All good TV shows – well, those that come back for a second season or more – go on hiatus, having delivered the required number of episodes to the network. The time gives everyone a break from the 12+ hour days and 5-7 day weeks.

I began this blog on September 9, 2009. I’ve found that there are a bountiful supply of roads and riffs that lap the topic of editing. I’m not out of subjects now. However, major life events are intervening, primarily the death of my mother in October and my father this month and having to close their estate.

Announcement
On the bright side, thanks to the books I’ve written on editing and this website, I’ve just signed the contract on a new book about a new subject for a new publisher. Chronicles of Old San Francisco will debut later this year for Museyon publishers. It’s the first western city of a series that chronicles Boston, Las Vegas, New York, Paris, London, Rome, Chicago (debuting soon), and Los Angeles (in 2014).

All books in the series are comprised of walking tours and a succinct history of the chosen city centered around its colorful characters. I especially like the character part – it reminds me of editing drama and documentaries. The guidebooks are aimed at all visitors to the cities, whether tourists or locals

Book = Hiatus
I am thrilled to explore, research, and write about the city I returned to in 2010. However, my May deadline leaves no time for other writing. So after 3 1/3 years of continuous blogging, I am awarding myself a hiatus. Please feel free to read previous blogs, explore this website, and make comments as my webmeister will be checking in and I will respond. Also, I will continue the Cut of the Month feature so enjoy the frames and text.

I will return to blogging in June or later this summer.

Dann and his monster Moviola

at the Hollywood Museum

Dann was a tip top comedy editor, most famous for his time at Desilu, starting with the first episode of I Love Lucy. A lifelong friend of the star couple, Dann created a multi-cam Moviola to match this pioneer sitcom. Dubbed the monster Moviola due to its four heads (three for cutting picture, one for cutting sound), it allowed editors to view all three camera angles of a scene at one time. While the scenes ran, the editor grease penciled cut points for cutting and splicing later.

After meeting in the waiting room
Dann and I received training on our parts of Ediflex: His the editing part and mine the pre- and post- cutting work. While the producers loved how he was putting the shows together, it quickly transpired that he needed help running the editing system. The solution? I operated the system for Dann and an apprentice was hired to do parts of my job. Frankly, I could never learn from watching editors edit; it was boring. But having to anticipate how to execute Dann’s edits on the Ediflex, I not only learned the editor’s side of the system but got into Dann’s head and learned comedy cutting from a master. As things progressed, Dann finessed things so I cut scenes and then shows, getting my first show credit.

This is how things should work in the world of editing (and elsewhere for that matter): The experienced helping the apprentice to learn. Dann earned a reputation before and after me for boosting the careers of many aspiring editors.

Via Facebook, I am in touch with his son, the current president of the Editor’s Guild, who posted that Dann’s final fade out at 89 this November was a smooth transition.

May your transitions in your career as well as to the New Year be as smooth. And may you pay things back as well as forward in your life.

One on One Movie
The heart of The Sessions throbs with the thoughts and emotions of two people. No one has described cutting such scenes better than Carol Littleton (Body Heat, Places in the Heart, and The Big Chill and many more): “One-to-one dialogue scenes are difficult because it’s literally about the very thin connection between two people and that connection can’t be violated.  You have to be aware of it all the time.  They may be connecting or not connecting emotionally, but you have to be aware of what’s happening between them the whole time.”

But let’s hear from the editor of The Sessions herself. Lisa Bromwell, A.C.E., wrote in a guest blog in Indiewire on December 5 about the challenge of the movie: “The story of an immobile polio victim living in a big metal box has its own editorial challenges to say the least. For one, it has very little inherent movement. There’s an old editor’s adage that says to make a cut invisible, cut on movement. And I had a main character that could barely move. Big problem.”

Bromwell adds, “Beyond that, there was the tricky issue of getting the tone right. We wanted the audience to be moved by Mark’s journey and touched by the fullness of his life without falling into melodrama. That meant we needed the humor in the script to work without betraying the reality of his disability.”

