Category Archives: Indie Film

Composer Matt Orenstein: Scoring the Horror Film Belle

October 5, 2023

Los Angeles-based composer Matt Orenstein has scored everything from trailers to features to branded content. In addition to projects for Mercedes-Benz, Square and DoorDash, his feature credits include Surfer’s Paradise, Earth Over Earth, Daddy and Silicon Beach.

Orenstein’s latest compositions can be heard in Level 33 Entertainment’s horror film Belle. Written and directed by Max Gold, Belle is a reimagining of the classic tale “Beauty and the Beast.” In the film, Belle works on the family farm and cares for her father after he falls severely ill. Desperate to save him, she journeys in search of a mythical rose believed to be a cure, but she must surrender herself as a prisoner to a vicious beast as payment for the rose.

Matt Orenstein

We spoke to Orenstein about everything from collaborating with Gold and the film’s editor to what technology makes his job easier.

Before you began work on Belle, what did you do? Meaning, did you create a sound palette you wanted to stick by, etc.?
Before I started writing, Max [Gold, Belle’s director] and I talked about overarching story themes, characters and moments in the script that stick out to us as being big music moments. We also talked filmic and sonic references for the tone of the score and of the film in general. Those ideas evolved quite a bit once we had a working cut. I’m always ready to let go of whatever sound palette ideas I may have or that we may have discussed. It’s not my job to dig my heels in. I just have to help lead the viewer to water, and the director knows where the water is.

What did the director want for the Belle score?
Our initial discussions were pretty open-ended. Max sent me Koji Kondo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time score, and that was our starting point. But he trusted me to throw a lot of ideas against the wall to see what stuck. A lot of that trust comes from our long working relationship. Max and I go way back and have worked together on more projects than I can count, so we have an ever-deepening shorthand. He knows my only goal is to support the film through score, and I know he’ll be open to whatever musical ideas I have so long as they support the film. So our work together is truly collaborative. Max’s vision for Belle crystallized as he and Patrick Lawrence, the film’s editor, worked to shape the film into the one you see, and the score evolved with it.

What is your favorite part of being a composer?
Being a composer combines so many things that I love. I’m a music lifer… music was always in my house, my parents’ cars; it was everywhere when I was growing up outside Minneapolis. I’ve played music since I was 4 and had my first paid gig at 8. I’ve played bass in all kinds of bands and studied both jazz and classical music as part of my bachelor’s degree in bass performance. After college, I moved to Chicago and worked at a record store for a few years while continuing to play in bands and work as a bassist. I also love to read — right now I’m reading David Stubbs’ history of Krautrock, “Future Days,” and Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” — and I love movies, so getting to help tell stories is supercool.

Composing for film allows me to take what I love about being a bass player and put it into practice on a larger scale. As the bass, you’re the anchor of the harmony and the glue between that and the rhythm. I’ve played a lot of different genres, from jazz to classical to hip-hop to punk to noise, so I feel like I’ve spent a good amount of time living inside a lot of different music. Getting to create all different kinds of music from the inside out is a real joy.

There’s a collaborative aspect to both being a bassist and being a film composer, too. You’re a part of a team, and it’s your job to add some kind of shading to whatever’s going on, even if that means doing something simple. It’s not about flexing, it’s not about upstaging anyone or outsizing the moment. It’s about what you’re all making together and using everything at your disposal to help bring the vision to life. And I love that.

Walk us through your process. How do you begin? What inspires you?
I was inspired by the trip to Iceland, where this was shot. Max strongly recommended that I come to Iceland and visit during filming so I could get a sense of the country. It wasn’t an ethnomusicology mission; I just wanted to get an impression of the country to weave into the fantasy that we were creating.

I walked around Iceland with my eyes, ears and lungs open (coming from LA, the clean air was a real shock to my system). I had an idea that I’d record nature sounds and somehow work them into the score, but it turned out that most of the natural sounds were either wind or water. When I wasn’t recording or just listening to the soundscape, I was listening to music that the country was pulling for me. A lot of Bulgarian Women’s Choir, Bjork, Arvo Pärt, Meredith Monk, Johann Johannsson, stuff like that. I read Snorri’s “The Prose Edda” in an old Viking church and on the side of a big hill before I hiked all the way up as the sun beat down at 10pm. You could see clearly for miles at the top. Just like how in LA you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing something that’s been filmed, you can’t walk 10 feet in Iceland without seeing some unearthly and beautiful natural thing. The trip stayed with me as we worked on the score and helped me feel the picture more as I worked.

We did about three passes of the score. By the middle of the second one we found a good mix of all the elements we wanted that could best help us tell the story we wanted to tell, both in the romance moments and the horror moments.

What tools did you use to create the Belle score?
I programmed and tracked exclusively in Logic. I use Pro Tools so I can look at AAFs and see how to conform to new picture edits, but I prefer the way Logic handles MIDI, so that’s mostly where I live.

The sample instruments were either instances of Kontakt, the Logic Sampler (for the ones that I designed), the dedicated Spitfire plugin or the old EastWest Play player. Most of the reverbs were QL Spaces convolution, Eventide stereo verb or Softube Spring Reverb plugins.

I also love Waves’ H-Delay and CLA-2A compressor plugins. I can’t count how many instances of Slate Virtual Tape Machine I used, either for dimension or distortion. The LA-2A and the QL Spaces helped me create some sense of verisimilitude, even though I made the entire score in my living room.

Matt Orenstein in his home studio

Name three pieces (or more) of technology you use that make your job easier.
1) AKG K712 open-backed headphones: These are great for checking final mixes and making sure that everything sounds alive. I use studio monitors (Yamaha HS-7 pair) to get my mixes most of the way there, but the headphones are great for checking bass relationships, compression strength and reverb tails.

2) MOTU MIDI Express 128: I like to record MIDI, send it to my hard synths (I used an ARP Odyssey, Roland GAIA and Sequential Prophet Rev2) and then record the audio from there. So if I don’t like the patch, or a sound needs to be re-recorded for a new conform, I have the MIDI on hand and can record a new part quickly. It’s not quite as fast as having soft synths, but hard synths add dimension and color to any track if they’re used right, so it’s worth it. It’s also easier and more fun for me to dial in a sound from a flesh-and-blood instrument than it is to work with soft synths (which, don’t get me wrong, I love and use often).

3) Logic Pro X: It’s such a versatile and deep program… anything and everything I needed it to do, it could do. Once you’ve got the hotkeys memorized and your presets/templates in place, you can move extremely fast.

4) Universal Audio Devices Apollo: Great for audio monitoring, the preamps sound fantastic, so it’s easy to record audio cleanly, and it takes some of the load off my Mac’s DSP. Just a solid workhorse.

5) SSD drives: I run my sessions off of one and host sample instruments and video off of another. Again, it keeps my DSP pretty light and helps me stay organized.

What advice would you give to up-and-coming composers?
Well, I’m more or less up-and-coming too. The hustling and learning is continuous. The love is, too. If it weren’t, it would be hard to keep going with this work. So find something to love about whatever you’re working on. I don’t know if I’m qualified to give any advice, but I can tell you what’s worked for me. Play to your strengths. Learn how to best support your collaborators within your role. Show a willingness to develop your weaker areas (and follow through) and keep your eyes, ears and mind open.

Get familiar with the temp and what inspired those people to make the temp (i.e., if someone is temping your project with John Williams, who inspired John Williams to write that music?). That way, you can write something in dialogue with what the director likes (and/or editor, producer, whoever you need to impress the most). Your spin on it will naturally appear.

Make sure the production value of your music is very strong. The most cynical (and unfortunately, correct) advice I’ve ever gotten is more or less “Make your stuff sound expensive.” But please, for our sake and yours, make sure your writing is on point too. Listen to your editor. I’ve worked with Patrick on so many projects, including Belle, and I’ve learned more from him about writing music for picture than just about anybody. Listen to your director, and work to earn their trust. It’s their story; you’re just helping to tell it. And god damnit, you’ve got to be kind.

DP Chat: Shooting David Duchovny’s Bucky Fcking Dent*

July 19, 2023

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LA-based cinematographer Jeff Powers’ work spans features, episodics, commercials and music videos. Recent credits include Heaven’s Gate for HBO Max, Muscles and Mayhem for Netflix and Slipnot’s video for Yen for Offsite Films.

Powers also shot the indie film Bucky F*cking Dent, written and directed by David Duchovny and edited by Jamie Nelsen, ACE. Set in the 1970s, the story centers on struggling author Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) and his estranged, terminally ill father, Marty (Duchovny). After learning of Marty’s condition from his caretaker/nurse Mariana (Stephanie Beatriz), Ted decides to move back home. Ted and Marty’s struggle to reconnect, understand and ultimately forgive each other is built on a mutual love of baseball.

Jeff Powers

“The film is dark and funny but also earnest and affecting. The two trade plenty of barbs, feeling each other out before Marty, in his failing health, opens up about his past and the source of their troubled relationship,” explains Powers. “The whole journey takes place within the context of the Red Sox’s doomed 1978 pennant race and results in Ted finding new purpose and direction in his life.”

Let’s find out more from Powers’ and his work on the film, which screened at NYC’s Tribeca Film Festival…

How early did you get involved on this film?
The whole project came together very quickly for me. Only three and a half weeks after my first conversation with director David Duchovny, we were on-set making it happen. With such a short preproduction window, I had to be extremely focused on my prep. David adapted the screenplay from a novel he’d published in 2016, so I was able to rely on his in-depth understanding of the story and characters. His clear vision of everything, from broad story points down to hyper-specific details, helped me get up to speed quickly.

How did you work with Duchovny? What direction were you given?
David said he wanted the camera to feel “buoyant,” which is a sentiment I latched onto. It’s wonderfully specific yet completely open-ended at the same time. In a literal interpretation, we decided to shoot a large portion of the film hand-held. That float gives a sense of subjectivity and immediacy that works well for this kind of character-driven story.

More figuratively, the film deals with themes of disappointment and death, but at its heart, it is an optimistic comedy. We don’t shy away from the dramatic moments, but we didn’t want the movie to sink into a heavy, dark place. Ultimately, it is a hopeful story with a lot of hilarious moments along the way, and the camera’s POV needed to be that buoy carrying you along.

One of the films David and I looked at to find a common frame of reference was Five Easy Pieces. There are obvious comparisons to the 1970s time period, and father/son theme — Laszlo Kovacs’ beautiful and often understated character-driven photography is truly inspirational.

