By Iain Blair

Andor, the new live-action Disney+ Star Wars series, is a gritty thriller rife with political intrigue and high stakes – along with plenty of hoverbikes, laser guns and other impressive visual effects. Set five years before Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the prequel explores a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy and focuses on Cassian Andor’s journey to become a rebel hero.

John Gilroy at the series premiere

Editor John Gilroy, ACE, whose credits include Michael Clayton, Pacific Rim, The Bourne Legacy and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, edited four episodes and was a co-producer on the series.

I spoke with Gilroy about the editing challenges and the post workflow on the show.

How closely did you work with your brothers — creator/showrunner Tony Gilroy and Dan Gilroy, who wrote several episodes? It’s like a family business!
You’re right. I’ve cut every project Tony and Dan have ever done, and I also cut for my dad, the late Frank Gilroy. The only person I haven’t cut for is my mother, who is 94, so it’s not too late. Maybe one day she’ll get a directing gig, and I’ll cut it.

(Laughs) For me, it’s so great working with both my brothers. There’s a similarity and sensibility we share, and a shorthand. There’s a lot that doesn’t have to be said.

What were the main challenges of this show, especially in terms of post and VFX?
Just like with a feature film, we began on post and all the VFX right at the start, and it was a very big challenge in terms of it being a much bigger canvas and arena. I’ve been on big movies editing for a year, but this was like doing four movies in two years. It was huge, with a lot more people on the post team and a lot more editors – seven in addition to me. You work the same way as a movie, but you delegate more, and there are a lot of moving parts.

Tell us about the workflow.
We wanted to go in sequence for Season 1 because we were trying to find the show, and I was working with Tim Porter [ACE], one of the other editors, but COVID kind of messed us up. I was working in New York with Tim for the first six months of shooting, but at the same time, we had the entire department working at Pinewood in England, where the production was based. They were building these huge sets and were shooting a lot of location stuff.

So you march along, they start the next block, and then you come in with your notes after the director’s cut and make the changes. And you’re always overlapping with one or two or more blocks at a time, so there’s a lot of place-setting.

They put a lot of money into this, but not as much as in a big feature, so the way you make up for that is that the TV schedules are longer. All the VFX shots took a very long time, but we had more time to get it all right. It’s the same thing with the sound. The sound crew is smaller, but all the prep is far more spread out.

What was the show shot on?
The total amount of footage shot in Britain was 275TB of media, and it was mainly shot on the Sony Venice 1 at 4K and with a 6×5 aspect ratio (4096×3432). We used Panavision C-Series anamorphic lenses. For our secondary camera, we used the ARRI Alexa Mini LF. And we used an ACES workflow.

What about the edit?
We cut on Avid Media Composer Version 2018.12.8,  and the project format was 1080p/24. The offline codec was DNxHD115. Editorial storage ran off a 40TB Avid Nexis shared storage unit and we added another 20TB chassis on completion.

Where was the post done?
Mostly in London, and eventually I moved over there. At the start, my crew were all based at Pinewood, next to the shoot. Then when I moved over, we moved the whole show to Hireworks in Soho. That was our base of operations, and it’s where we did all the post for Rogue One. I actually ended up cutting in the same room I cut Rogue One in, which was great.

Then we did all the sound at Northern California’s Skywalker, and we had two sound supervisors: Dave Acord, who was our sound designer and mixer, and Margit Pfeiffer, who did all our ADR and dialogue. She was actually with me in London, which was very helpful. Most of the sound crew was at Lucasfilm Skywalker, and that worked out really well. They’d do their work and send us files which we’d integrate. We mixed all the shows in London, and they’d come over for the sessions at De Lane Lea.

There are a lot of VFX. How closely did you work with ILM VFX supervisor Mohen Leo and his team?
We met them on Rogue One. They did a great job, and it was a very close collaboration. It’s such a joy to work with them as their expectations of their own work are even greater than ours, and that makes our job far easier because we don’t have to continually monitor the process.

What they know about Star Wars’ history and lore is so deep. Basically, they made the show look like a movie, and it all comes down to clarity of vision and knowing exactly what you want to achieve. You don’t get a lot of second chances in TV because of the tight schedules and budget.

The scripts have to be really good and the production has to be really plugged into making a really interesting shooting strategy because you don’t get to do it a million different ways on the day. So in editorial you’re also hugging that initial plan and have to cut fairly quickly. Big movies often get found in post with a lot of changes going on, but there’s none of that here. Everyone’s marching forward in sync.

You must have used a lot of temp VFX?
Oh yeah – a ton. We had a great VFX editor, Liyana Mansor, who was with us from the very start. I don’t know how to do that work myself, but I pull in experts like Liyana, and we used a lot of temp VFX to help us figure stuff out and sometimes to shape the mechanics of a scene. So it was a big part of the whole process.

Tell us more about the DI.
Our colorist was Jean-Clement Soret, and we conformed in FilmLight Baselight with UHD SDR and HDR timelines. Tony, who was in New York, would come over and was very heavily involved in the DI.

How would you sum up the whole experience?
I have a lot of experience and a lot of tricks up my sleeve, and I used all of that on this show. It was a very high standard and a very big production, and I think we really pushed the envelope. We’ll be starting the next season soon, so it’s very exciting.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.