Crafting a Scene

Yesterday was day 3 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. After spending the night before retranscoding the rushes from day 1, it occurred to me that we had been wasting a lot of our time on day 1 and 2, watching the blue transcoding bar creep across the screen. So we decided to leave leave transcoding unless there was time for it and focus on syncing so I could start editing. As it happens, the crew were working on some fairly complex scenes and so footage came in fairly slowly, but from now on, we will likely leave transcoding and just set it going after the day is over.

Make Your Mistakes Early

Day 2 on "The Turing Enigma" has just finished. At the beginning of the day we caught a mistake that has meant a little setback in the editorial dept. Inside Avid Media Composer 5 there is an option for how you want to deal with AMA linked files called "Reformat". Unfortunately this option does not come up when you first link to a folder of R3D clips. You have to add it in the Bin -> Columns setting. This fact, combined with some confusion over what Quicktime player was doing when we played back the proxies (cropping the top with the quicktime bar) led to us transcoding the first days footage in DNxHD with the left and right of the image severely cropped into a 2:1 aspect ratio instead of the 2.4:1 that we should have had. So everything has to be retranscoded correctly, with Reformat set to "Pillarbox/Letterbox". A lengthy process to say the least, but it will be done by tomorrow. If we had noticed the mistake later, then we would have pushed ourselves so far behind we would have been catching up all the way through the shoot. And I would likely not have got much actual editing done. So make mistakes, but make them early on. Some wisdom we should all be able to take something away from.

Keeping Up With Production

Its Day 1 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. The morning started slowly but as production kicked into gear, we have had to work hard to keep up. We are holed up in our own room, backing up and transcoding footage as it is being shot. We have networked 2 macbook pro's together, one is reading the CF cards from the Red One, through an expresscard reader, the other is connected via eSATA to a GSpeed Q and it has become a juggling match between transferring data and transcoding inside Avid to DNxHD 36. The first scene (only 2 shots) is cut and the master of the next scene has been finished. As the medium shots and closeups come through, a third ball will enter our juggling trick. Should make for an interesting afternoon.

My Job as the Editor

When I meet people in real world and tell them that I am an Editor, I am often met with a blank face. I have tried using Video Editor or Film Editor to clarify a little but still, the same blank face. Even film buffs who have a reasonable idea of how films work don't really tend to grasp the extent to which an Editor shapes the film they see so its hardly surprising that the public at large don't even seem to know what the hell we do. When you watch a film, you are hopefully experiencing a different world. Whether that world is similar to ours or in another galaxy is arbitrary, their has to be a space for the story to unfold in. The truth is that world doesn't exist. If its the bridge of a spaceship, that seems pretty obvious, but if its a bedroom inhabited by an old married couple, its existence is no more concrete. In an intimate moment, as the couple lie next to each other, perhaps after finding out that one of them is dying, the world of the film would have to you believe they are alone. But there is a camera there and a cameraman, a camera assistant (or two), a sound recordist, a boom op, a director, a producer, a few studio execs, a makeup artist, a script supervisor... well you get the point. Everyone working in post production has to trick you into believing they are alone. As an editor I choose not to show you the moment caught on film, where the AC marked the shot. I choose for you not to hear the moment where the studio exec choked on his donut. The other illusion is time. We have to make it seem as if the events you see are simply unfolding before you. When I cut from the old man to the old woman you have to perceive it as continuous. In reality it could have happened hours apart. The actors may have had lunch in-between shooting each shot, but I have to make you believe they are reacting to each other, organically and in the moment. This is the magic of editing and we underestimate it at our peril. With the onset of desktop editing is it becoming more and more common for directors/producers/executives' nephews to be the one tasked with editing. But just remember it is not being able to push the buttons that is important. It is knowing the order in which to press them.