Shooting for a director who will spend the majority of the day in front of the camera is a big undertaking. I knew I was going to have to cover a lot of the gray area in between the DP and director role while shooting, and that’s a lot of responsibility. I’m extremely grateful for the trust David placed in me and his unyielding support on-set. In the end, I think a lot of our personal relationship is up on the screen in a way that is truly unique, in my experience.

What about the color and working with the colorist? What are some notes that you exchanged?
For production, I built a show LUT. I wanted to set our look at the start so the intention would be clear from dailies all the way through editorial. I chose a single-LUT workflow to keep myself honest. We were working very quickly on-set, and in that situation, I find the simplicity of sticking with the single look and using lighting and exposure to craft the image works best for me.

Sebastian Perez-Burchard at Tunnel Post handled the color. While we did look at dailies for reference here and there, Sebastian built up a fresh, more refined look based on some images we traded back and forth. I was particularly into photographers Tina Barney and Larry Sultan at the time. I found their work informative in finding how to place our highlights and shadows at the near edges of exposure while maintaining a relatively medium- to low-contrast look. There’s an intimacy to these images as well as an off-the-cuff snapshot quality that was appropriate for our film. I brought both those books with me to the DI in case we lost our way and needed some inspiration.

Sebastian did a tremendous job giving the film the grade it deserved while keeping David and me on track throughout the process. I can’t thank him enough for the heroic 14-hour final day we pulled to get it all done.

What did you end up shooting on and why?
We shot Bucky on ARRI Alexa Minis with Zeiss standard speeds. Given the nature of our short prep and fast production style, I needed to rely on a camera I’m comfortable with. I’ve shot with the Alexa Mini countless times, and its combination of wide latitude, beautiful color rendition and compact form factor was the right choice.

I’ve always loved Zeiss standard and super speed lenses. DPs often pair older, softer lenses with digital sensors, and it’s a move I’ve pulled many times myself. In this case, the standards brought the right balance of clarity and expressiveness to achieve our look. I tended to shoot them in the T 2 2/3 to T 2.8 1/3 range, which is where those lenses perform best for me. When necessary, I also worked contrast or diffusion filters in to push the softness and halation even further, but I’d guess a solid third of the film was shot on 40mm, clean with no filtration.

AbelCine in New York set us up with the Alexa/Zeiss package as well as an Angenieux 10:1 zoom, which we used for some of our more telephoto shots.

Can you talk lighting?
The goal of the film was natural, grounded lighting throughout. David was looking for a style that would apply to the dramatic elements equally as well as the comedic. To me, this meant lighting from outside windows or motivating with practicals as much as possible. It also meant not being afraid to let faces fall into shadow.

As with any DP, I always feel the temptation to get the lighting “perfect” (whatever that might mean). You place the key just so to get that Rembrandt triangle. You set blocking so your actor’s marks are carved out with striking back light. Don’t get me wrong, I love all that, and it’s my go-to starting point. However, every time I reached for these approaches in Bucky, they ended up feeling forced and unnatural in a way that undercut the story we were telling. Eventually, I settled into emphasizing those key moments with darkness and shadow.

One particularly dramatic and cathartic scene between Ted and Mariana is set in a narrow hallway and plays out entirely in silhouette. I love how much weight this image brings to the moment and allows the audience to focus on the emotion conveyed in the characters’ entire body language. You can’t see either of their faces, but you feel it all.

Any happy accidents happen on-set?
In the third act of the film, there is a scene in which Marty has a revelation and truly opens up to his son, which required a lot from David and Logan performance-wise.

We did a blocking rehearsal, and while David stepped away to prepare, I placed the cameras and set up the scene. But when the cast returned and we started rolling, I immediately realized the angles I’d chosen weren’t working at all. Everything felt very stiff, and the camera wasn’t matching the intensity David was bringing to this massive three-page performance. I didn’t want to break the energy midscene, so after the first take, I went up to David and told him his performance was incredible, but the cameras were in the totally wrong place. Not a comfortable admission to make!

I could have stopped it down and reconfigured the setup, but David and Logan were in it and prepared to give a great performance right then and there. In order to keep momentum, I opted to go hand-held and shoot everything with a single camera. This was not the plan at all, nor was it the vision for how the scene would play, but in the moment, it just felt right. This allowed me to adjust the camera to mirror the dynamic of David’s performance.

Without much forethought, I found myself wrapping from a medium close-up to a near-3/4 raking profile and back, spontaneously taking cues from David’s monologue. Similarly, while on Logan’s side, the lens dips in and out of flares, sometimes almost completely obscuring his face as he takes in this brutal honesty from his father. None of these choices would have been made if the initial plan had worked out.

The result has a very close and intimate feel. The performance is feeding the camera, and the visuals are reinforcing that performance. Obviously, this is all some very basic stuff, but it really made the scene come to life. Sometimes things work out through dumb luck, but in most cases, I think these “happy accidents” come from acknowledging that what you’ve planned isn’t as good as what’s actually happening… and having the presence of mind to roll with it.

Are there some scenes that stick out as challenging? Can you talk about those?
Making a period indie film is tough. The script called for a few exterior scenes, which I knew would be huge undertakings to make period-accurate. For example, there is a sequence in which Ted and Mariana walk around downtown as they get to know each other. I was searching for a way to convey the world of this 1970s small town without just burying the art and AD departments.

I love a good medium-to-longer-lens wide shot in general, but on this one, we pushed it hard and ended up doing wides at 200mm or even longer. This gave the shots a very narrow and achievable field of view from a set dressing and background actor perspective, but it also used the compression and depth of a telephoto lens to keep that sense of world I was aiming for.

Looking back on the film, would you have done anything different?
There is that classic saying, something to the effect of “You are only really prepared to shoot a film after you’ve wrapped it.” There are always things to improve if you were to get a second shot at it. I’m always highly self-critical, and so the day I step away from a film fully satisfied will honestly probably be the day I retire.

I’m really proud of what we achieved with Bucky, but if there’s one thing I would have done differently, it’s that I would have loved another couple weeks of prep. Days spent sitting in the production office certainly aren’t the most exciting part of filmmaking, but there is no substitute for thorough preparation. In this case, our quick preproduction window didn’t allow for that, so everyone had to be light on their feet to keep up. I will say this forced us to focus on the bigger picture of the film and adapt to new opportunities as they came up, which gave plenty of room for those happy accidents you mentioned.

Any tips for young cinematographers?
I can’t recommend working on-set in a crew position enough. I started out on a dual track of sorts, working as an electrician and gaffer while simultaneously shooting my own smaller projects. Not only do you get to learn more experienced DPs’ approaches, but you also gain a sense and appreciation of what you’re asking your team to do. A big part of being the DP is managing the people working with you. How well can you do that if you’ve never actually held any of those positions yourself?

Also, I keep a work journal and wish I had started doing so right from the start. It can be as elaborate as full lighting plots, set photos and camera diagrams on some shoots, or as simple as a few notes recollected after a chaotic day. Either way, I have a record of what was done on-set and how effective it was. Over time, it’ll help you find your style and dial in your skills. And most importantly, it’ll prevent you from making the same mistake twice when you do have a misstep… I can promise you that!

Editing Tribeca’s Breaking the News

July 5, 2023

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Editor Jamie Boyle about worked on Breaking the News, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. The film follows the journey of The 19^th*, an independent, nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2020. It focused on events that helped shape that historic year with a team of women and nonbinary journalists “forging a new path amidst the centuries-old bias of mainstream media,” she says.

Jamie Boyle

Boyle also put on her writing hat, among others for this one.

Let’s find out more…

How did you get involved in this project?
I was contacted by the film’s incredible producer, Diane Quon, when the team was looking for an editor to come onboard for approximately eight months. At the time, I was helping out editors Carla Gutierrez and David Teague as they launched the BIPOC Editor’s Database. Carla was consulting on Breaking the News, and I believe she and David recommended me to Diane. I had worked with David as an associate editor in 2014 on E-Team, and he’s been an invaluable mentor ever since. I had a couple of introductory meetings with the directors and producer on Breaking the News, we all watched each other’s previous work and decided to move forward together.

Do you know what it was shot on?
Sony FS5, Sony FS7, Canon C70, Canon C300.

How did you work with the directors? How often were they looking at cuts?
Breaking the News had three directors — Heather Courtney Princess Hairston and Chelsea Hernandez. I tend to work in a more solitary fashion. I had a weekly meeting with the directors and producer where we talked about how things were going with the edit overall and discussed any new footage coming in.

I sent them an assembly approximately four months into the edit period. The first rough cut was about four months in. After that, I sent cuts on a monthly basis, roughly speaking. During the final month or two of editing, I send cuts much more often, sometimes multiple times a week. I’m usually not sitting with the director(s) in the edit room for more than a few weeks over the course of an edit.

Was there a particular scene or scenes that were most challenging?
There was an embarrassment of riches in the material for this film, and that was one of the biggest challenges. It had four incredible main participants (with a fifth added late in the edit), hundreds of hours of original footage, years of Zoom meeting recordings and decades of archival news footage.

The greatest challenge was interweaving all five storylines while also telling the larger story of The 19th* and its historic disruption of the US news industry. It was one of the biggest challenges of my career, and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity and proud of the result.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
Yes, I was given a writing credit as well. Everyone on an independent documentary does much more than their credited role implies, and editors are far from immune to that. I often feel like I’m on equal footing with the directors during the edit process, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with teams who embrace that creative collaboration.

There is so much crossover of these roles. I personally find myself constantly oscillating between editing, writing, producing, directing, assistant editing, post-supervising, even shooting, on nearly every project I’ve been involved with. And I know most members of those film teams feel similarly. Breaking the News was no different. I picked up my camera (Canon C300) more than once to grab a cutaway or b-roll shot we needed.

Can you talk about your editing workflow?
Usually there’s an AE on for at least a month before I start editing. I watch down all of the footage, pull selects and take a ton of notes. If I feel particularly inspired, I might even start crafting scenes in the early weeks. I really let myself go when I’m pulled in early on because I think that’s where a lot of my value lies — in being a fresh set of eyes and following those knee-jerk reactions. It often lays the groundwork for the tone of the entire film. I come back to that early work frequently to remember what was standing out before I became completely consumed with trying to wrestle it all into a narrative.

It’s an almost sacred time when you have the space to simply listen to what the material wants and needs to be. I then create an assembly of around 3-4 hours of the most crucial material with a rough narrative arc. I reach the first rough cut about a month or two later and continue working out the puzzle of the film until about a month before picture lock. I try to leave a month at the very end just for fine-tuning. It takes much longer than anyone ever anticipates, especially with larger teams.

