Editor Robin Blotnick

Filmmaker Robin Blotnick was editor on To The End, a documentary film that is a sort of a sequel to Knock Down the House. It follows Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alongside three young leaders — Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement, Alexandra Rojas of Justice Democrats and policy writer Rhiana Gunn-Wright — as they fight for a big, bold and scientifically realistic government response to the climate crisis.

“It starts in 2019, when the Green New Deal was ascendant, and takes us through the turbulence of the 2020 elections and the pandemic all the way to the anxiety and uncertainty of the present moment,” explains Blotnick. “On the way we witness firsthand the way meaningful change has been stymied by a powerful fossil fuel industry, politicians on both sides of the aisle and, to some extent, the news media itself.”

Blotnick’s wife and longtime collaborator, Rachel Lears, was both director and DP on this film, which was shot, for the most part, on a Sony FX6 with a Sony FE 70-200mm lens. “Washington, DC-based Ray Whitehouse was an invaluable second unit DP on this. He knew the capital in and out from his work as a photojournalist. We also worked with 10 other great cinematographers based all around the country to cover scenes that Rachel couldn’t be at in person, especially when the pandemic made travel difficult.”

Color and audio post was done at NYC’s Final Frame, which Blotnick says did the pair’s two previous films. Let’s find out more from To The End’s editor, who cut on Adobe Premiere.

Director Rachel Lears

How did you work with Rachel? What direction were you given for the edit? How often was she looking at your cut?
Rachel’s always very involved in the edit, and since I live with her, and we work from home, it was easy to share my work for frequent feedback.

She and producer Sabrina Schmidt Gordon (who’s also an editor) had strong editorial visions and crucial roles in shaping the edit. But they were also very busy with production, which continued until three weeks before our premiere, so I had opportunities to build scenes and sequences on my own as well.

Can you talk about working on this during the pandemic? How did that affect the workflow?
Rachel and I were already working out of a home office, so editing workflow didn’t change dramatically when the pandemic set in. One good thing to come out of it for me was that production slowed down for a while, which gave me time to catch up on watching and logging all the footage we’d already shot.

On the downside we had to do post during NYC’s Omicron surge, and our colorist came down with COVID just days before we were scheduled to start. The post house was short-staffed and scrambling during the Sundance rush, but they pulled everything off very gracefully, and we were able to get enough days of color and sound in-person. I’m not sure what we would have done if we’d had to do post remotely. How would that even work?

Alexandra Rojas of Justice Democrats

What was a particular challenge to this project?
I suspect I’m not alone in saying the pandemic presented the biggest challenge for us. For a while, we were afraid the entire second half of the film might have to be a bunch of Zoom interviews. The solution we arrived at was to create scenes of our protagonists at home and isolated, taking in the world through their TVs and computers — the way so many of us did in those early months of 2020.

For example, when Varshini Prakash and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were tapped to be on Joe Biden’s climate task force, it was an important moment in our story, but even if we could have secured access, it would have been nothing but Zoom meetings. To make things harder, the mainstream media wasn’t covering the story at all. Luckily, Fox News was, so we ended up using their alarmist coverage about how AOC was steering Joe Biden to the left to give the moment the weight and sense of drama that it needed. It ended up creating some interesting irony because you see that Fox News and our subjects are effectively saying the same thing.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
I’m also a producer and writer on the film, which meant I frequently talked through storytelling choices with Rachel and Sabrina and spent a lot of time plotting out possible story arcs before they happened. To the extent that we had a post supervisor, that was me as well. I also worked as my own AE for the most part.

Transcriptive at use within Premiere

You cut on Adobe Premiere. Is there a particular tool within that system that came in handy for this one?
We originally envisioned this project as a series, so anticipating a team of editors, our EPs at Story Syndicate helped me set up Project Shortcuts, which was a new tool at the time. This turned out to be very useful because we could keep our project files on a shared folder in Google Drive. This meant that I could be editing a scene, Rachel could be making a radio edit from an interview, and Sabrina could be watching raw footage, all at the same time without saving over each other’s work.

I also relied heavily on the third-party plugin Transcriptive, which allows you to align transcriptions to the footage. For instance, you can do a keyword search of an interview and jump to the exact frame of the footage where the word is spoken.

How did you manage your time?
Rachel and I have a 5-year-old son. When you’re working as a self-employed artist with a young child, you learn to make the best possible use of every free hour you have.

One thing that always helps me is planning out the film with scene cards – first as physical index cards and later in the program Trello. It’s gotten to the point where I can look at a sequence of cards and play it out in my head before I even edit the scenes. This way I don’t have to spend as much time following wrong paths. That said, following wrong paths and wasting time is unavoidable and an important part of the creative process.

Robin Blotknick’s WFH setup

Do you manage expectations or try everything they ask of you?
I always try everything the others on the team ask. Sometimes I’m sure something won’t work and am pleasantly surprised. That’s why it’s good to make room for another set of eyes, especially when you feel blocked and out of ideas.

How do you take criticism?
I think I get better at taking criticism with each new project. When I first started as an editor, I was rigidly protective of my creations and afraid of the work involved with taking things apart and trying it another way.

With this project I often found myself happily willing to try sweeping, drastic changes at the drop of a hat. I guess I’ve come to learn how fluid a film is, how much it needs to be revolutionized again and again, and how crucial other people’s perspectives are. There’s no way I could do this in a bubble. That said, I still get defensive sometimes, especially when getting criticism at the end of a long day. It’s easier to take in other people’s ideas when you’re rested and ready to address them.

Finally, any tips for those just starting out?
This is kind of a small and obvious thing, but I would say take the time to get to know the platform you’re using inside out from the very beginning. I first started nonlinear editing with Final Cut Pro way back in 1999, and I was self-taught and didn’t know all the keyboard commands — I basically did everything using my mouse. When I switched to Premiere, I took the time to do online tutorials and learn it properly and realized all that I’d been missing.

Main Image: Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement