Grading (A Resolve Set Up)

Been a while since my last post but I'm just getting towards the end of the edit of my fourth feature film as editor, Tamla Rose. Its been an interesting job because whilst principal photography ended several months back and I have been working on the film on and off since then, the team only shot the final day of pickups a couple of weeks back and we are already trying to get the film locked. I also got a nice surprise when I was asked to grade the film as well. I wasn't expecting this as the last film I did for this company was sent down to a Colourist in London. This is going to be my third feature as Colourist (after Born of Hope which has now had 11million views and The Turing Enigma) so I made a couple of big decisions. Firstly, I wanted to do it in DaVinci Resolve (which I have recently spent a lot time learning so that I could teach it at the media school I work at) and secondly I wanted to have at least some kind of proper video monitoring and a colour control surface.

VS

So the first decision was easy. Whilst I love Apple Color (which I used on the previous two features and several shorts) it's a dead application (thanks Apple) so continuing to hone my skill on it seemed kind of pointless. Resolve is the industry standard and now its cheap (or free for the Lite version which "only" goes up to HD resolution) it's becoming incredibly commonplace.

The second decision was more difficult because it would mean a lot of research on my part into getting the "right" setup and it would involve not only spending all the money I was getting for grading the film, but also getting a loan to pay for the rest. But I think any career in such a competitive industry as TV & Film needs to be full of bold moves that you hope pay off. When I quit doing temp work in an office I had no idea if I could support myself with just film work and teaching, but it paid off and 4 years later I'm still paying the rent, so you have to have a little faith. But how much to spend? That was the big question. I priced up my ideal suite at between £8-10k. It would have looked something like this;

Now if that doesn't make you drool then what the hell are you doing reading my blog? But £8-10k is a LOT of money to be dropping unless you have several well paid jobs definitely lined up. Which I don't. I have some pretty nice potential jobs and few definite jobs on the horizon but in the end I thought that spending this money would be a mistake because it would essentially be taking several steps at once. I would be moving up from my MacbookPro, to a tower with additional GPU processing, adding external monitoring of my video signal and getting a broadcast quality OLED monitor.

So I downsized my budget (several times) and ended up with a figure of £4k, which meant I could get pretty small personal loan that if worst came to worst it would still be pretty easy to pay back on a minimum wage job. So instead my setup looks like this;

I replaced the MacPro (which are a dier need of a revamp by Apple anyway) with a top spec iMac. I replaced Black Magic card with the cheapest Black Magic thunderbolt box (the Intensity Extreme). I kept the colour control surface and the 42" high end consumer plasma screen but lost the OLED monitor. Whilst the setup (I'm looking at it right now) doesn't make me drool quite as much as I had in mind it is still a major step up for me (and I still feel a little giddy about it). I believe I was stretching my Macbook as far as it would go and that is the moment that you should upgrade. So that's what I did. Now I can edit and grade in HD whilst monitoring the actual video signal on a faithful(ish) monitor that at least attempts to emulate the scale of watching a cinema screen and I can grade at least 4 times as quickly (and I'm not even practiced yet) with the control surface. Once I have pushed this gear as far as it will go then I can upgrade to the suite above and this setup will become my offline suite. Until then, I'm happy with this.

My Career So Far

These past couple of months have been pretty chaotic for me. I have been very busy with The Zombie King which we locked picture on last week, The Turing Enigma has made its way into the world via Amazon and Distrify, I started a new feature called Tamla Rose and edited a good portion of the rushes during its first 3 week shoot and I recently put the finishing touches to the first feature I edited, First Time Loser, which has at last come out of the other side of its audio post and grade. All in all I'm feeling pretty reflective about my career so far and also thinking about what the future will hold. So far I have edited 3 feature films (First Time Loser, The Turing Enigma and The Zombie King) and going into my 4th I think I have learnt alot from all of them. I try to keep away from discussion of technology on this blog as much as possible, not because I don't find it interesting, but because there are so many other blogs which talk about the software and hardware side of editing. That mostly means I'm talking about editing techniques or the philosophies behind editing but today I'd like to share my experiences in the general post-production flow of the films I have worked on so far, what I have learnt from them and how I applied that knowledge when taking on the job of Editor for my next feature, Tamla Rose.