What system did you use to cut and why?
I used my 2015 iMac and Adobe Premiere Pro. I need to upgrade my system but by replacing and maxing out the RAM, I was able to work smoothly throughout this edit. Premiere is my preferred software. I learned how to cut in FCP 7 and worked in it for years, so that transition was pretty seamless. I used Frame.io for uploading all cuts and gathering feedback.

Is there a tool within that system that was particularly helpful?
Yes, many. Premiere’s auto-transcription is fantastic. It allowed us to do many things quickly including translations. Many of the films I’ve had the opportunity to edit over the years have included multiple languages and this tool is a huge time-saver. It’s also incredibly accurate which is critical to getting the scene right and doing the material justice when you don’t speak the language. Frame.io was also an enormous help on this project. We had three directors living in three different time zones so getting accurate and organized feedback was essential. The ability to leave notes at exact timecodes, toggle frame by frame, comment on each other’s feedback, those tools made it possible to finish the film in the time we did.

How did you manage your time?
Setting realistic expectations from the start is the key to any semblance of healthy time management, especially during an edit. The film team is often excited to be wrapping production and ready to sprint to the finish line. When you’re a full-time editor, that means you’re always being asked to sprint. It’s helpful to set the tone that this is just the very beginning of shaping the story, and the patience and space to do that is key to making the strongest film possible.

The directors and producer on Breaking the News were exceptionally respectful of that process and it made all the difference in the world, not only in terms of my own health and wellbeing but in the caliber of the film created.

Did you have an assistant editor on this?
Yes, we had a phenomenal AE named Anna Ramirez. She backed up, logged transcoded and organized footage as soon as it came in throughout the edit process. She also pulled selects, tracked down archival material, and post-supervised throughout the composing, sound mix, color correction and online sessions. We truly would not have been able to finish in the time we did without her.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
I’ve learned the hard way that it’s so much better to set realistic expectations than to disappoint later on. I often made the mistake of setting timelines based on everything going smoothly and working myself to the bone. Everything will not go smoothly. It never does, especially on a documentary edit. And you’ll quickly burn out and hit many unexpected roadblocks if you overwork yourself. The film will suffer for it as well.

I adhere to the Guide for Documentary Edit Schedules created by The Alliance of Doc Editors. It’s long been the standard timeline in this industry, but I cannot express how helpful it is to have it in formalized guidelines that can be sent along to producers and film teams so everyone understands what they’re embarking on.

How do you take criticism? Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of others’ ideas?
It depends on the criticism. There can be instances where the feedback is not necessarily coming from a place of thinking about what’s best for the film, and it’s important to know that. It can be that the director didn’t like their camerawork, or they had a bad experience with the participant that day. I always want to know the root of any note. Once I do, the creative challenge of crafting or continuing to shape something that everyone can be excited about and moved by is one of the things that I love most about this work.

On Breaking the News, it was a regular occurrence to get four different opinions on one scene or even one shot. All three directors have their own storytelling styles and preferences. Rather than forcing everyone to hash it out and come to a consensus, I took in all of their feedback, gave a lot of consideration to where each was coming from and incorporated all of it into something new. I’m so grateful these four team members entrusted me with that role.

When someone who is starting out asks what they should learn, what do you recommend?
In terms of programs, I recommend they learn both Premiere and Avid Media Composer. For the projects I’m approached about, there’s almost a 50/50 split between teams that prefer Premiere and those that prefer Avid. Premiere seems to be the choice more recently, but I think it’s still helpful to know both. The film team will usually respect the editor’s preference but on occasion you’re picking up where an AE or previous editor left off and they’ll want to keep the project in the same program. Getting experience as a very hands-on AE is absolutely invaluable. You can also make it clear that you hope to gain the experience necessary to move beyond the AE role and hopefully the editor and film team will be supportive in that regard.

Editor Josh Porro on Tribeca Film Cinnamon

June 21, 2023

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Josh Porro edited the Tribeca film Cinnamon, which folllows two young lovers who attempt to improve their circumstances by engaging in what they hope will be a victimless crime. When they realize who they stole from, the pair get way more than they bargained for and could end up becoming the victims themselves.

Josh Porro and friend

We reached out to Porro, who was brought on after filming had wrapped and an assembly was put together, about working on the film and with director Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr. on what was the first feature for them both.

How did you work with the director? How often was he looking at your cut?
For the first half of editing, Bryian and I worked remotely, Zooming and sharing cuts every other week or so. For the second half, when we really started to dig in, we worked out of Sugar Studios in Los Angeles every day for about two months. This was Bryian’s first feature film as well, so I feel like we learned a lot together.

Was there a particular scene or scenes that were most challenging?
One of the main characters in the film is a budding singer/songwriter, and there is a sequence in which she is recording an original song, having some trouble with it, overcoming some fears, all while juggling a very new and very powerful romance, which is just starting.

It’s a lot of story and music and emotional beats to blend together in a few minutes, and I’m sure we tried it a dozen (or more) different ways. Sometimes, I think editors can get to a point in an edit where they have done something so many times that they begin to lose their objectivity, but this is when it is most important to dig deep and keep trying until they fall in love with something. I think the scene turned out great.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
No. Luckily, they had lots of amazing other people doing the rest of the work.

Can you talk about your editing workflow?
My workflow for this project was far from a well-oiled machine. After more than a dozen years editing professionally (as I mentioned), this was the very first feature I ever edited. And, more than that, this was the first project of any note that I edited using Adobe Premiere. I also like to work in long-play instead of reels, and in the future, I think I might have to grow up a bit and realize I can stay way more organized in reels.

You cut on Premiere. Why did you choose that tool?
I didn’t get to choose the system we worked on, and I don’t think I would’ve chosen Premiere, but I’m so happy it was chosen for me and that I made the switch. Every new project I begin (if I get to choose), I now use Premiere.

Is there a tool within that system that was particularly helpful?
I cannot overstate enough how much I love the ease of putting a graphic/text on a clip in Premiere. Whether it is marking a VFX shot to be pulled later or just typing up some temp ADR we are coming up with, Adobe makes it incredibly intuitive and user friendly. I know it might not be the sexiest feature, but as far as saving me time, it really is number one in my book.

How did you manage your time?
I have two kids, two dogs and a busy spouse, so time management is key. Plus, I’m working from home a lot of the time, so my day can get out of hand really quickly if something needs to happen that wasn’t in my schedule when I woke up (which is every single day mostly).

As far as saving time and mental clarity is concerned, about three years ago, I got rid of all my social media. This stopped me from staring at my phone an extra 10 or 15 minutes after each text I would answer. But that is a drastic example. Mostly, as far as time management goes, I just set small, specific, achievable goals for myself each day, and I try to meet those regularly.

Did you have an assistant editor on this?
Yes! Sam Means, who works at Sugar Studios, was my main assistant editor, and he was invaluable helping me with my Adobe questions, aswell as just being a great sounding board.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
I think if you are working with the right people, then they trust you to get the job done. (We were on this film with Jillian Apfelbaum and Tristen Tuckfield over at Village Roadshow and Oz Scott, who is a wealth of knowledge and has been in the trenches of making entertainment for a good long while). But if there ever is a bit of contention, I firmly believe most people just want to be listened to — to be heard. If you are hearing other people and they are extending that courtesy to you as well, I feel like things generally work out in the end.

How do you take criticism?
This is a seriously hard thing to learn. On one hand, being creative takes a certain amount of blind enthusiasm and belief in yourself that you know what you are doing — that you have something to say, and people will want to listen.

On the other hand, you have to remember that what you are working on could be terrible. It just could be. You might be a genius, but that doesn’t mean you’re immune to making something bad. So somehow, you have to learn to navigate your own inner criticism first. Because, if you’ve done that, all exterior criticism should actually end up being helpful — resulting in either a new idea you haven’t thought of, or it will reinforce why you did what you did in the first place.

Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of other’s ideas (good and bad)?
I remember like it was yesterday, but in 2011, I was working on a big montage, and we were running out of time with maybe a day or two left after weeks of editing. I was in a room with three or four other producers who were trying to be helpful, pitching ideas like we’d done the previous nights. But it was getting late, we had been working hard, I was nearing the end of my creative rope, and someone suggested a transition to try. For some reason, I chose that moment to put my foot down and just flat out said it wouldn’t work. That it wasn’t a good idea. They kind of looked at me, suggested it again, and I reminded myself they were paying me. So I tried it, and — you guessed it — their idea totally worked.

From then on, I’ve never flat out said something wouldn’t work without trying it. Because you know what? You don’t know if it will work or not until you try it.

When someone who is starting out asks what they should learn, what do you recommend?
Ironing. It’s the analogy I use the most to explain it. I almost always sit down to my day’s work, coffee in hand, and back the movie up 5 to 10 minutes from where I left off and let it play. I hit the spacebar when something bugs me or if I remembered I had a note I needed to address. Then I fix that. I drag the play head back a minute or so, or to the top of the scene, and do it again. I just keep going back, rewatching and stopping until I’m finished. I just flatten out all the wrinkles until those pants are pressed and starched! So ironing… and good carpal tunnel stretches for your wrists. I would learn those too.

Craig Scorgie on Editing the Cannes Film In Flames

June 13, 2023

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Craig Scorgie was the editor on the Cannes film In Flames, a horror film set in Karachi, Pakistan. It follows a mother and daughter who are fighting malevolent forces, both real and imagined, that emerge following the death of the family’s patriarch. The film uses the psychological horror genre to unpack complex themes of grief, misogyny, love, generational trauma and mental illness.

Scorgie’s eclectic and interesting resume includes jobs as an editor, a VFX and graphics artist and a comedian! Recently he was a VFX editor and first assistant editor on the film Women Talking, an assistant editor on HBO’s Big Little Lies Season 2 and the VFX editor on Season 1 of the Apple TV+ series The Morning Show.

Let’s find out more about his work editing In Flames…

Craig Scorgie with his Media Composer set-up

How early did you get involved in the film?
I was officially brought onto the project in June 2022. My involvement, however, feels like it began more than a year before, when director Zarrar Kahn and I attended the Canadian Film Centre together. It was there that we talked about the script of this film and developed our process of working together.

What was it shot on?
The film was shot on an ARRI Alexa Classic in the ARRIRAW codec. Fun fact: Our cinematographer, Aigul Nurbulatova, shot a lot of our scenes during blue hour, which we owe a lot of the film’s moody atmosphere to.

How did you work with the director? How often was he taking a look at your cut?
Zarrar and I actually had a fairly unconventional way of working together on this film. It’s almost like we started with a director’s cut, then an editor’s cut and then the fine cut. Because Zarrar is an editor as well as a director, we decided it was best for us if he completed the assembly. We also thought this was a good idea because our film’s language is Urdu, which I am unfortunately not fluent in.