On Set Post Produciton

On set post is a major new development in the industry and whilst it's motives probably lie somewhere in the ever increasing complexity of digital acquisition, I think directors and producers will soon be wondering why they ever tried to make films without post staff on site. As an editor I have been constantly trying to push the point where I start working on a film forwards, to well before the film shoots and the guys I know in sound post do the same. It creates better work, its as simple as that. We are starting to see that shift now and we need to embrace that wholeheartedly. On the feature film I am editing at the moment, they have just finished doing 2 days of pickups and because I was already on board editing the footage from the first shoot, I can already tell that the new footage is going to be easier to edit, just because I was able to have some input. So you can imagine my excitement at having just been hired onto another feature nearly 2 months before it shoots. I will be onset, with an assistant, backing up, transcoding and editing the RED One footage on a MacbookPro hooked up to a G Speed drive. If I can establish that the new MBPs run Avid OK then I may even look into the possibility of utilising Thunderbolt. I doubt budgets will stretch to a Thunderbolt raid, but maybe a Thunderbolt to eSata or miniSAS going into a G Speed? Even that would produce mouthwatering speeds by Laptop standards. So why this obsession with speed? Well, because basically I need to be cutting, and if I'm constantly waiting for transcodes then there ain't much use in me being there. I would be a glorified DIT and not much else. The processor and disk speed are always your major bottlenecks. I'm already getting the fastest MPB processor available so it makes sense to maximise disk speed as well. Occasionally we will utilise native R3D access over AMA into Avid MC5 when we really need to know how a scene is cutting before we move on and hopefully getting our drives as fast as possible will at least remove one of the hurdles. What kind of performance we'll get on a laptop, I'm not sure but hopefully it will be enough to make some basic cuts if we ride the settings down all the way. Mostly we'll be using AMA to transcode to DNxHD36 and we'll stay in that for all of editorial. After that we'll be sending an EDL and the R3Ds for finishing, most likely on a DaVinci 2K, outputting a 2K DPX sequence for Digital and 35mm print. Oh what fun lies a head. I'll be testing this workflow in the coming weeks and will post results here.

Acting

I have been thinking a lot about acting recently so I thought I would vent some of my thoughts at 1am on an outlet that nobody pays any attention too. We might as well start off with a bout of theatre bashing. I think a lot of people interested in acting would disagree but I wholeheartedly believe that the theatre is a crap medium for good acting. This seems kind of counter intuitive but I think if I can tell what your supposed to be thinking or feeling from the back of a theatre, then you can't possibly be acting well. Or at least not in a way that I would recognise as good acting. Let me elaborate. See, I'm a pretty rare breed of 20 something in that I watch the culture show on BBC2. If you aren't aware of it, it's generally full of self important wankers who toss off or criticise a bunch of pretentious bollocks, but they often mention good films that I might not otherwise hear of, so I watch it. And the thing is that every piece of theatre that they show on there looks rubbish, and this is supposed to the best of what's coming out. I really hope to meet someone who knows theatre and could show me where the hell I'm going wrong, cause I would hate to dismiss a whole art form off hand, but Jesus they're gonna have to be one persuasive bastard to get me to see how theatre isn't the most melodramatic waste of time in the world.

Anyway, back to acting. My limited knowledge on the subject has lead me to the following conclusions. I hope anyone reading this finds them useful.

1)You can never truly experience anything as someone other than yourself. The best you can hope for is a moment by moment emotionally honest performance based upon your own experiences.

2)Your character is defined more by what you do than by any intellectual notions of "who you are". Even psychopaths don't think of themselves as bad people, it is what they do which defines them. If you judge a character you will never be able to play him as anything other than a caricature.

3)You should avoid anything that will result in you monitoring yourself. You have to give yourself up to the events around you. Don't think about the effect you have on the audience or the results you are striving for. Don't tell us what you are thinking, just think it and we will see it.

4) Your costars are your most valuable resource, use them. Truly listen to the other actors and react to their energy. Fight for the ideal of staring your costar in the eye, even if they are ofscreen and the DOP says the eyeline doesn't look right.

5) Don't push. We don't have to see it when we are at the back of the room, we have to see it when your face fills a 40' screen. Subtlety is everything. In a theatre you need a soliloquy, in the cinema we can read your mind.

That is all.

Organisation and Director Envy

Having just taken on my first feature film editing job I have had a lot of opportunity to think about the way that organisational skills impact filmmaking. A boring topic, I know, but having a pre-established system of organisation really is what separates a professional from an amateur. Without a definitive way of tracking your decisions throughout the whole filmmaking process something is always going to get lost. For any budding editor or assistant editor I would definitely recommend Make the Cut by Lori Jane Coleman and Diana Friedberg. It has a plethora of information on how to organise your work-flows and keep track of things. Just when I thought I was being too anal about my bin layout in Avid, this book showed me that I wasn't being nearly anal enough.

Before this film I had taken somewhat of a break from filmmaking as I focussed on teaching my various degree, diploma and short course students all the wonderful features of Avid and the intricacies of Music Video production. Coming back the world of filmmaking has stared to give me a fresh dose of Director Envy, which is a great way of motivating me to finish my short film script. Hopefully by the time I have finished this feature I will be ready to think about shooting it. I can hardly wait.