Let me first point out that all of the films I have worked on so far have had low budgets (and should probably be classed as no budget films). Whilst there was money spent on them all (in amounts that would make a lot of indie filmmakers drool), they are all at a level where most of the cash will dissapear into things like food, accomodation, camera and light rental and the general administrative process of getting a feature film made. What this basically means is that on all the films the majority of the cast and crew's payment was either partially or competely deferred. Working for free or a fraction of what you should be getting paid is a difficult game when you still have to pay rent/bills, but its really the only way you are going to get a foot on the ladder in a business as competitive as this one. Its a raw deal, but whining about it gets you nowhere. So if your interested, I'll describe my first 3 films in detail after the jump...

The First Cut

My favourite part of the job I do is doing the first rough cut of a dialogue scene. It doesn't have to be a dialogue scene, I'm quite happy with an action scene or music video or a simple montage, but dialogue is my forte. But that moment when I have a bin full of footage ready to go and a completely blank timeline is the most exciting moment in filmmaking for me. Truly, I believe it's the moment when the filmmaking actually begins. Production is exciting and I wouldn't dream of demeaning the input of the various roles involved, but a lot of the skills which go into it are not unique to filming. Photography, lighting, acting, art direction, they all have there roots in other art forms, but editing is the thing that sets cinema apart from everything that preceded it. Up until the moment you start trying to seamlessly combine the various performance and camera angles together to create a new little universe that no longer contains cameras and lights and crew and actors, only the characters that inhabit it, you don't really have a film. You just have footage. And that is why I love being an Editor.

I have in the past had people ask about how much "say" I get into what goes into the final draft of the films I edit. They are usually surprised that, technically, I don't get any. Thankfully, I am usually afforded the opportunity to put together a first cut of the film on my own. But if the director came along and decided that he literally wanted to change everything, he could. And at the end of the day he has that right, because its him that will get the credit if its great (i.e. it sells) and the stick if its rubbish (i.e. it flops). But putting money on this happening would be a foolish way to waste money, because it underestimates the power of the first cut. There is something special about seeing the footage cut together for the first time, and although there is always going to be a lot of work done after that, the first cut (if done well) will always leave an imprint on the finished project. So even, if I encounter a director who doesn't know the meaning of the world collaborate, I'm pretty sure I will always get my fair share of "say".

To finish off this post, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and give you  a complete dialogue scene that I did for The Turing Enigma, my second feature as Editor. It's one of my favourite scenes that I've had the pleasure of working on.

Prying Open Your 3rd Eye

One of the most important skills a good editor needs to develop is the ability to understand and manipulate the gaze of the audience member. The quality of every cut you make depends on your ability to determine where the audience will be looking before the cut and control where they look too after the cut. Many factors go into this including the emotional content of the scene, the composition, lighting and focus of the shot and the movement of objects within the frame. A lot of the time, this decision is made instinctually and you can usually feel if a cut is smooth or jarring (both have their place), but there are several things you can do to improve your cutting ability. One resource which has only recently developed is technology which can detect where your audience members are looking on the screen and log that information as data. The following video comes from a small audience watching a scene from There Will Be Blood. The circles on the screen represent where in the frame each audience member is looking. If someone maintains there gaze on one spot then the circle grows in size. I hope you find this as interesting and useful as I did.

READ BOOKS!

I'm going to be in danger of sounding like your dad with this post but what the hell. If you want to be a writer/director/or filmmaker in any capacity, you should read more novels, not watch more films. Seems counterintuitive, I know, but let me explain a couple of reasons why I believe reading makes you better equipped to make good films.