How did Bromwell solve the problems? She worked with director Ben Lewin, himself a polio victim, moving and eliminating fantasy Mark’s fantasy sequences, adding a VO of him reciting his poetry at the beginning, and making other structuring changes. Regarding structure Bromwell relates, “Ben used time ellipses in the script – right in the middle of an embarrassingly awkward moment with the sex surrogate, we would cut to Mark describing his feelings to his mortified but intrigued priest [played by William Macy]. We realized we could use this device both sooner and more often. As long as we were advancing the story, we could flash forward or back without confusion.”

When female editors are often called for
Steven Spielberg hired in 1982 Carol Littleton to cut E.T. because he believed a female editor would bring more humanity to the E.T. character. Things haven’t changed much in 30 years a Lewin also deliberately set out to hire a female editor, Bromwell reports, because he “felt a woman would be more sensitive to the emotionality of the story.” Bromwell reflects, “I don’t know if that’s true – I like a good gunfight as much as any guy. But right or wrong, I think women are perceived as being more nurturing.”

Editors as chefs
Bromwell gives clear insight into a good editor-director relationship when she writes, “Whatever their gender, the editor sees everything – that means all the mistakes as well as every flash of genius. There needs to be a level of security between director and editor so neither censors their thoughts before speaking. It’s often the crazy bad idea that turns out to be brilliant.”

To illustrate her point, Bromwell recounts her experience cooking Chicken Mole Negro one day during her time off: “The multi-page recipe called for nuts and dried fruits and all sorts of fabulous things including peppers so hot you had to handle them with gloves. Finally, after hours of work, the last item you add is chocolate. This sounds like a terrible idea that will ruin the entire thing. But it doesn’t — it’s the key. Just like editing, every little bit counts and sometimes the most unlikely ingredient turns out to be the thing that makes magic.”

EditDroid: Where Darth Vader appeared

when you tried something it didn’t like.

Volume 1 details the evolutions from 1898-1988, spanning the period from film (nitrate and non) to tape (linear and non).  It contains interviews Buck made of major system inventor-engineers Adrian Ettlinger and Andy Maltz (Ediflex) and others responsible for the development of analogue, tape-based systems such as CMX, Convergence, D-Vision, EditDroid, and Montage.

Lightworks’ unique console

Volume 2 covers the years 1988 to 2000 and the saga of how film and video systems paved the road to today’s currents digital editing tools. It too is chock full of interviews with the key players and prime movers of today’s tools which include: Avid, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Lightworks, Media 100, and Premiere.

Buck’s book includes the following splendid timeline – decipherable by logo by the end – of editing technology. You can download a high, medium, or low res copy here.

We are indeed indebted to Buck for a contribution to film history that only an editor could make.

When the Cinematographer Thinks Like an Editor
by John Loughlin, Chair of the Cinematography Department/The New York Film Academy

As I work with cinematography students, I sometimes have to break the news to them gently how they will not have the last say on the story.  To be sure, cinematographers play a pivotal and significant role in the look, feel, and even meaning of a film.  But they necessarily collaborate with the other players, the screenwriter and editor – and the actors – who help construct the story, as well as the director, who manages the story through every stage of the process.
I tell them that a film is written three times.  It is first written as a script.  It is rewritten when it is translated into shots during production.  And it is rewritten again when those shots are put into sequence during the edit.  The movie can become something very different during each of these rewrites.  And when a cinematographer sees her shots cut together in a way other than intended, she can feel like the editor is doing it wrong, ruining the story.  We face conflicting urges to take over and dictate the edit, and to get frustrated and write the movie off.

Even though we have to learn to let our shots go when in the hands of the editor it doesn’t mean we divorce our thoughts from the other parts of the filmmaking process. Far from it. In the same way that screenwriters need to write visually, cinematographers should find themselves shooting like editors. No crew member, and no student, is an island.  Staying connected to the evolving movie pays educational dividends that will make shooters more sophisticated and refined in shooting effective shots. They are learning to “shoot for the edit.”