So for the first couple of months, Zarrar was completely on his own. He put together the assembly and added English subtitles so I could continue working with it. Then he wanted me to do a version on my own, presenting all of my ideas in one cut. He gave me complete freedom with this, allowing me to cut and reorder scenes, change dialogue and experiment with structure — anything my storytelling instincts told me to do.

This part of the process was so much fun because I really went wild with it! Then I sent my pass to him, and we started working together on a third version — one that combined the best of both our cuts. We used this as our fine cut and then went through several rounds of test screenings and outside feedback until we arrived at the final film as it is today.

Was there a particular scene that stands out as the most challenging?
In general, our story involves many moments when pieces of the past are colliding with the present through the use of flashbacks and dream sequences. There is one moment in particular when two characters’ past experiences collide with the present day to help us understand a pivotal moment of the film. The flashbacks and present day were originally scripted as separate scenes, which we quickly discovered wouldn’t work; they needed to play as one simultaneous sequence. Achieving this in a way that was elegant and not confusing was incredibly challenging.

In the end, I’m very proud of how this scene turned out. I feel like it’s quite original and poignant, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
In addition to editing, I also did some of the visual effects. I like to use visual effects as a tool to elevate my editing, so a lot of the composite shots in the film were built in the edit and finalized by me. I can’t take credit for all of the bigger VFX shots though. All of that goes to the incredible team at Wild VFX.

Can you talk about your editing workflow?
To be completely honest, I don’t have a one-size-fits-all editing workflow. I tailor it for each project and each director I’m working with. Process is an excellent tool for bringing out the best in a collaboration, so I don’t like to have any hard and fast rules on mine. I think I get this from my background as an improv comedian, where I had to take all of my cues from my scene partner. I think this is the most organic way to collaborate. It focuses things on what’s working and builds off of that.

What system did you use to cut and why?
I am comfortable working in both Avid Media Composer and Premiere Pro. For In Flames we used Premiere Pro because that’s what Zarrar was most comfortable working with.

Is there a tool within that system that was particularly helpful?
One thing I really enjoy about Premiere Pro is its integration with After Effects. This saves so much time when you’re an editor who loves working with visual effects.

How did you manage your time?
Because we’ve worked together before, Zarrar and I had a very good sense of how much time we needed for our editing process. We scheduled how many weeks we each needed for our individual passes and then set aside a month and a half for developing the rest of the cut together.

Because Zarrar is an editor, we are also incredibly efficient with our time. We set aside full days to work together, but we often ended up working half days or half weeks. At a certain point in an edit, it can be more beneficial to have time away from the cut instead of working together every day. I’m glad our schedule allowed extra time for this because it gave us the distance and clarity we needed to make some of the most important decisions of this film.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
I’m lucky that on this project we didn’t have many situations like that. Our producers were incredibly supportive of the choices we made in the film. And our collaborators in post were also flexible and able to deliver top-notch work with the time and resources we had.

Whenever I am in a situation like that, though, I always think it’s important to remain open-minded to other people’s expectations and give it an honest try. I am not quick to decide that something cannot be done because I’ve been proven wrong many times in the past. You never know what solutions will reveal themselves if you remain open. I use all the tools at my disposal, and if I have to, I take some time away and try again. This way if something is truly unattainable, people are more likely to understand and see that for themselves.

Craig Scorgie

How do you take criticism? Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of others’ ideas (good and bad)?
I always welcome and embrace criticism. It’s a gift. It can be a challenge sometimes decoding criticism, especially if it is from other filmmakers because they can sometimes be prescriptive.

I always think about “the note behind the note.” There’s always a legitimate reason why a note is given, but often that reason is not articulated in the note. Seeing beyond the note, instead of dismissing it immediately, is sometimes easier said than done. By staying open-minded, empathetic and curious, I often find something valuable in most notes that are given to me. Or if it comes down to personal taste, I’ll defer to the director’s vision and whether the note matches up with the film they are intending to make.

Finally, when someone who is starting out asks what they should learn, what do you recommend?
I always say it’s important to watch as many films as you can and find a mentor or peer who can provide constructive feedback on your work. And edit as much as you can! If you continually do these three things, you will only elevate your skills as an editor.

When it comes to collaborative skills, personal growth couldn’t be more important. This is something that I wish someone had told me earlier in my career. Read self-help books, book regular appointments with a therapist if that is accessible to you, work on improving personal relationships, put time into other creative hobbies that you enjoy. All of these things will make you a stronger editor in ways that you can’t imagine.

Shooting Indie Esme, My Love: Director and DP Talk Look

June 7, 2023

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By Randi Altman

Audio post pro and Silver Sound Studio owner Cory Choy recently directed and produced the indie film Esme, My Love, which he co-wrote with scriptwriter Laura Allen. Choy came up with a rough outline, plot points, characters and backstories, and Allen helped him mold it into what it is today… a psychological thriller/mystery that is now streaming on Prime Video, Google Play, Tubi and Vudu.

Director Cory Choy having fun on set with co-writer Laura Allen.

The film follows Hannah, who notices the symptoms of a terminal and painful illness in her aloof daughter, Esme. She decides to take her on a trip to their abandoned family farm in a desperate attempt to connect before they have to say goodbye.

To capture the film’s authentic feel, “Laura and I went up to the location in Hauge, New York — and specifically the DeLarm family farm — and walked around the property and talked to the town historian. We stayed in the area overnight and really took it all in. Then Laura wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and we revised together.

We reached out to Choy to talk about making the film. DP Fletcher Wolfe answered some questions as well. Her section appears after Choy’s.

What was the film shot on, and how did you work with your DP, Fletcher?
Fletcher brings so much to the table because of her attention to detail, her laserlike focus on prep and her many years as a gaffer/lighting technician. Fletcher is a true director of photography in that she knows lighting inside and out, and she knows how to effectively run the camera department… and even grip and electrical G&E, should she need to. We shot the film on a combination of ARRI Alexa Mini and Canon C200 RAW with Cooke Panchro Classic primes and Canon Cinema zooms.

What about the lighting setups? Was it mostly natural light?
There were very few lights in this movie. Outdoors was almost all natural light, with a good amount of reflectors and flags — again, a testament to Fletcher’s experience and artistry. Even the shots where there were lights, they were pretty minimal (night for night and interiors).

How long was the shoot?
This was an extremely low-budget film; we only had a $90,000 shooting budget, so we had to be as efficient as possible. We shot on location in Hague, with 13 days of principal photography, two planned pick-up days at Bravo Studios in NYC, and one unplanned pick-up day at a pool in Fletcher’s friend’s parents’ backyard.

How did you and Fletcher work with the colorist? How did you describe the look you wanted?
Tom Younghans was the colorist, and we were really fortunate to work with him. He not only colored the film using DaVinci Resolve, but he also has a lot of experience with conform. Without Tom’s expertise, dedication and time, we would never have been able to get such a nice conform and color. Even though this was, I believe, his first feature film, he really put in the time and effort to make it what we wanted it to be.

I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the movie to feel — my biggest look/visual reference being The Tree of Life. I wanted it to have a filmic and dreaminess to it. So our plan of attack was to first have Tom go through and even things out to the best of his ability, then dial in the look of the grain and then go in scene by scene to tweak.

Any examples of notes you had for Tom?
I wanted outdoors to feel real and nostalgic, and often this meant making night scenes darker and daylight scenes brighter. There were times when the sky wasn’t cooperative, and Tom did a great job turning some pretty dull skies slightly more vibrant and blue.

I was with Tom for most of the color process.

Let’s talk editing. How often were you looking at cuts?
It was an extremely long editing process for several reasons, and I worked with several different editors before I was able to land on Emrys Eller and Ellie Gravitte, who ended up being the main editors on the film. Once I was with the right team, I would check in on individual scenes with them once or twice a week.

Let’s talk pace. It’s definitely spooky. How did the editors tackle that, and what guidance did you provide?
This movie is a slow burn until it isn’t, if that makes sense. Once it hits, it really takes off. Oftentimes, pacing was dictated by a combination of our shooting style and the emotional content of the scene. Many scenes in the first act feature very long, static takes. (Old Joy was one of my inspirations.) But when we started to get to the internal frenetic state of some of the characters and memory and time, we moved to more and more shots, and therefore more cuts per scene.

One of the most difficult stages to get to was a full assembly of the film. For whatever reason that eluded me and my editors for a long time. One of the crucial scenes was actually written in editing by one of my editors, Emrys, and I have to say that it was the linchpin that really brought it all together. It was the baptism scene. After figuring out that scene, the rest of the movie finally fell into place.

After we actually got to a full assembly and rough cut, we then mainly focused on trimming the fat. I had both Ellie and Emrys go through individually and be as ruthless as possible, removing every single scene they didn’t think we needed. And it was funny because each of them chose different scenes to remove. I looked at each of their choices and kept the cuts that I thought made the most sense. Ironically, we ended up cutting some of the best performances and two of my absolute favorite scenes. That kind of broke my heart. But in the end, the movie was better as a whole without them – and I got to keep them in my “deleted scenes” bonus on the DVD.

You wore a few hats on this film. Can you talk about that?
I think one of the things that was most difficult about this film is that I was not just wearing my director hat. I was also the main producer. If I could go back and do it again, that is the thing I would change. It was hard to move from the logistical to the story, but once I did, it was really rewarding.

What was the film edited on? And do you have any examples of notes?
We ultimately edited in Adobe Premiere, though an earlier version was on Avid Media Composer. Media Composer was fine, though I wish it had been a little more stable. (Switching between Mac and PC was a nightmare for some reason. All the media kept coming unlinked even though we were staying in Premiere, and we eventually had to abandon a faster and better workstation because switching became such a problem.)

Who did the audio post? Were you hands-on?
I was the sound designer and mixer and editor for the audio post. My friend and colleague, Tarcisio Longobardi, helped a little with the organization and sound editing and some backgrounds, but I did 95% of the post audio myself. As the director, I actually found it essential to do the post sound since sound and VO play such an important role in telling the story.

What about the score, which plays a big part?
I was also incredibly involved with the score, which evolved over a long period of time with me, Emrys and my composers, Charlotte Littlehales and Stephanie Griffin. Much of the score was melodically related to the credit song “Atlantis,” which was written by a childhood friend of mine, Jake Herndon, when he was in middle school. Charlotte and Stephanie and I had many, many phone calls and sessions in regard to score.

