By Iain Blair
Set in 1943, A League of Their Own is a comedy-drama series co-created by star Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham. Based on the Penny Marshall 1992 film of the same name, it charts the formation of the Rockford Peaches, an all-women’s baseball team, and features new characters, storylines and issues that set out to broaden the scope of the original. The Amazon Prime series was cut and co-produced by editor Peter CabadaHagan, whose credits include Fairyland, Mozart in the Jungle and Paul McCartney: Find My Way.
I spoke with CabadaHagan about the editing challenges and the post workflow on the show which was recently renewed for a second season.
What were the main editing challenges?
The challenges evolved. We began with the pilot back in 2020 and soon after when we got into our producer’s cut COVID happened. Then it was a big mystery about how to proceed, and within two days we were working remote and using Evercast, which very few people had used at that time. We loaded everything onto hard drives, went remote, and took it from there. So that was a big challenge for doing the pilot.
Then 18 months later when we went into production and began shooting in Pittsburgh where I was on location with the team. We had to start shooting everything but the baseball scenes because of COVID and supply shortages. Our baseball field wasn’t built in time, so we began by producing episodes that were incomplete and working on cuts without seeing the centerpiece baseball scenes, so that was also a big challenge. And, creatively, balancing the tone of a comedy-drama was a challenge, as the show navigates a lot of territory.
While it’s a period piece, it has a lot of contemporary dialogue, which seems quite subversive. Was that a conscious choice?
Yes, it doesn’t stick strongly to its period. The dialogue and the music aren’t necessarily from the ‘40s, and finding that alchemy that brings all those pieces together in a way that felt purposeful and not like some mixed-tape, so to speak, was the biggest creative challenge.
The show was heavily improvised, and a lot of our talent comes from a comedy improv background, and that’s not something you usually expect with a period piece. But we wanted to have our cake and eat it too, by having the looseness of an improvised comedy but also the grandeur of a period piece, with big, exciting sports scenes like in a sports movie. And then we also wanted to balance that with quiet moments too, as a lot of it is about these characters’ relationships and how they’re discovering themselves for the first time.
How early on did you integrate post and VFX?
Our VFX supervisor Christina Mitrotti was always on-set, and we began on post and all the VFX quite early on. She was a real hawk in making sure we were only shooting locations that worked for the period. As far as set extensions and stuff like that, it was fairly minimal because they did a really good job of finding locations that would work, and that saved us a lot of time.
The biggest VFX challenge was dealing with all the baseball elements, and the baseball itself was always VFX. So for the first edit you had to do it imagining the timing of the ball – and the speed and angle of the ball. The fact that I’m a big baseball fan helped me a lot in getting that timing down. It would have been really hard without a baseball background to have an intuitive feel about that timing, because if you don’t watch a lot of baseball, it’s not necessarily clear how that timing should play out – or even what direction the ball should fly, depending where it hits the bat and so on.
That’s an area where I spent a lot of time working with the VFX team, discussing all the details, such as “OK, so if the ball hits her bat at this point, it’ll go in this direction. If you want it to go in a different direction, it will have to hit the bat here,” and so on. So it was all about bringing authenticity to how the play would actually manifest in reality, and that was a big part of the VFX process.
We would temp things as soon as we could after the initial edit was done. We’d have a still frame of a baseball that we’d drop in and animate, and that was helpful, but the notes process for the baseball footage was extensive, and that carried on well past our final picture lock — probably for another four months. That was where we really dialed in all the timing and direction of the ball. We had the rough direction but getting it looking authentic and real took a lot of notes and effort.
Tell us about the workflow and the editing gear you used.
We used the latest version of Avid Media Composer available in June 2021. I always like to use the most up-to-date software. There’s always the potential for bugs, but I figure I’ll have to deal with that at some stage anyway. One challenge was shooting in Pittsburgh while our dailies facility was here in LA at Sony. They have some proprietary hardware and software called Slingshot, which allows them to move large amounts of data very quickly, and we had a PA who got the dailies from the set every day, and he’d then send them to Sony’s lab here. Then they’d get sent back to me on location in Pittsburgh, and they were also pushed to our Nexis here where the rest of our editorial team was based.
Peter CabadaHagan
Dealing with COVID actually helped us all get used to working remotely, and we used Jump Desktop, and we were pretty nimble in what we could accomplish. I remoted into an Avid based in LA where I had the dailies on a hard drive mirrored with the Nexis, and I also had an Avid in Pittsburgh, and that allowed me to go on set and work out of Abbi’s showrunner trailer, so she could give notes on specific scenes. Then when we all came back here, we had a hybrid workflow with editorial offices until after we finished picture lock, when we moved to full remote for all the post work – VFX reviews, sound mixes and so on. Our workflow was constantly evolving, based on our needs at the time.
I assume you must have used a lot of temp sound?
Yes, a lot. I’m a big believer in providing a strong music and sound blueprint for the departments when they take over. I see my job as obviously dialing in the picture edit perfectly, but also handing over a strong foundation, and I was also tasked with a large part of the supervision of all the sound mixes. I was on the dub stage at Signature Post every time we had people working with our sound mixers, and I’d give the first round of notes before Will and Abbi got involved.
We had a fantastic sound team who came from Warner Bros., and I worked closely with them and our supervising sound editor Brian Armstrong. I’d worked with them before, and I recommended them for this job. Sound is a huge part of any period piece, and the world sounded very different 70 years ago, so to get that authenticity took a lot of care and attention to detail.
Tell us about the color grade.
Our finishing – the online and the color – was done at Company 3 with colorist Jaimie O’Bradovich. That was done mostly by our showrunners and our DPs, but as the post schedule did get extended there were times where I’d share notes on the color, as the showrunners had moved on to other projects and they were looking at things under less than perfect conditions. I was able to go to the lab and look at things in a dedicated color room when they an extra set of eyes.
How would you sum up the whole experience? Where does it rank in terms of challenges and satisfaction?
I have done a lot of hard jobs where you know going in that you’ll be working 25 days straight, and then it’s over. This was a marathon. I was part of the whole post process, and it took over a year to complete. But I’m very proud of the work we did. There’s a lot of myself in the show, a lot of my tastes, so there’s a lot of personal satisfaction in that.
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.