Although cinematographers are not expected to edit, because editing is a different job, I suggest that everyone benefits from editing his or her own projects while at school.  We learn how a movie comes together only in the editing room.  We begin to see what is meant by “the language of a movie” when shots work together, or when they do not – when shots are missing and it’s too late to go back and get that insert.

And we see the object of a movie, that what we deliver to the audience is a construct of specific parts – that it is this shot for this long only, and that is followed by specifically this next shot.  A close up of a face looking through a window followed by a high angle shot of someone walking through city streets tells a story.  The audience fills in the missing information at the edit, between the shots, and makes meaning.

Viewers draw a connection from the first shot to the second, and experience something that is not physically in either of those shots: maybe that the person in the window is spying on the person walking through the street. Or waiting for him. Or missing her. How can you possibly photograph “missing,” or “betrayed” or “regret”? Yet somehow the audience sees those things. So it is for all viewers.  Through editing we discover that we deliver a specific experience via a specialized language, that of images in sequence.

Seeing this happen, in the editing suite, as cinematographers, we begin to see what our shots really are: elements of visual grammar. And from that realization we can begin to learn the nuances of which shots will work in which story moments. What if the shot of the person in the window is a profile? What if it is over the shoulder? Or a little bit tighter of a frame? What if we use a long lens for the high angle shot of the person in the street? Will it be more voyeuristic? What about a wide-angle lens? What if it’s not a high angle shot at all, but down at street level? Have we now adjusted the audience’s sense of setting? Is it time for that shift?

Maybe we discover that we needed such a shift in setting, that we need the audience to leave behind the person in the window, and join the experiences of the person on the street.  But we only have an objective point-of-view of the person in the window.  What can we do?  There is an expression, “flop sweat,” meaning the panic you feel in the edit room when a scene is not coming together. Everyone asks, “How could we not see this failure coming?”  This unpleasant circumstance turns out to be a great learning experience.  It leads to an evolution in filmmakers, that they shoot for the edit, which really just means they have the ability to envision the scene edited, even while they prep and shoot it.

I also believe that editing is a beautiful and creative art.  Sometimes we can find something greater than planned and expected, even for those who know how to shoot for the edit.  For example, the way holding a close up for longer than you might have intended when shooting it can somehow spawn an idea or an emotion that didn’t exist in the edit before. Or the way a close up, stolen from the footage after the director calls “cut,” can become the perfect supporting reaction shot during some other character’s lengthy and inspired speech.

And so when we see a scene edited differently than how we shot-listed it, we can ask ourselves: Did the editor actually create something larger or more true than intended?  Rewrite the scene into something better?  After all, that’s what the editor’s there for.  Or if the scene is weaker than intended, is it because we as cinematographers didn’t deliver the necessary shots for a cohesive scene?  In other words, did we shoot for the edit?  The best way to train yourself to shoot for the edit is to experiment with editing whenever you can, and to collaborate with your editor when your project has one.  Find out how he sees the story, the scene, and where the hidden pitfalls may lie.

All films are always going to be a mix of players, each imprinting a bit of themselves through their contributions.  But the greatest success for all happens when each player does what they do, and communicates what they want to do, with each other, so that the shots work together.  That’s what it takes to make great films.

3) Shoot right for postproduction
Too many projects show up into the cutting room sadly compromised due to poor audio, lighting, or planning in general. If you’re involved with production, when you’re on location or on the set, be sure to get the critical shots, record the important sounds, and keep accurate logs and records during. Shooting correctly saves time, stress, and money in postproduction and reaps fantastic footage that you can’t wait to start editing!