DP Fletcher Wolf

DP Fletcher Wolf

Fletcher, can you talk about why you chose the camera and lenses you did? Was it mostly natural light? I almost feel like the light is another character in the film. Were you using on-set LUTs?We shot on Alexa Mini with Cooke Panchro Classics. B-unit work was shot on a Canon C200 and a Canon cine zoom that we got through the Canon co-marketing program. In spite of the tight budget, we wanted it to look the best it could, so there was a lot of borrowing and kind help all around to get some tools we knew we could depend on. The day exteriors were mostly natural light augmented with bounce and negative fill. Day interiors were typically natural window light augmented with a LiteMat. Some of the night exteriors and the basement scene were keyed mostly with flashlights.

We were viewing most scenes on-set with one of my old go-to LUTs. But for the day-for-night scenes, we monitored with a LUT I built for this project. I did a camera test at Hand Held Films with soft, toppy light and a chip chart. Then, with that footage, I shifted it blue until it felt monochrome and pulled exposure down until middle-gray was about four stops under. That way I could shoot properly exposed footage so faces would be visible when necessary, but we could all see what it was going to look like as we shot it.

Any piece of gear that was absolutely crucial/especially helpful?
Our 4×4 floppy solids and sky-blue muslin bounce. Those were our main tools for day exteriors, which is the bulk of the film. Also, the T-Bag underwater housing from Air Sea Land, which worked beautifully when we shot the underwater pickup shots. (That was after a failed first attempt in the lake.)

Did you do any camera tests? What did you learn?
Besides the little test I shot to build the day-for-night LUT, we didn’t do any traditional camera tests for A camera. (This was a microbudget, after all.) I did a brief test to make sure the C200 footage could be matched reasonably well to the Alexa and to see if there were any quirks to matching the exposures. (Underexposing worked for our project.)

We did, however, do some interesting camera tests during casting, which I shot. Cory wanted to get a feel for how the two actors would play together on-screen as mother and daughter. We used a C300 in Prospect Park for camera tests and auditions. It actually wound up informing our shortlisting for the scenes they read.

How did you work with Cory to help him get the look he envisioned?
From the beginning Cory wanted the woods and the old family farmhouse to feel like characters. They had to be both magical and dreadful at different times, but heavy with importance either way. For scenes where we didn’t have much lighting control, I tried to work the schedule to use the natural light and weather to lean in to which of those moods we needed to feel in any given scene. Since Cory comes from sound mixing, he provided some recorded narration and soundscapes in prep that conveyed the mood he was going for. That was a cool tool to have, and I understood what he was going for. I feel like I was able to translate the sounds into images.

Before shot-listing, I like to do what I call an emotional or psychological pass of a script, where I take note of emotional beats, whose perspective each scene is from and what’s going on with the characters internally. Then I bring those thoughts and questions to the director, and we tease out a map of the characters’ arcs. That’s the main thing for me that guides shot choices — what is the camera seeing? During that process Cory and I realized that halfway through the film, the perspective shifts from Hannah as the protagonist to Esme taking the lead, so we built that transition into the shot choices.

Any scenes that stand out as the most challenging?
The underwater scene was certainly one of the hardest. We shot all the above-water parts on an island that we had to shuttle out to on a boat. When it came time to do the underwater shots, there was a leak in our underwater housing for the camera. Those of us in the water were freezing despite our wetsuits, and the water was too murky to see anything. We wound up doing a pickup day in my friend’s pool to get the underwater shots. (Thank you, Brodsky family!)

The other hardest scene was the night exterior fight scene. That was shot day for night, there was a fair amount of choreography to cover, and we had someone dig us the big hole/grave with a backhoe. The cast did a great job working through it. I had hoped for a cloudy day to help us sell the day-for-night look, but alas, I didn’t get lucky, and at that point, we were out of days to shift around in the schedule. I tried to bring up the actors’ faces by blasting our strongest battery-powered lights at them (a trick I learned when gaffing for cinematographer Adam Jandrup), but they couldn’t really get close enough due to the fight choreography. That scene was probably our biggest challenge in the color grade.

Any happy accidents happen on-set?
Our most memorable happy accident was on the final shot, when Esme walks off into the distance for about two minutes while the credits roll. We scheduled it for sunset, but on the day we were scheduled to film it, the sky was completely overcast and gray, much to my dismay. We decided we couldn’t afford to reschedule it. We did a couple takes in the road with our PAs holding traffic back just off-screen. (God bless them.) We decided we needed a third take, and about halfway through that one, the clouds in the west parted, and a fiery pink and orange sunset broke through. It was glorious. I’m so glad we didn’t decide to shoot it on a different day.

How did you express the look you wanted to the colorist? What were some notes you provided about the look after seeing dailies?
I put together a lookbook for Tom ahead of time. It was separated into day exterior, day interior, day for night, night exterior, tent interior and underwater. My main notes were that I wanted to find a look that was dark, moody and natural, toning down green foliage a bit and drawing our eye toward warm skin tones. My eye tends to buck any super-strong grade that looks heavily affected in post, so we started our session choosing some film emulation LUTs and going from there.

Did the film end up looking the way you expected it to?
For the most part, yes — as much as any film does when it moves from visions in my head to concrete images dozens of people collaborate to make. The main surprises for me were probably from our B-unit photographer. We brought in our old friend Nathan “Bob” Jones for that. He shot most of the “monster” footage and a lot of the atmospheric b-roll. He and I were checking in after wrap each day to go over what he’d gotten, but I couldn’t review all of his footage, so there were shots that made it into the cut that I hadn’t seen before.

There were wonderful surprises — to see that he’d found a caterpillar or filmed an entire unscripted scene in a wide shot at the lake. He did amazing work, largely with little or sometimes no other crew to support him. His shots really weave the story together with unusual views of the forest.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 25 years.

Editing the Indie Comedy Scrambled

April 26, 2023

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Editor Sandra Torres Granovsky, whose credits include Promised Land, The Opening Act and Alpha, recently cut the SXSW film Scrambled. Torres Granovsky, who studied film theory and anthropology at UC Berkeley, learned her craft from her mentor, editor Dan Lebental, ACE, while he worked on Jon Favreau-directed films such as Elf and Iron Man and other Favreau projects such as Couple’s Retreat and The Break-Up.

Torres Granovsky started on Scrambled — which follows millennial Nellie Robinson on a hilarious, existential journey as she faces reproductive challenges and decides to freeze her eggs — a week before the film started principal photography. The film’s director, Leah McKendrick, stars along with Yvonne Strahovski, Clancy Brown and June Diane Raphael.

Editor Sandra Torres Granovsky

Let’s find out more…

How did you work with the director, Leah McKendrick?
During production I shared a few scenes so that the director could get a sense of how her footage was coming together. Leah and I had never worked together before, so we decided to connect and work on a couple of scenes during production. This was great for beginning to establish a rapport.

Was there a particular scene or scenes that were most challenging?
One of the most fun and challenging scenes to edit in Scrambled was one of the first scenes of the film. Nellie, our protagonist, takes ecstasy at her best friend’s wedding. She’s alone and we had to convey what that experience was like.

We were tasked with creating a comedic moment when Nellie’s reality shifted and became different from the reality of everyone around her. The director and I also wanted it to be fun and viscerally accurate. There was a lot of trial and error and a lot of laughs. In the end, we played with the speed of the footage, the music and the lighting that DP Julia Swain created. (Swain shot on ARRI Alexa in the OpenGate 4.5K format.) It felt like a wild dance party for Nellie, and it was a great way to start the film.

Can you talk about your editing workflow?
When I edit a project, I eagerly wait for my first completed scene. Once I receive all of the organized dailies for that scene, I will edit according to script. I move quickly because as I continue to receive footage, it’s important to keep up to camera so I can flag any issues or desired coverage as soon as possible.

I focus on sketching out the scenes and do not allow myself to get bogged down by any footage puzzles. Once the whole scene is sketched out, I fine-tune the cut until I am happy with it. I move forward in this way throughout the whole of production. However, I always go back to the scenes I have edited at least once more with a fresh eye.

Writer/director Leah McKendrick

What editing system did you use?
We used Adobe Premiere Pro because our deadlines and production workflow dictated that we transfer dailies internally.

Is there a tool within that system that was particularly helpful?
The copy and paste features are great in Premiere.

How did you manage your time on the film?
Managing time with editing is somewhat esoteric because it’s such a creative endeavor. The most important thing for me is to have an idea and plan for execution. That doesn’t necessarily come when I sit in front of my computer. Oftentimes it comes when I am doing everyday activities, such as washing dishes, walking my dogs or having my morning coffee. I try to be patient with myself if I don’t have the inspiration or plan right away. I know that once that comes, the execution takes no time at all.

Did you have an assistant editor on this?
My assistant editors (Malcolm Garvey and Jeff Cummings) and I worked remotely on this film. This had actually been the case with most of the projects I worked on shortly before COVID-19 greatly affected our workflows.

Luckily, post technology has enabled a successful remote workflow. However, it requires working with a very strong assistant editor and good communication on both ends. This has also been an interesting way of working because we met in person only a handful of times. Most of the time we communicated by messaging, Zoom and phone calls.

In this case, we sent cuts and footage back and forth with Premiere Productions and Google Drive. Occasionally, when we had tight deadlines or screenings, we worked in person.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
Communication and confidence are the most effective ways to manage expectations with the reality of what can actually be done. It is important to develop the confidence to know and to communicate that a certain expectation may not result in the best possible work. In these situations, I have found that almost everyone has respected, supported, facilitated and appreciated my desire to do good work.

Scrambled

How do you take criticism?
I try to make sure that I feel very good about the work that I do. If I feel good about my work, then any feedback I receive is a welcome part of the process.

I have also found that a good idea is undeniable, and everyone I have worked with has strived for that. I believe that ideas that don’t work are just as valuable as ideas that do. While it is more challenging to execute an idea I don’t believe in, it’s a wonderful exercise that makes me a better editor. I also very much enjoy the times when I don’t believe in an idea, and it works. It enables me to always have an open mind and to be excited about collaboration.

When someone who is starting out asks what they should learn, what do you recommend?
I would recommend that anyone starting out as an editor be humble and always open to learning. There are so many aspects of editing that require an openness at all levels of experience, from learning new tech to learning how to express new ideas.

SXSW: Editor Curt Lobb on I Used to Be Funny and BlackBerry

March 23, 2023

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Editor Curt Lobb, whose credits include the films The Kid Detective and Chubby, has been busy recently, cutting not one but two entries for Austin’s SXSW film festival. I Used to Be Funny follows a stand-up comedian struggling with PTSD as she weighs whether or not to join the search for a missing teenage girl she used to nanny. BlackBerry is the story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.

