Article by Jason Goodall

Leading up to our broadcast premiere on OMNI.TV on April 8 2012, meet the person who made the film look so good.

Online editing, colour correction, designing titles and graphics, and mastering; all in a day’s work for Tony Manolikakis of Rev 13 Films. As the co-owner of the Montreal-based post-production house, Tony did all this for The Invisible Red Thread.

But what do all these tech terms mean exactly? Colour correction is where the colour in each shot is made to look consistent, and any problems, such as over- or under-exposure, are adjusted. Online editing is the final stage of editing, where all of the shots are colour corrected and assembled with the highest possible resolution. Finally, mastering is the process of transferring the edited film, with soundtrack and all, onto a master copy, from which all copies of the film will be made. A lot of work to ensure that the film looks its best!

As the online editor for The Invisible Red Thread, Tony came across an interesting problem. The footage came from all sorts of different cameras, which all record in different formats, or codecs. Although different formats are common these days, for The Invisible Red Thread, “it still took three days to get everything in the proper format, instead of the usual one day,” says Tony.

Not to be misleading, however, Tony had a great time working on this film. “The colour correction was fun and it was a very interesting film,” he says. “One of the most fun parts about working as an online editor,” he explains, “is that you get to see so many great films.”

Tony also created the opening title graphic for The Invisible Red Thread. The basic concept came from Maureen Marovitch, the co-director and co-producer, but Tony was able to bring in his own ideas. “The way I saw it, the girls’ two stories were, in some ways, reflections of each other,” he says. So, Tony had the English titles reflected in Mandarin, with the thread weaving through them, and the reverse for the film’s Chinese version.

Tony came to film post-production in a circuitous path. Although he worked on his own and friends’ animated and 8 mm films as a teenager, Tony went on to study engineering in university. One of Tony’s first jobs was working at a company that developed hardware for video editing and broadcast systems. Shortly after growing his knowledge of the technical side of filmmaking, he decided to follow his first passion and has been working on films ever since.

The topic of adoption has an interesting connection for Tony. “Several of my family members have adopted, and they were fascinated by the idea of the film,” he explains.

“In the film, Vivian’s mom, Eve talks about how people often comment about how ‘lucky the children are to have been adopted’. The people in my family who have adopted often hear this too. But really, it’s not only the children; whether they are unable to have children or not, the parents are blessed as well.”