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.

FCPX

A quick aside from all the Turing Enigma stuff, to comment on the details that are floating around about the new version of Final Cut. A lot of people have been commenting on it after the NAB supermeet, and I have been putting off forming an opinion. Firstly, late me be clear that I am an Avid editor first and foremost but I do use FCP and I am soon to become an Apple certified trainer. I use FCP for corporate's and documentaries and find it works really well for fast editing where I am just simply assembling things on a timeline or where I want to create flashy sequences over music. I don't mind it for music videos and I also grade in Color, so I often use FCP to prep sequences for grading. But my ambition lies in editing feature films. And when I do that (as I am doing at the minute2) I want to do it in Avid because frankly, its perfect for it. I honestly can't understand how people craft dramatic scenes quickly in FCP. So my main reason for watching the sneak peak at FCPX was to determine whether this situation will be changing anytime soon. Short answer, no. FCPX looks like a great tool and will likely make what I use it for now, even easier, so I may even start using it more. But for editing features, it has moved further away from what I want. I'm sure there will be keyboard shortcuts but the focus is definitely on drag and drop editing, even more so than FCP7. And I don't want to drag and drop. I will race anybody, anytime, editing a rough cut of a dramatic scene if I can use the keyboard and they only have a mouse. There will also only be one window for viewing clips and sequences and it will alternate depending where your mouse is. Which sounds great, for when your editing a corporate on a laptop and screen space is minimal, but again, when I edit dramatic scenes I want to see the last frame of the sequence, when I'm finding the first frame of the next shot. Surely thats a must for any cut on action? The randomly appearing "magnetic" tracks also disconcert me because they will remove the idea of keeping the same stems of audio on the same track. That's important for me, when I build indivual scene sequences and then want to assemble them into a master sequence. Who knows, maybe I'll be proved wrong and by editing corporates on FCPX i'll be converted, but these are my initial thoughts. Anyone else?

Black & White

So yesterday was day 4 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot and today we have the day off (so a chance to recuperate after going till 4am last night). Now we have changed tic-tacs (or tactics), we are keeping up with production pretty well. I have edited 11 scenes of the 12 they have shot (number 12 wasn't finished till 4 so I'll be editing that tomorrow) and there are some amazing looking scenes coming out. The longer scenes especially are seeming really slick. Some screenshots after the break.

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.