Let’s find out more from Lobb…

Editor Curt Lobb

How early did you get involved in these films?
I actually wasn’t contacted about editing I Used to Be Funny until principal photography had wrapped. This was a first for me, as usually I’m involved before shooting begins. But I had never met or spoken to any of the key crew members until after they wrapped and were looking to find an editor for the project. It was a fun and new experience for me to dive into a film that was already shot and waiting for me to begin.

For BlackBerry, I’ve been working with the majority of the department heads for 12 or so years now, so I had read the BlackBerry script a few years ago, when they wrote the first draft. I gave input on the script and on other aspects of the movie all through development and preproduction.

How did you work with the director? How often were they taking a look at your cut?
I Used to Be Funny director Ally Pankiw lives in Los Angeles and was there for the edit while I cut in a small town called Goderich in Canada. To make our process work remotely, we had a routine where we would chat about what scenes I was going to tackle for the week and how she envisioned they might play out. I would then do my first pass on the scenes and send them her way. She would then give notes, we’d talk about how I might address those notes, and then I’d take another crack at the scene and send once again, often with a new batch of scenes as well.

We did some version of that over and over through the process. Sometimes I would send long chunks of the movie with various changes throughout, or I’d send just one scene at a time. Near the end of the process, when we had a fine cut of the whole movie, the notes would often be spread out through the whole edit, so I’d be sending an export of the entire film her way a lot of the time.

For the first three months or so, BlackBerry director Matt Johnson would be in and out of the edit suite. There would be stretches of a couple weeks when he’d be sitting in and watching edits as they were completed, and other weeks when he’d be gone and let the edit progress quite a bit before checking in.

BlackBerry director Matt Johnson

I’ve been editing his projects for several years now, and this is how we often work. He lets me experiment and try out my approach on the movie before he comes in. He is a lot more hands-on at the end of the process. This method seems to work well with us, as it allows me time to discover ways of telling the story that we might never have anticipated. It gives Matt new ideas that he can then run with and refine with me at the end of the editing process.

Was there a particular scene or scenes that were most challenging?
In I Used to Be Funny, when Sam (the lead character) is driving to find Brooke, we do a lot of weaving in and out of the past and the present. It was challenging to find the right balance of the past to keep in the movie (which is a court case with a lot of dialogue) while keeping up the emotion that Sam was feeling in the present.

To Ally’s credit, she doesn’t hesitate on cutting things out when she knows something isn’t needed, so she really led the charge on how to trim this section down and keep the pace up. In this sequence, like a lot of the movie, it was sometimes challenging to find the best ways to transition from the two timelines, but the crew often set us up for success with how they shot the scenes and built in a lot of the transitional moments. And whenever we needed to remove something or change the order of scenes from the original plan, it was always a lot of fun to experiment with transitions and make something new that wasn’t part of the initial intent.

It was also a challenge editing the assault scene, as we didn’t want to be gratuitous but also needed to make it as impactful as possible and not shy away from the horror of it. I think we landed on the right balance.

For BlackBerry, there are countless versions of the opening 15 minutes of the film, often with scenes that are now completely removed from the movie. We trimmed out a lot of exposition that maybe would have introduced the audience to who these characters are a bit more, but the tradeoff was a much slower-paced, less captivating opening so we decided it was better to just throw the audience in and let them gradually discover what these characters are all about.

There’s also a sales montage that happens around the midpoint of the movie that I took a lot of passes at. We discovered that additional story beats needed to happen inside of the montage, and I kept adding new elements to it.

I Used to Be Funny

Also, overall, more than some other projects I’ve worked on, we continually cut the movie down and rewrote certain parts of it, which would always create a domino effect of things we’d then have to tweak. But we always go into these Matt Johnson projects knowing we will be doing a lot of “writing in the edit,” which gives me a lot of opportunity to explore the best ways of telling the story — often totally differently than the original intent of how some things were shot.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
I think it’s normal for most editors, or at least I often find myself in projects where I can contribute in other ways. I gave input on the VFX for I Used to Be Funny (done by my longtime collaborator Mark Hussey) and the audio mix and color grade.

I’m an associate producer on BlackBerry. I gave story notes on the various drafts of the script and continual feedback on the VFX, audio mix and color grade.

Can you talk about your editing workflow?
On I Used to Be Funny, I was lucky to have Mark Hussey (a business partner at FauxPop Station, our production house where we edit) doing additional editing on the movie. Often, he would prepare assembly edits of the scenes I would be jumping onto, which really helped to speed up the process. On this movie, we started right at the beginning of the film and worked our way chronologically from there. This helped us to take unexpected paths when they popped up and to let the movie dictate a lot of the choices as it was being built — instead of just trying to stick entirely to the script.

I was on another project while BlackBerry was in principal photography, but we had Carly Williams and Manny Hussey assembly-editing the film while the shoot was going. This allowed us to have an assembly edit of the whole movie just a couple weeks after picture wrapped. This was a huge help in seeing roughly what we had, and it allowed us to make some bigger structural decisions right off the bat when I first dove into the cut.

I also need to give a shout-out to executive producer Robert Upchurch for being so integral during the edit. I couldn’t have done it without him.

What system did you use to cut?
I cut I Used to Be Funny on Adobe Premiere Pro 2021 on an iMac and BlackBerry on Premiere Pro 2022 on a Mac Studio.

Is there a tool within that system that you call on often?
I’m sure the average Premiere user knows about Team Projects, but if not, they are incredibly useful and were a huge asset on I Used to Be Funny. Mark and I would be constantly sharing sequences with one another, and using Team Projects made this task a lot easier and faster than if we were just using traditional project files.

BlackBerry

I used Team Projects even more on BlackBerry. It was integral. Our two assembly editors both lived a few hours from our office, and using Team Projects meant they always had updated assistant-edited/synced sequences to work with. (We had a team doing the assistant editing in our production studio and would send the updated, organized project out to them daily.)

Our assembly editors would then constantly be updating our master Team Project with their edited sequences, and we always had an up-to-date master project that any of us could jump into and work with at any time.

How did you manage your time?
Knowing what the deadline was for picture lock on I Used to Be Funny, we worked backward from there and divided the schedule into three parts, ensuring we had a fine cut of each act done by a certain date. We also had time allocated at the end of the post schedule, after finishing the fine cut of the whole movie. This ensured we could do test screenings and have the time to do whatever work was still needed to address our final notes and get us to the picture lock.

We did far more test screenings with BlackBerry than any other project I’ve done with this group in the past, so we were always just using the nearest test screening as a deadline to push for. (I think the first one was maybe only 3½ months after I started on the edit, which for this crew was a very fast turnaround. Couldn’t have done it without the assembly edit).

We always wanted the best version of the movie we could get by each test screening, but sometimes that meant picking and choosing which parts of the movie to refine more and which things to leave on the back burner until the next deadline. It was a fun exercise in testing out certain aspects of the movie at certain screenings, and once we felt we had cracked a specific story element, we could then focus our attention to another. But we still, of course, tried to make sure that globally the movie was working as well as possible at each step.

I Used to Be Funny director Ally Pankiw

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
I think there was hope for a pretty quick turnaround on I Used to Be Funny, but the producing team was realistic. As they saw the movie come together, they understood that it was going to take time to make the best product possible. So they stayed flexible and understanding and gave us the time we needed. I think the best thing to do as an editor in those situations is to try to hit the deadlines that have been laid out, prioritize the quality of the work, and hope that when the producers see that you’re on the right track, they’ll grant you the time needed to finish at that same quality level.

Luckily for me on BlackBerry, one of the producers (Matthew Miller) has been a part of the crew since our first-ever collaboration as a team. He fully understands the time it takes for a movie of our style to come together… although this is the closest this crew has ever followed a script.

There is still so much experimenting that is done in the edit to find the best version of the movie. Miller knows that since he’s been through it several times with us, and he always had our back in terms of giving us the time we needed. In large part due to Miller’s reassurance, the other producers on the project, who hadn’t worked with us in the past, also put a lot of trust in our process and gave us the time and space we needed.

Again, I think if the quality of work you’re showing producers on any project is something they can see value in, then they should be giving you the time you need to finish the job.

How do you take criticism? Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of other’s ideas?
I think I take criticism pretty well, and I certainly welcome it —that’s what you need to get to the finish line on editing anything. I always try to do my best version of anything I cut, but then it’s up to the director (or whoever else is contributing to the process) to bring in their ideas on how to make something better. That’s the fuel you need to keep the machine going.

If I was left by myself to edit with no feedback, it would be very hard to continually revise things to get them to be the best version they can be. Of course, you can continue to improve something on your own by doing passes on it over and over, but it’s so important to get other perspectives on what you’re doing. This way you’re not just working in a vacuum and fooling yourself into thinking something is perfect when there’s still lots of room for improvement.

I also try to bring as much of myself and my taste into a project as possible, but I’ll always respect and heed the director’s vision and input. Even if we don’t exactly see eye to eye on something, I’ll try to give them the version they want to see in a way I can get on board with… and do it to the best of my ability.

Finally, when someone who is starting out asks what they should learn, what do you recommend?
I think anyone starting out should plunge right into Adobe Premiere or whatever professional editing software they can get their hands on. I know that was an intimidating leap for me, going from very simple editing software to a more legit one. I say this because if you’re just starting out and haven’t learned anything otherwise, you might as well learn the actual tools that you’ll be using if you keep pursuing this career.

Then, far more important than learning the technical skills, you’ve just got to edit as much as possible to develop your creative instincts. As you get more and more practice and become better at what you do, people will notice, and they’ll seek you out to work with them. So I’d say, much more important than trying to network out of the gate, just get good at what you do. Put that work out into the world, and people will eventually come to you with opportunities.

Main Image: I Used to Be Funny

Sundance: Directing Aliens Abducted My Parents… Feel Left Out

February 8, 2023

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The Sundance film Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out follows Itsy Levan, who is devastated by her parents’ decision to leave the city and buy a fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere. Her life seems over until she meets her space-obsessed neighbor Calvin Kipler, who believes that his parents were abducted by aliens 10 years ago on the night Jesper’s comet was seen. Itsy sees this as her chance to get into a New York City journalism program by writing an exposé on Calvin, but she ends up discovering much more than what’s on the other end of the comet’s tail.

Jake Van Wagoner

The cast includes Will Forte, Emma Tremblay, Elizabeth Mitchell and Jacob Buster.

The film was produced and directed by Jake Van Wagoner, who was first pitched the film’s title from screenwriter Austin Everett. “I loved it immediately,” he says. “I remember telling him that I didn’t need to hear any more and to start writing it. We were lucky enough to have funding right away, and as he was writing, I was already putting the production plan together so that as soon as the script was done, we were able to move into production.”

