The documentary feature LFG, which premiered at Tribeca last month, is a no-holds-barred, inside account of the US Women’s National Team’s ongoing fight with US Soccer for equal pay, as told by Megan Rapinoe, Jessica McDonald, Becky Sauerbrunn, Kelley O’Hara, Sam Mewis and others. “It’s also,” says the film’s editor Jeff Consiglio, “a rally cry for badassery, inspired by the seemingly limitless badassery of the women who tell their stories in this film.”
Editor Jeff Consiglio
LFG, which can be streamed on HBO Max, was co-directed by Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, the latter of whom also served as DP on the film. The Fines and Consiglio have collaborated in the past, so the trio had a very helpful shorthand on this project. “Andrea, Sean and I had made three prior films together and about once a year we’d connect and discuss possible next projects,” explains Consiglio. “They contacted me when they were looking into what was going on with the women’s national team back in 2019 and put this project into motion. We talked for several months as the project was evolving in production, and once they could see a roadmap through post, they locked me in. I was lurking around the project for almost eight months before the first day of editing, observing, consulting, adjusting plans and trying not to break anything before go time.”
Let’s find out more from the LFG editor …
What direction were you given for the edit?
Because this is now our fourth film together, we have a strong rapport and can often finish each other’s sentences. It’s organic for us to talk about what’s in their heads for the film and then for me to disappear into the edit studio and start negotiating between ideas and dreams for the material and the reality of what the material can be and wants to be. I make sure to know their wants as deeply as possible so I can bend the reality of the material as far toward those wants as it will go. I do this while bending their wants toward what the material is crying out to be.
Kelley O’Hara
I’m never without clear direction from them, and I report back about how that direction is making its way through the material. I showed them builds of material all the time, big or small, long or short, successful or total crap, so we could all keep on that journey together. The three of us are very interactive, even though I maintain a closed door when I’m actually doing the surgery of building that material.
Was there a particular scene that was most challenging?
No single scene sits at the top of the pain-in-the-ass list, but the entire Act I is there. The first 20 minutes of every documentary is always by far the hardest section because you need to do many things at once — get a lot of information out to set the intellectual stage and conflict, introduce your characters without falling into the rabbit hole of their full stories, and let the audience know they are in for a rewarding ride. And each of those things has to be done with perfection. They each then have to weave together elegantly, and it all has to happen without taking an entire film’s worth of time.
Usually Act I gets more hours of labor than Acts II and III combined, and that happened here as well. How do you get to know these women, explain a lawsuit, capture the emotion of their decision to drop the lawsuit and engage in dynamic soccer play quickly, efficiently and elegantly? All filmmakers face this same Act I beast. Ours was on the workbench for a lot of weeks.
What was the film shot on?
Sony Venice with some Phantom material from games and practices. Like all films from 2020, Zooms, Osmo cameras and iPhones also became part of the camera arsenal.
Where was it posted?
Because Andrea and Sean are based in Washington, DC, and we were in pandemic times, they opted to do most of the post locally at a facility they’ve used for years, Henninger Media Services. We mixed the film in LA where I am based, at Barking Owl Sound.
Was the edit done during the pandemic? If so, how did that affect the workflow?
Yes, the edit began in June of 2020 and ended in June of 2021, and the pandemic torpedoed our workflow plans as much as it torpedoed everyone’s plans for everything. Fortunately, we had originally planned to begin the project with me in LA and them in DC, so we had set up a robust workflow for remote work — but that was meant to be temporary until we got to a certain stage, when we’d move the edit to DC. Clearly, that never happened, and we built this entire film working remotely the whole time. We had to get very good at Zoom calls and eventually embraced Evercast as a low-latency videoconferencing system that enabled us to review material in real time while 3,000 miles apart.
Jessica McDonald
What system did you use for the edit?
I’ve been overlapping multiple projects within the Adobe ecosystem for years, so I’m always inclined to use Premiere Pro to keep everything consistent, and that’s what we used here.
Did you have an assistant editor on LFG? If so, how did you work with them?
We had two assistant editors (Kai Keefe and Kevin Otte) and one coordinating producer (Lauren Gaffney) who did most of our research as well as a few more people who would track every piece of media, whether it came from the outside or was a build I created. Transcribing, documenting, tracking elements and versions … this project was a multi-headed dragon.
Do you allow them to edit scenes and/or give input on your edits?
I always strive for the old-school classic definition of an assistant editor, which is one who is actively creating in addition to managing the flow of media. So I try to get assistants to exercise those creative muscles whenever possible, either performing specific tasks or just taking blind creative stabs at scenes on their own. Often the technical demands of the workflow are so overwhelming that the creative time is minimized, but it’s ideal for me to have those additional ideas and perspectives whenever we can wrangle our days to make it happen.
Megan Rapinoe
How do you manage producers’ expectations with what can really be done?
Probably a lot like a doctor does when walking back into the room to give you the results. No film is ever what anyone thinks it will be going in; it is the result of that negotiation with reality mentioned earlier. Producers who’ve been around the block know this truth well, so we all deal with the good news/bad news of every day’s work with as much of a hunger for improvisation and adaptability as we can muster.
But I’m not free of the despair that comes from the shattering of an expectation against the wall of reality, so it’s never not challenging to adjust along the way. We just know from experience that at least half of those adjustments are discoveries of something better than we expected, and the other half might be painful at first but almost always lead us to new discoveries. I’ve got to be that doctor for them every day, but I’ve developed those muscles by being that doctor for myself about a hundred times an hour anyway. The film always wins this struggle; it always gets better when we adjust our expectations. The happiest filmmakers are the ones who know that every hour of every day.
Megan Rapino
How do you manage your time?
A film in progress cries out for every second of your time for the entire duration it’s being created. It’s the most high-maintenance thing I know. What directors ask of me is only one part of that constant demand, so right away their asks are in constant negotiation with what the film itself needs to grow. We do all we can every day until we drop because that’s what this creative endeavor demands of us.
Again, when working with the best filmmakers who’ve been around the block, everyone knows that time management and the prioritizing of asks is an inherent part of the process. Usually, I can let someone know right away if an ask is even possible or not and we progress from there so that we can all wrestle with the most effective and efficient steps every day to get the crying needy film baby fully grown in time.
How do you take criticism? Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of others’ ideas (good and bad)?
If one does not have a leather-thick skin for taking criticism, then one’s life as an editor will last about 7 minutes.