Inspiration

With the amount of remakes, reboots, knowing winks and downright plagiarism (I'm looking at you Quentin Tarantino) in the world of cinema it is has become patently obvious that more and more filmmakers are only looking to films for their inspiration instead of the plethora of art forms available to them. This gives us a situation where the same ideas are recycled and rehashed over and over again, each time becoming weaker than the last like the page of a book that has been photocopied, and then the photocopy has been photocopied, and then the the photocopy of the photocopy has been photocopied and.... well you get the point. The reason I think books can be such a good source of inspiration for original filmmaking is simple. They can be far more specialist. Films take a lot of money to make and distribute and whilst there are some niche markets, they just can't aim at the narrower audiences that authors of books can aim at and still make a living because of the lower production costs of writing and printing (or kindling? that's almost a pun because paper can be used as kindling and amazon's reading gadget is called a kindle, get it? anyway moving on). You can quite easily buy a book about a couple who use a clone of the baby jesus as a but plug (imaginatively titled The Baby Jesus But Plug), but I'm fairly certain it's unlikely to get optioned by Paramount. If you can publish to a smaller audience, you can take more risks. Filmmaking often falls victim of the committee. Now, I'm not suggesting that you should make films with a very narrow audience, because you won't get the money to make it. But taking inspiration from something specialist and niche and adapting it for a mass audience can be fruitful, interesting and (most importantly) fresh. Similarly, don't see this as an excuse to adapt every good novel into a film.

Subtext


A lot of people talk about making their films more cinematic, and this phrase is generally interchanged to mean a lot of different things. They could refer to using wider shots so that it suits projection, using a wider aspect ratio like 2.35:1, shooting at 24 or 25p etc etc. For now, I'm going to cast the technical stuff like 24/25p aside, not because it doesn't matter, but because too many indie filmmakers get bogged down waiting to make their film until they have the right camera or whatever when you could just make that film and then make a better one when the Red Scarlet, that will so drastically improve your film, is released. The way I think of cinematic is based on what defines cinema as a medium. For example, cinema differs from radio and books in that you can show things to your audience rather than describe them. And cinema differs from theatre in that you can put every member of the audience at the same distance from the actors and you have almost total control about how great that distance is. The first one of these leads good script writers to the realisation that cinema is most powerful when it shows us a story rather than tells us one. Which is why action films are generally considered more cinematic than, for example period dramas. Some people take this a step further and seem to think that dialogue heavy scripts simply can't be cinematic but this ignores the way that cinema can project just the face of person on a 40 foot screen. The medium shot and the close up give us the power to show more than just what the actor is saying. So, even a dialogue heavy film can (in my opinion) be cinematic, if the emotions and story developments are shown rather than explained through dialogue, as they would have to be with theatre. This (at last) leads me to books, because what you need to make a dialogue scene cinematic is subtext. You need things for the characters to think, to want to say but never say and to mean when they say something completely different. A novel is one of the few places where you find subtext explicitly written down. In a novel you can write 5 paragraphs about the thought processes a character is going through before he or she responds to a question they have just been asked, even though in real time (and usually in cinema) the conversation would have continued at a normal pace. A lot of good novels are mostly subtext, because like making your film cinematic, this takes advantages of the characteristics of the medium. By reading novels and being more exposed to subtext you can become better at integrating it into your films Now, in a film script you don't (and almost certainly should't) write the subtext of  scene down. But by knowing the subtext of a scene, by knowing that a character means yes even though they are saying no, by understanding that people might talk about something not because its relevant but because it can distract them from what they should but perhaps don't want to say, you will almost certainly write better scrips. And applying the same ideas when dissecting an already written script will also almost certainly make you a better director, actor, director of photography etc. By making a scene about the subtext rather than what the characters are actually saying, you instantly make it cinematic because you are showing rather than telling your story to the audience and taking advantage of some of the key characteristics of cinema.

That is all.

Empathy

I have just started teaching a new group of students the joys of Avid Media Composer, through a series of 3 hour evening classes. Whilst we follow the 101 course laid out by Avid, I always like to mix it up with discussions about editing in general, so that I'm not constantly teaching them to how to push the buttons. In the first lesson we looked at the history of editing, which is very much tied in with history of storytelling in film.

Edwin Porter's early films were some of the first to explore the cut and also some of the first to explore many of the ideas we see today in narrative cinema.