We spoke to Van Wagoner about working with the film’s editor, Whitney Houser, and his process on this film, which was shot by cinematographer Jeremy Prusso on an ARRI Alexa Mini LF.

How often were you looking at the editor’s cut?
Editor Whitney Houser sent me an assembly, and from then on, I was reviewing cuts. She would send a cut, I would watch and make notes, and then we’d start going through the film together.

What was it edited on?
We used Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s just such an intuitive system, and our post house only runs on Premiere, so it was kind of a no-brainer.

Where did you do the post?
We were split between Utah and LA. Our editor was in LA but our finishing team and director (me) were in Utah.

Was there a particular scene that was most challenging in the edit?
The last scene of the movie. It was critical to get the pacing right. There’s so much going on in that scene — it was 7-degrees outside, we had kids, a lot of pages, special effects, cranes, and we were trying not to go into overtime. It was only possible because the crew literally jumped from shot to shot with minimal set-up time and Jeremy (our DP) lit the scene to be shot from almost any angel with minimal adjustments. It took a while to get it dialed in, but we ended up really nailing it. I’m very proud of what we ended up with.

How did you manage your time in relation to the edit?
Being the producer on the film as well, I knew what deadlines we needed to hit and was able to keep the cuts on schedule.

How do you manage your expectations with what can really be done?
I have very high expectations, but luckily, I’m also very realistic. So when it came to what could be done and what I wanted to be done, I feel like I was pretty aligned with the editor. We knew what movie we wanted to make and what movie we could make, and luckily the two lined up pretty well. Whitney was really good at working until it was perfect. It’s really nice to work with a perfectionist as an editor.

How do you take feedback in the editor suite?
I enjoy the collaboration between the editor, myself and the other creatives. I try to not be defensive. In the end, everyone is trying to make the movie better, and I will always let the best idea win.

When someone who is starting out as an editor asks what they should learn, what do you recommend?
Pacing. Pacing is the biggest thing to me. If you can learn to pace out a scene, hitting the comedy, the heart and the emotion, you’ll never stop working.

Sundance: Editor Patrick Lawrence on Film Short Mirror Party

February 2, 2023

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Patrick Lawrence edited the Sundance short film Mirror Party for director Bridey Elliott. It is the seventh film that he has edited that has had its premiere at Sundance since 2016.

Mirror Party is the story of two best friends who experiment with reenacting a scenario in which one of them has a “come to Jesus” talk with the man she is dating, only to have it spiral into a gender-bending fever dream.

Editor Patrick Lawrence

We reached out to Lawrence to talk workflow…

How early did you get involved on Mirror Party?
Almost immediately. Bridey and I have worked on five films together, and our relationship in the edit room has become very simpatico. We have a shorthand together that has proven successful time and time again over the course of these five films. When she asks me to “do something weird,” I know exactly what she is looking for… even if it’s not inherently in the footage.

How did you work with Bridey? How often was she taking a look at your cut?
Bridey really gives me room to explore in the edit. She trusts my instincts and lets me get into the weeds a bit while constructing my first cut. I like to approach that initial edit how I see the film working best, even though I know it’s not necessarily what the director wants.

After I’ve thrown everything at the wall, I like to get in the room with a director and start sculpting my work into something more akin to what they are looking for. And that convergence of ideas is what I love about collaboration in filmmaking. No one film exists in a vacuum, so I’m not the type of editor that likes to be a “button-pusher.” If you hire me, it’s hopefully because you like something that I’ve done in the past, and it’s that knowledge and experience that I want to bring to the table while working on your project. I want to work with you to make the best film possible.

Director Bridey Elliott

Was there a particular scene or scenes that were most challenging?
I would say the climax of the film proved to be very challenging, as the two women’s experiment becomes very sexual in nature and blurs the lines of what is reality and what is fantasy. I had to edit the scene in a way that was frenetic and confusing while still maintaining a sense of grounding for the audience… something that I have done a lot while working with Bridey.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
Typically, I wear a lot of hats on films that I edit, including credits titles, sound design or even producing. But on Mirror Party, I stuck strictly to the edit.

What system did you use to cut and why?
For Mirror Party I used Premiere Pro and the Adobe Creative Cloud, which I have also used on all seven of the films that I have had premiere at Sundance.

I have been using Premiere Pro and the Adobe Creative Cloud for the majority of my career now. I like to consider it as an extension of my hands or a muscle that I can flex. I know my way in and out of the program so well after all these years that using it has just become second nature to me. The toughest and yet most exciting part is when new features are introduced, and you have to take the time to learn them and adopt them into your workflow.

Is there a tool within that system that you use a lot or especially like?
My favorite newest feature in Premiere is Speech to Text, which I think has the ability to really break new grounds and streamline your edit, not only in documentary formats, but also narrative. I have been using it most recently as a tool in script-based editing, something that is gravely missing from Premiere.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
I think it’s best to keep up communication with your producers while working on a project and make sure that all expectations are managed either ahead of time or while the edit is occurring and new/unexpected problems arise. Producers should be your best friends, not your worst enemies.

How do you take criticism? Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of others’ ideas (good and bad)?
I think it’s a natural defense mechanism to be very protective of your art, and for the first few years of my career, I think I was very difficult to work with because of my steadfast nature to stand by my edits. But with time and experience, I have learned that the best idea wins, and that is only possible if you explore all the options. Even if you instinctively think that an idea won’t work, you might be surprised with the results.

When someone who is starting out asks what do you recommend?
I speak to college students each semester who are looking to make a career in film, and I always express the importance of learning all nonlinear editing programs, from Premiere to Media Composer to Final Cut. When you are putting yourself out there for work, you never know what the needs of a project will be, so it is best to be well-versed in all programs, including After Effects and DaVinci Resolve.

I also stress the need to learn the art of collaboration. No one film exists in a vacuum, and no one sets out to make a bad film. So you have to learn to listen to the people that you surround yourself with and respect their experience while also staying true to your own ideas. Somewhere in between is a great film; you just have to chip away at the marble until you reveal the sculpture underneath.

Editor Holle Singer Cuts Machine Gun Kelly in Taurus

December 13, 2022

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By Randi Altman

Consulate editor Holle Singer spends her time working on spots, music videos and feature films. Most recently she edited the Tim Sutton-directed feature film Taurus, which stars Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly) as a fictionalized version of himself. It pulls back the curtain on fame and tells the honest story of how fame and fortune can be both a blessing and a curse. It also takes a look at addiction while following a troubled musician looking for inspiration to record a final song.

Holle Singer (Credit: Shane Sigler)

The film, which also stars Megan Fox, Ruby Rose and Maddie Hasson, premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival and then screened at Tribeca in New York.

We recently reached out to Singer to talk about her process on the film.

How early did you get involved in Taurus?
I was brought in when the film was in the middle of shooting. Boaz Yakin, whom I had just done an edit for, recommended my name to Taurus director Tim Sutton. I read the script, Tim and I “met” over the phone, and I was in.

I was able to screen and put together a rough assembly while they were shooting, so by the time they wrapped, there was something for Tim to see and respond to (something over three hours long, but that’s another story!).

Were you on-set? Near set?
The film was shot in 2021 in the middle of COVID, so I could not be on-set while editing. The footage was synced, transcoded and organized in Los Angeles by the lovely assistant editor, Mikayla Theone Khramov. Everything was loaded onto a removable drive and sent to me in New York City.

I love the idea of being able to work on-set. Having an editor on-set while shooting makes sense to see what’s working and what’s missing while you still have the opportunity to fill in any gaps.

What direction were you given by the director for the edit/pace?
I was fortunate to work with a director who knew what he wanted and captured it. There were many long, atmospheric, beautifully constructed shots — that’s part of Tim’s style. It’s a tool that he’s really mastered. The direction was in the footage. I didn’t want to cut.

The first thing I did after reading the script was watch some of Tim’s work to get a sense of his world. After seeing his films Dark Night and Pavilion, I immediately wanted in.

There is an almost meditative quality to the experience. Many of Tim’s films do not have a traditional structure that I’m familiar with and are very different from the world I come from, which deals with music videos and commercial work. I love his use of very long, slow shots — holding and allowing the viewer to have an experience rather than cutting to create one.

Did the director do a lot of takes? Did you have a lot of footage to work with?
There was a lot of beautiful footage captured by the very talented DP, John Brawley (ACS). He provided a wide range of styles and textures — including carefully blocked, roving Steadicam shots and footage from multiple cameras (including iPhone) — on both scripted and verité scenes. Coming from the world of commercials, where you might have eight hours of material for a 30-second spot, the shooting ratio was quite manageable.

On average, there were three to five takes for each scripted scene as well as verité of live performances, interviews, studio moments and driving in the streets of LA captured documentary-style. That blurring of the lines between fact and fiction is very powerful. We are no longer capturing an actor; we are capturing a man in his life and all the dynamics that push on him.

It is pretty raw and dark. Can you talk about editing to ramp up these emotions?
Addiction is a dark subject. It wasn’t a matter of ramping up emotions but trying to capture the real experience and struggle of an addict. I wanted the editing to be invisible. Sitting uncomfortably in that raw, dark space has a ramping effect. A lot of dialogue was stripped away in the editing room. As a viewer, I feel much more when I’m allowed to watch and experience something — making discoveries and connections rather than being told what to think.

Editing is a matter of putting one thing next to another. Meaning comes from context. I suppose one example of an edit that had a powerful effect would be the cut from [a child shooting a gun] in a family home to screams revealing the roar of a crowd as Colson walks toward the stage. It created an interesting juxtaposition.

Was there a particular scene that was hard for you to crack? Can you talk about working through it?
There’s a saying that a poem is never finished; it’s abandoned. The same is true for film scenes.

There were scenes that were hard to crack. Some were never cracked and entirely dropped. Entire storylines were eliminated because they were a distraction from other, more important things. Some scenes fit together and moved powerfully exactly the way we hoped.

The fight scene between Mae (Fox) and Cole (Baker) in the studio booth underwent many transformations. It was originally envisioned as a one-take in total silence as Cole’s assistant and producer watch the couple argue from behind the glass. There were many versions — longer, shorter, with and without sound. We settled on adding ad-libbed dialogue from our watchers to create a feeling that this happens all the time. They drop into silence as things escalate, enhancing the voyeuristic quality.

Can you provide an example of a note or two that you got from the director?
Tim gave me one note that I found very interesting, and it has changed the way I approach cutting an edit. We were working on the opening scene, where Cole is seated at the piano. The shot was over five minutes long when we started. While watching, I remember wanting to cut at many points. When we discussed the idea, Tim agreed that the viewer would be waiting for a cut or a change. But he liked the idea of keeping the scene going so long that you forget you’re watching a film. You’re living with the character. Now I find it interesting to consider how long I can hold on to a shot rather than how fast I can cut out.