Bringing together the MAGICAL and the TECHNICAL
Once you’ve got the shot footage in front of you:
Be organized and know your shots
…while it’s great to talk about how revolutionary Avatar is, we were still making a movie…when you come down to it, all this technology is just there to make the images more compelling and to tell the story better. Ultimately, we’re asking the same questions editors always ask: Does this shot work? Does this scene serve the story? It’s all about performance and story. Things just take a little longer to get done when you’re on the moon Pandora…
John Refoua, A.C.E., co-editor, Avatar

You’ve got to know your raw material in order to have an idea of how you’re going to edit it. View the footage for the scene and make mental and/or written notes about shots, lines, angles, or cutting ideas. Also, review any notes you took when screening dailies or that you received from the director. The late Dede Allen, who edited Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, and many other major films related how she works: “If you have a great deal of coverage, you really can’t just go plowing through the whole thing, you’d never remember all of it… I make massive notes which I have if I need them, but I memorize the material so thoroughly that I seldom even look at my notes.”

You’ve already read the script but now you have the real, filmed version of a scene along with the lined pages that the script supervisor labored over for your benefit. As you approach cutting the scene, familiarize yourself with it as well as the scenes before and after it. Since you usually edit a show out of sequence, it’s important to be clear on what the scene is about. Ask yourself: What led to this scene? What does this scene lead to?

If your project is a doc, PSA, or other non-scripted piece, review the paper cut and keep it and your logs of the shots handy as you cut. Since non-scripted shows normally have fewer guidelines than scripted shows, your editing will have a major impact on its content and structure. Initially you will be the one who decides what the audience sees and learns and when they see it and learn it, so you want to know your shots and laser in on the story you’re molding from them.

Doc or drama, you want to be clear on the purpose of the project you’re editing and who will be seeing it. Is it a training film for navy recruits or a cereal commercial aimed at kids? Is it a muckraking documentary on the food industry or a drama about Navaho code talkers in World War II? You get the idea.

Finally, as much as you have ideas for how you will put scenes and the show together, as you progress, you will find things don’t work as envisage. This is normal and means you will have to try other approaches to making a cut or a scene work. Remember the wise words of sound and picture editor Walter Murch, (The English Patient, Apocalypse Now, and many more): “Editing is not so much a putting together as it is the discovery of a path.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA05aiIvl20

ENGINEERING

1) Know what happens before and after editing in the filmmaking process.
Ten years ago postproduction was at the end of the food chain. Now we are in production meetings.
Alicia Hirsch, VP of post production, Fox television studios

There are six stages to any film or video project: Greenlighting, Development, Preproduction, Production, Postproduction, and Distribution.  Understanding what goes on before and after editing (postproduction) will give you more insight into the successive stages of filmmaking and make you a better participant in the process. It will help you communicate more effectively with those whose work overlaps yours, primarily the script supervisor and cinematographer (from the production phase) promo producer and publicist (from the distribution phase). More importantly, current workflows are converging post production with production and even pre-production, especially in animated shows and those with loads of VFX (visual effects). The lines between filmmaking phases are less distinct today and will get even fuzzier in the future.

2) Backwards engineer your show

In other words, to know where you’re going when you’re setting up and designing a project, you must know the end result. This advanced planning covers several fronts:

a) Know the venue(s) your audience will use to view your show.

Will your audience see your show in a theatre? On the ‘Net? TV? Or where? Determining your show’s viewing venue will enable you to decide its final delivery format a.k.a. finishing format. The four finishing formats are: film, tape, file, and disk. Your show may need to deliver on more than one format. Each format has many different types, e.g. 16mm or 35mm film, .mov or .avi file, DVD or Blu-ray. Be as specific in your planning as possible. The format you finish on may not be the format you shoot on. For example, you may shoot on a file on a card but deliver on tape, called a “tape out” show or shoot on film and have a file out show. Which brings us to workflows.

b) Know your project’s workflow

Workflows are the name of the game in planning a projects’ path through postproduction today. There are workflows for HD shows, workflows for 3D shows, for low budget docs, for low budget dramas, for animated shows, reality shows, TV dramas, features, for FCP shows, for Avid shows: You name it there’s a workflow for it. Workflows are also designed according to editing system, type of show, budget, camera used (Genesis, RED, Viper, etc.), region, and politics among many other reasons. While there are ordinary workflows, it’s just as ordinary to deviate from them; each project is different.
How to make sense of it all?
Know the common workflows – tape, tapeless a.k.a. file, and film – so that you can create your own. Get input >from the post supervisor or associate producer – whoever’s in the know on your show. Understanding your project’s workflow has the additional benefit in that it will ground you in the basic steps and processes of postproduction.