Recently in their 4th lesson, I started a discussion about what qualities a good dramatic editor needs to have to cut well (there are many other qualities which an editor needs to help him work well with clients and meet deadlines etc). There are some obvious ones such as creativity, imagination, attention to detail, focus and concentration. Knowledge of the editing software is also important but I was quick to point out that I consider this a base level for editors really and probably the least important thing in making you good at cutting. I see the software simply as a tool to help you make the decisions you need to make. Knowing the software inside out is not guarantee of success if the decisions you make with it are lousy. There are also plenty of excellent editors who can do very little with the software they use other than just simple editing, as they are used having everything else done for them. It is the the decisions they make about what to put in the sequence and in what order that makes them excellent. So in relation to different software packages, the only thing you really need to consider is whether it allows you to make the decisions you want to make, easily and accurately.

So this led to a discussion of what I consider to be the most important quality that makes you a good editor, empathy. Don't confuse this with sympathy. You can be a complete bastard and still be a good editor. Empathy isn't about feeling sorry for people, it is about being able to put yourself in their shoes and as an editor, it is a skill I am always trying to improve. There are many different types of empathy, and two in particular come into play every time you make an edit. The first is kinetic empathy. Being able to feel and understand  the movement of the characters on screen is vital every time you try and cut on an action. Accurately matching an action across a cut is integral to making the kind of invisible cuts that will allow your audience to seamlessly enjoy the scene unfold before them. The second type is emotional empathy. If, for example, you are editing a shot:reverse shot sequence of two characters talking to each other, you usually have a great deal of control over the spaces between when one person finishes speaking and other starts. Getting the gaps to sound fluid a seamless is one of the most important things to get right. This is where emotional empathy comes into play. If you can feel and think the way the character is supposed to be feeling then you can start to make decisions based on the emotional subtext of the scene. When a character asks another character a question, the speed at which they reply says as much or more than what they actually say. Are they reluctant to answer, are they desperate to answer having been waiting for the question to be asked for a while. Perhaps they even interrupt before the question has been finished/ The possible connotations are almost endless. The difficulty with this kind of thing is that there is no correct answer to how long the pause should be. I think this is why as editors we often have a tendency to talk about technology and software when we talk shop. But these are the things we should be considering, discussing and analysing. They are what make a truly great editor and finding ways to be better at should be at the forefront of our efforts to be be better editors.


I also wanted to discuss the empathy you must have with your imaginary audience, but this post is getting a little long, so another time.

Dynamic Trimming

I mentioned the other day that as my experience has grown as an editor I have strayed from the step by step way of crafting a scene and instead fluidly move between the different stages as I edit. That got me thinking about how else my editing style has changed since I first started. One significant thing I have noticed is that I use dynamic trimming (or trimming on the fly) more and more when refining a sequence. For anyone who doesn't know, trimming is a way of adding or removing footage to the beginning or end of clips in a sequence. So in a dialogue scene, it can be used to remove a word that shouldn't be there or add a word that should. But perhaps more importantly, it can be used to control the length of the gap between the lines of dialogue. For me, controlling these gaps is one of the most important part of making a scene feel natural and right. They can also add a layer of subtext to the dialogue itself. If someone takes a moment to think before answering a question, it can add a new layer of meaning to their response. Perhaps they are lying? Or maybe they just don't want to answer? When I was a teenager learning to play guitar, my dad would often say to me "It's not the notes that are important, its the spaces in between." I apply that logic to my editing today. So how does this link to dynamic editing? Well early on in order to control the length of the pauses between lines I would trim using numbers. I would preview the edit by looping it and then remove or add a set number of frames, then preview again. This gave a good degree of accuracy and I would always find the frame eventually, but there was a significant amount of trial and error. Dynamic trimming allows me to hit play on an edit point and wherever I hit pause, the edit will move there. Sounds simple enough, but this allows me to feel where an edit should be, rather than find where it should be through trial and error. I know that using this method has sped up my work, but I also think that it has improved it. Hopefully it has made my work more emotional and less mechanical which, in filmmaking, can never be a bad thing.