HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show was nominated for five Emmy Awards this year, including for Outstanding Picture Editing For Variety Programming. Supervising editor Daysha Broadway and editors Stephanie Filo and Jessica Hernández were recognized for their work on Season 2, Episode 3, “Sister, May I Call You Oshun?”
Daysha Broadway
We reached out to the trio to talk about their favorite sketches to edit and more.
Which scene was your favorite to edit in A Black Lady Sketch Show?
Daysha Broadway: I would have to go with “Get Your Life.” It’s the sketch that starts the season after Dr. Haddasah’s Spike Lee dolly shot moment. The sketch is an entire short film with a beginning, middle, plot twist, end… it’s a movie.
Jessica Hernández: “The Girl Who Cried Vintage” is one of my favorite sketches. It’s an inherently funny concept, and I had a lot of fun with the music.
Stephanie Filo: My favorite sketch that I edited this season was “The Last Supp-Her.”
Describe this scene and the significance it has to the rest of the series.
Broadway: In this sketch, Robin Thede plays a “When Pigs Fry” fast-food employee, Salina, who desperately goes to see a psychic (Laci Mosely) to find out why her life is the worst life ever or as she puts it, why her life looks like Baby Boy 2.
Psychic Sabrina tells her that her life is in shambles because of a M.A.S.H game she played when she was younger with her friend LaDonna (Skye Townsend) who miscounted during the game and is now living the fabulous life that Salina should be living. Salina then goes to confront LaDonna and tries to get her to repeat the game and switch lives.
Jessica Hernández
When Salina gets there, she sees that LaDonna lives in a mansion and is married to our guest star, Omarion, and she refuses to play the game again. It’s absolutely hilarious. So many jokes back to back. Lots of physical comedy, and it showcases the talents of our new cast members this season, Skye and Laci. It really sets the tone for the silliness and overall joyful laughter you get from the rest of the season and was probably the best math joke ever written.
Hernández: The sketch is about a plus-size woman trying to convince her friends that a store-bought jumpsuit is actually vintage. I think the sketch, like the series, blends silly, light-hearted humor with complex societal questions buried just under the dermis.
Filo: This sketch follows three women disciples (Robin Thede, Skye Townsend, Ashley Nicole Black) who were snubbed at the Last Supper and have to sit at the kiddie table. I think that this is a scene that really showcases the many talents of our cast.
The dialogue in this sketch goes by very fast, and the most amazing part of it is that about 40% of it is improv, so the jokes are stacked! Gabrielle Dennis embodying the Mary Magdalene character showcases her physical comedy chops as well. This was actually the last sketch that I worked on this season and it almost felt like a final test or the end of a marathon because I ended up combining every technique I had used throughout the rest of the season — improv moments, music timings, sound design, creating different visual effects to sell a look, finding every possible reaction shot, and pacing it up to match our show’s style.
What technical challenges did you encounter while cutting this scene?
Broadway: The crystal ball was probably the most technically challenging aspect of this particular sketch. I was really trying to sell the M.A.S.H game materializing within it. My assistant, Lilit, and I brought in smoke overlays and SFX that we layered to get the right sound for this crystal ball. I didn’t want to do anything that sounded too generic, so we ended up layering the SFX a lot to create something unique.
I then spent a lot of time creating a matte for the contents to live inside the crystal ball and making it feel real so the VFX team could understand what we were going for. There were the contents in the ball, the light from the room reflecting onto the ball, the character’s reflections in the ball and the animation of the contents in the ball. There was also a forcefield blocking Salina from touching LaDonna and Omarion. It was a lot.
Hernández: The most rewarding part of my edit was the music, but it was also the most difficult to actualize. I decided to use the opera “Carmen” to drive the accusatory tone the sketch takes when all the partygoers begin to question whether the jumpsuit is, in fact, vintage. Timing the music for both comedic effect and harmony was the largest technical challenge. Another was the amount of actors in the sketch. It was a moving target to make sure the geography was clear and the best improvisations were used from each actress.