c) Set a postproduction schedule

Every project has a schedule sheet with dates that you must meet such as First Cut, Director Cut, Producer screening, etc.  If you’re a student or an independent filmmaker, knowing the schedule is doubly important as its part of budgeting – another area to cover when visualizing your show. You may make the schedule on your computer using a calendar program or receive it from the post supervisor – or both – but in either case, allow for easy updates as most schedules can and do change. Since postproduction takes place at the end of the show, If it’s running behind or the schedule gets shortened, editorial gets pushed to work harder and longer!

d) Know the digital system you’ll be cutting on

Cutting digitally requires a lot of general knowledge. You need to understand time code and video tape, have solid computer and internet skills, be able to create VFX on third party software (preferably), and
have experience with film if you’re hired on a film show, not to mention know how to edit! Working on a digital system, even when you’re totally comfortable, is a constant learning process. Just when you become familiar with the current software there’s an upgrade or new version and more to learn.

No matter how experienced you are with an editing software, don’t assume everything on your system is in working order unless you own the system. Put your system through its paces by checking out everything that you will be doing: ingesting and outputting to tape, mixing sound, recording with the mic, making DVDs, importing from CDs, etc. You don’t want to wait until dailies are flying through the door to find out your deck isn’t reading time code or a channel on your mixer is muted. Secure an expert friend or system guru you can call on when a technical breakdown is beyond your expertise so you can keep your project running smoothly.

If you’re picking out a system for your show, make sure that it can perform what your project requires (fit your workflow and achieve your finishing format) and that it is compatible with all equipment – tape deck, servers, or another editing systems third party, etc.- that you’ll need to interact with.
This concludes the Imagineering part of visualizing your film. My next post will alert you to the more mundane engineering requirements that are part of envisioning your film

IMAGINEERING

2) Visualize your audio – and plan

One misconception that many people in the film business have…is that if you want great sound in your movie you don’t really need to think about sound early on.

Randy Thom, sound designer and mixer, How to Train Your Dragon, The Incredibles, The Right Stuff, and Return of the Jedi.

To produce the best-sounding film or video, anticipate how your show will sound, budget for sound, and record your desired audio during the shoot. This way you’ve got the sound you want for when your picture comes together audio wise during sound editing in sound editing and the mix.

Create a sound vision. Imagine what your viewer will hear. Think about the different scenes or parts of your show and how you want them to sound: light and sprightly, cheery with a sinister threat in the air, painful but upbeat, etc. You might start by imagining each character or subject as an instrument or a theme: What would they sound like? What tune would they play? Next, envision how scenes or sections will sound as purely musical themes. The goal is to get an idea of the subtle and grand tones of your film and consider how sonics can support them.

…if you encourage the sounds of the characters, the things, and the places in your film to inform your decisions in all the other film crafts, then your movie may just grow to have a voice beyond anything you might have dreamed.

Randy Thom

Like picture images, sound and music elements contribute to the story. Sound augments POV sequences, helps put the noir in noir, and is the backbone of many a dream and fantasy sequence. Sounds, words, and music can inform a character, prompting an action or reaction or revealing overt or underlying emotions.

Ensure that each piece of sound and music enhances and supports your story. It’s not always a matter of “see a bird, hear a chirp effect.” Sound can represent something or someone unseen – off screen – and comment on or deepen a scene. Yes! Routinely, sound and music bound from the backseat to drive the story. Think of the ways the off screen kaboom of a bomb or swoosh of an advancing tsunami affects a town of people or recall how Rick reacts to hearing “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca.

