used. But the trade-off is, wireless never sounds as good, and often times need to be redone.
Another reason for looping is to do a television version of the film. This is something we’re contractually obligated to do. It’s kind of silly really, but what the hell. We’re actually kind of having fun with it; not taking it too serious. Originally, I wanted to do all the television changes in Yiddish: “What, are you some kind of fuchachtan schmuck!?” But the producers didn’t go for that, the spoilsports. So we went a more traditonal route. There’s one line in the film where the actor says, “Oh yeah? Well, blowjobs soothe me, but you’re not giving me one while we’re working are you!?”. For the T.V. version, we changed it to, “Oh yeah? Well, bearhugs soothe me, but you’re not giving me one while we’re working, are you!?”. It’s VERY funny. 
Another line was “You barbarian shitbag!” which became “You barbarian snotrag!” for television. I’d love to see a barbarian snotrag. I imagine it would be made out of burlap and have spikes coming out of it.
Today we did loop group, a form of looping. It’s where a group of people come in (not the principle actors), and record all the background stuff. All the background noises, crowd stuff, background walla, etc. Random lines of dialogue that are in the background. It took all day, but was actually pretty fun.
Meanwhile, the foley artists are next door on the stage doing their thing. Foley artists record sounds: footsteps, punches, doors closing, etc.
While all of this has been going on, the negative cutter cuts the negative, which you’d never guess from the name of his job. Nowadays, of course, films are edited on computer editing systems (we used the Avid, which is pretty much the standard). After the picture is ‘locked’, the computer is made to spit out an “EDL” (edit decision list) which is essentially a big list of numbers of where all the cuts are. The negative cutter takes this list, and physically cuts the film to match our list.
The next major step is the final mix-down of the sound. That’s where we take all the production sounds, all the looping, all the foleys, all the music, all the sound effects, and work with the levels, properly mixing them down.
After that… well, we have a movie.