Stephanie Filo
Filo: The biggest technical challenge I encountered during this sketch was trying to keep dialogue from overlapping too much based on how all of the different improv moments were cut together. If you look at the “loaves and fishes” run, for example, you’ll see they’re all talking to Skye Townsend’s character at the same time. But these are each pulled from different improv moments and different takes to create one long run of jokes, so sometimes you could hear Robin, Ashley or Skye’s audio twice at the same time from two different improv moments, and so on. Ultimately, through a combination of reality TV franken-biting techniques and iZotope RX filters to clean up background sound, those moments cleaned up nicely.
What was the dialogue like between you and the series’ director or showrunner regarding this scene?
Broadway: Robin (Thede) and I talked about her character a little bit, which was helpful in choosing takes where she played Salina in the most desperate manner possible. She was also as concerned as I was about the crystal ball VFX and technical things of that nature. I had already cut in quite a few alt jokes that were great, but there were so many that were shot. So during the notes process, Robin, Lauren and I would choose which ones we wanted to use, deciding which jokes were funnier and which jokes worked for other reasons. I think because this is our second season together, they both trust my instincts on things like that, which makes the process more collaborative.
Hernández: This sketch came together rather easily, in the sense that we were all on the same page tonally. My main conversations with Robin and head writer/co-EP Lauren Ashley Smith revolved around shaping the jokes so they landed as strong as possible.
Filo: I think our director Brittany Scott Smith knew early on that she wanted to try to get a Succession feel for this sketch to amp up the funny moments. In our tone meeting about this sketch, we also noted something else that is funny about it: It’s almost as if our three characters are each having completely different conversations with themselves. With that in mind, part of the process for this sketch was trying to find takes that really showcased our individual characters’ different traits as well as the Succession vibe.
During my notes pass with Brittany, we really zeroed in on these specific elements, and then once I got to my notes pass with Robin and Lauren, we continued to dial in which moments to keep and which moments to trim. This sketch is so packed with jokes that it used to be longer than it is now; ultimately it came down to making it just the right length and as funny as it could possibly be, all while laughing hysterically and collaborating in the process.
Which video editing tools or plugins did you use to cut your scene?
Broadway: I used a lot of in-Avid effects for this sketch. There were a lot of VFX we needed for the crystal ball, echoing sound effects and music stings, a lot of split screens. I used the animatte tool, Avid’s D-Verb plugin, a pitch shift plugin, a stabilizer and a TC Electronic plugin, and we use iZotope for noise cancellation to get cleaner dialogue. We really have to pull out all of the tools and tricks we’ve learned over the years for this show.
Hernández: I used Avid Media Composer exclusively to cut this sketch, and Evercast to do notes remotely with the directors and producers.
Filo: The desired look for this scene was modeled after the show Succession, meaning a lot of hand-held shots as well as quick pans and zooms on different characters or at different moments — almost a reality show feel. With this cutting style, you almost have to rewire your brain on where the cut should land to sell the comedy of it. The frame might pan to a different character quickly and then do a quick zoom, and you want to lean into that action instead of cutting. The zooms draw attention to reactions on characters’ faces, or they zoom in right as a punchline hits.
Because so much improv is peppered in and happens on the fly in this sketch, the camera action sometimes didn’t catch those exact moments, so I used in-Avid effects such as Boris Continuum’s Pan and Zoom and 3D warp to digitally create zooms to land on specific punchlines when it was needed and to make the sketch feel uniform overall with what was scripted versus what was improv. A soft Boris Continuum Jitter effect was also useful in making sure everything felt as uniform as possible for this look.
I used D-Verb on the background harp music as well as some of the background voices in the sound design to add a large echo, which made it feel more like they were in a giant room. I also tried to amp up the sound design to feel like there were a lot of people having a good time without the three ladies, even if we don’t see everyone else.