Hitchcock believed that “To describe a sound accurately, one has to imagine its equivalent in dialogue” and gave this illustration from a scene in The Birds: The flock gathers, surveys, and attacks, saying, “Now we’ve got you where we want you. Here we come. We don’t have to scream in triumph or in anger. This is going to be a silent murder.” The Birds is noteworthy because it relied heavily on sounds – there was no score – to make its farfetched plot plausible.

The buzz words today for sound are “organic,” “real,” and “natural.” The Hurt Locker, which won the 2009 Academy awards for sound editing and sound mixing exemplifies this trend. A memorable scene of GIs on a night-search in Iraq depended entirely on the bed of sound the editors built. Avatar, the runner-up for the Oscar that year, embodies the other end of the sonic spectrum: Its audio palette paints an imaginary planet where the synthesized sounds are anything but real. What these two sound styles have in common, however, is crucial: They both aurally plant the audience in the movie’s environment.

Whether you have many layers of sound or minimal sound, sonics are pivotal to the audience’s perception and reception of your show. They transport viewers away from the filming on the soundstage and into the characters’ world. Sound sustains and is an integral part of a film’s voice and vision. Bear this in mind when you design sound; every sound effect and piece of dialogue should strengthen your show’s purpose.

And don’t overlook the power of silence. Sound design can include planned sections of silence or minimal sound. (No show is entirely silent as there is always ambient sound. If you drop out all sound, you risk viewers’ hostile glares at the projection booth or channel surfing.) Silence, especially during a gripping scene or after a cacophony of sounds, can put the audience on the edge of their seats until they’re literally living and breathing with the movie.

3) Visualize your music – and plan

Music can strongly influence how the audience feels about a show’s subject, characters, themes, and plot. Well thought-out music sets the appropriate tone for the picture, clueing viewers in as to what to expect: a comedy, a romance, or a chance to rock and roll. Music, like sound, affects our hearts and senses and seals the movie in our memories: John Williams’ music in Schindler’s List, played by the incomparable violinist Yitzhak Perlman evokes the suffering and loss of Jews during WWII.

Music anticipates and foreshadows action, often warning that a villain is just around the corner, or, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, hinting that this is no ordinary hamlet. It can also conjure a time or place. Scott Joplin’s upbeat piano tunes peppered The Sting, rooting the movie in the 1930s and paralleling the characters’ optimism. The musical theme in Somewhere in Time sustained its time travel plot. Regularly, music accents key and not-so-key points: entrances, exits, scene transitions, and act outs.

Music can counter what’s on screen to convey a larger truth. Composer Toru Takemitsu delivered a renowned score for writer-director-editor Akira Kurosawa’s epic movie Ran. Here’s what one scene in the script called for: “A terrible scroll of Hell is shown depicting the fall of the castle. There are no real sounds as the scroll unfolds like a daytime nightmare. It is a scene of human evildoing…The music superimposed on these pictures is, like the Buddha’s heart, measured in beats of profound anguish, the chanting of a melody full of sorrow that begins like sobbing and rises gradually as it is repeated, like karmic cycles, then finally sounds like the wailing of countless Buddhas.”

Music can let the audience know something before a character does – that good or bad news is on the other side of the door. It can also do the opposite – set the audience up – as the melody at the end of Carrie does, lulling the audience so the movie can deliver its final jolt of fright. Music often conveys characters’ inner thoughts and emotions. Bernard Hermann’s score for Vertigo heightened its characters’ nightmares, dreams, and schemes right from the opening carousel music which mirrored the circular camera movement and the spiraling mystery plot. Sometimes characters even have themes e.g. Lara’s theme in Dr. Zhivago or the shark’s theme in Jaws.
Once you’ve got your music plan, be sure to allow enough time to obtain rights, hire a composer and allow time for their work, record that band you’re dying to use, or create it yourself. Skywalker Sound Ltd., George Lucas’s sound company, states that, “Music provides an emotional bedrock for a film.” Lay out your conception of it ahead of time to once again craft the best sounding, most efficient-running project.

This concludes the Imagineering part of visualizing your film. My next post will alert you to the more mundane engineering requirements that are part of envisioning your film.

Thanks!