What NLE did you use for the edit? Did any tool within it particularly come in handy?
I cut Taurus using Adobe Premiere Pro 2021, which I set up in my living/dining room. Tim and I both live in Brooklyn, so he would come over, and we’d work together. It was my first work-at-home situation with a client.

I suppose my biggest “tool” was not in my NLE system but, rather, my Apple TV, which allowed us to mirror my desktop so Tim could hang out on the couch. It worked for us and gave us a wee bit of physical space.

Did you have an assistant editor on this one? How did you work with them?
I worked closely with our post consultant and editor, Ben Shearn — or at least as close as two people could work on opposite coasts. It was a very post-COVID-world situation, as Ben was in Los Angeles while I worked with the director in Brooklyn. We each had matching removable drives. Our workflow was entirely remote, using Dropbox to transport the project and footage. I shared a few scenes to have Ben play with sound design, which he did beautifully.

Finally, do you have a favorite scene from the film?
My favorite scene is actually a sequence of scenes that took place before, during and after Cole’s Apple studio interview. It’s an emotional roller coaster that moves from comedy to drama to tenderness to an actual interview captured with numerous cameras. It was a pleasure to cut and weave those scenes together.

That sequence hinges on the fight between Cole and his assistant, played by the fantastic actress Maddie Hasson. It’s one of the few scenes in this film that has a lot of edits. The power comes from seeing people’s reactions. It’s a scene that captures real people in situations they don’t know how to handle, lashing out at the people they’re closest to. I think that’s a relatable human experience, and that’s what creating a movie is really about.

American Murderer’s Director and Editor Talk Through Workflow

December 1, 2022

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By Randi Altman

Director Matthew Gentile’s feature film debut, American Murderer, is based on the true story of a charming con man (Jason Derek Brown, played by Tom Pelphrey) who takes one robbery way too far. Besides Pelphrey, it also stars Idina Menzel and Ryan Phillippe.

L-R: Matthew Gentile and Matt Allen

Also written by Gentile, the story mostly unfolds in Utah, with Brown finding illegal ways of paying for his extravagant lifestyle while an FBI agent (Phillippe) is hot on his tail and as he’s romancing a woman (Menzel) with a young son. The film was shot by cinematographer Kalilah Robinson, who worked with colorist Katie Jordan at Light Iron in Hollywood for the grade.

We recently spoke with Gentile and his editor, Matt Allen, about making the film during the height of the pandemic, their workflows and how previz played a big role in finding the story.

What was the film shot on?
Matt Allen: We used the ARRI Amira camera. Most of the shoot was single-camera, but we were fortunate enough to have two cameras on a couple of the days with the action/ set piece scenes.

Matthew and Kalilah do a great job of working together on-set, making their days and shooting very efficiently to get what we needed to tell the story well.

Matthew Gentile: I am very happy with how the look of the film turned out. Kalilah and I have used the Amira on our shorts Lawman and the American Murderer proof of concept, and the lenses we chose (Zeiss standard speeds) were crucial to how we were going to accomplish the different looks needed for the film. She knows how to run a film set, lead a camera crew and collaborate so well.

What about the camcorder footage and older TV/surveillance footage? Was that look created in post?
Allen: We also shot for one day with the Red camera for all the scenes that take place on a boat, which are revisited throughout the film as camcorder footage. We wanted to shoot on a different camera so it had a very different feel and look from the rest of the film.

The visual effects team, led by VFX supervisor Arthur Mesa, treated that footage to create the full camcorder look with graphics. We also used DJI Osmo action cameras for the surveillance footage.

Gentile: Yes, the tiny DJI cameras were easily mountable at various locations throughout the shoot, and the look felt appropriate for telling the story of surveillance — Jason Derek Brown leaving behind digital clues for the cops and the audience.

Where did you shoot, and for how long?
Gentile: We shot in November and December of 2020 at the height of the pandemic. We were the only feature film shooting in Utah at the time. Principal production was 22 days, with some additional pickup days for second unit photography, which was done in April 2021.

I was fortunate to have great producers — Kevin Matusow, Carissa Buffel and Gia Walsh — who believed in me and helped pull off this production in the midst of a global pandemic.

How early did Matt get involved?
Gentile: Matt got involved in preproduction during the summer of 2020 and played a unique role. At the time, he had received the prestigious Eric Zumbrunnen Fellowship from the American Cinema Editors and was working under Oscar-nominated editor Matt Chesse (ACE) as an assistant editor.

I had met Matt Allen at film school at AFI, and he impressed me the very first time we met. I kept an eye on his career because I knew he was going places. During the pandemic, Matt had taught himself this previsualization program called ShotPro and offered to help previsualize some scenes from American Murderer with me.

Not knowing much about the process, I was skeptical at first if this was going to be helpful to my prepro process, and I didn’t think I could hire Matt to edit the film (since I was a first-time director, and normally producers encourage you to work with department heads that are more experienced). Matt didn’t care about that, and with his positive attitude, we jumped right into previz. I realized very quickly that Matt and I worked really well together and that he had to cut this movie. Seeing all the hard work Matt had done before a single frame was shot and his resume as an assistant editor, it was a pretty easy sell to the producers. I credit Matt with getting me directing again before the shoot happened in Utah.

Allen: We did previz on scenes in preproduction with Matthew was a really important time for us. It allowed us to get on the same page creatively. As an editor, I think we can sometimes be at a disadvantage in preproduction compared to some of the other department heads.

Creating previz and editing previz with the director allows me to start that collaboration early with a director. Once the actors are there, the footage is hitting my editing system, and the clock has started, you can feel the pressure because every day of production is expensive.

Having that time with Matthew allowed me to know what he was looking for in the edit, and I credit that with a better first cut of the film. Obviously, you still have a great deal of molding and shaping to do with the director to get to the finished film, but starting in a great place makes your director feel secure and willing to try things and explore the final rewrite of the film.

Matt, were you on-set? Near set? Keeping up with camera?
Allen: I was not on-set. I was back in Los Angeles receiving digital dailies each day through the dailies system provided by Radar DIT. Over the phone, Matthew and I would talk about how the shoot was progressing, but we did dailies separately.

L-R: Matthew Gentile and Matt Allen in the editing suite

Matthew would call out takes he liked while shooting and ask my opinion about performance. There was a high level of trust that developed quickly because of the previz for the film, especially for all the action and set pieces.

Were there any instances where you told Matthew you needed more coverage?
Allen: We didn’t have time to go back and get additional footage because the production was changing locations every day, so Matthew’s rigorous storyboarding and previz helped ensure we got what we need to craft a scene.

Gentile: As much as the preplanning helped, I didn’t follow the previz and storyboards exactly. Some great filmmakers I love, like Alfred Hitchcock, storyboard everything and follow it very closely. Matt is also a big Hitchcock fan, and we love to draw inspiration from the greats in cinema.

In fact, Matt actually paid homage to Psycho in the film with how he cut together a driving scene of Jason Derek Brown on the run. Brown is looking at the things he passes by, like a pawnshop, a strip club, a loan office, etc. It has quite a few similarities to the driving scene in Psycho toward the beginning of the film, when Janet Leigh hears voices in her head.

However, as a first-time director, I would ask the actors —like Ryan Phillippe, who has worked with some of the best and has directed some projects himself — what the best directors do. They would all say roughly the same thing: The directors are prepared and have a vision but are flexible and collaborative.

That’s what all this preplanning with Matt and my other wonderful department heads did. It allowed me to have a strong plan going in, but I deviated and reacted whenever needed. A great example of something being better than you possibly imagine was Tom Pelphrey’s performance as Jason. I realized quickly that I had to shoot him on wider lenses than I anticipated because Tom brought so much physicality to the performance.

Allen: Yes, we would often want to play things wider with Tom because his performance wasn’t just in his eyes or his face, but in his whole body. A great example of this is the golf course scene, when Tom’s character is trying to convince his brother to help him. Tom is pacing back and forth, and his body language adds so much to the scene; you need to see that as an audience member to understand his desperation in that moment.

Matthew, how much footage did you shoot? Was it tidy, or did you shoot a good amount of takes?
Gentile: Due to the schedule restraints, I had to be efficient. I didn’t have the luxury to come back to locations or shoot one scene over several days at the same place. But I did give my actors time to explore the scene and bring that emotional authenticity.

Matthew Gentile (right) on-set.

Also, sometimes movie magic strikes, and you get something wonderful in the first or second take, or an actor does something even better than you wrote. That happened quite a bit on this movie — this great cast of actors elevated my script, and sometimes their ad libs were better than the lines that I had written. And that’s an ideal situation.

Allen: I will add that watching dailies every day was incredibly energizing. It was fun to watch these amazing actors work at their craft. As editor, sometimes it’s your job to get out of the way; just sit on an amazing performance and let that actor work. The fun of cutting this film was that you have moments of pure performance mixed in with a nonlinear structure and some sequences that required quite bit of intercutting to get right.

It was great to edit the movie Matthew designed because American Murderer is a movie that takes advantage of the craft of editing to propel the story forward and create tension.

Can you provide an example of the intercutting?
A great one is the theater stalking sequence as Jason plans his crime. I think the interesting part of the film is that it is true character study, and you’re getting to see Jason through all these other characters’ perspectives — his sister, his brother, his mother, his real estate agent who he has a love affair with, her son and the special agent who is hunting him.

Honestly, my personal favorite intercut scenes are in the last 15 minutes of the movie, when you see the consequences Jason’s crime has on his various family members and the manhunt for him. I don’t want to give too many spoilers away.

What direction did you get from Matthew in terms of the pace of the edit?
Allen: American Murderer is a true crime thriller, so we wanted to craft a “ride” for the audience to go on for about 100 minutes that grabbed and kept the their attention. Matthew and I had quite a few conversations about tone because we knew it was going to be challenging. The tone was going to have to shift subtly but confidently throughout the film.

We were starting in a place where people would be intrigued by Jason, and maybe even like him, then going to a situation where the whole world is collapsing around him due to his decisions. A big challenge was the nonlinear structure and how much we could scramble up the timeline without confusing the audience. We did some virtual audience previews and screened it for some trusted and veteran directors and editors, and this really helped us discover the right blend of mixing up the timeline.

Editor Matt Allen editing on Avid Media Composer.

Gentile: Matt did an excellent job with helping me craft the nonlinear structure in the film and making it even better. He’s definitely a director’s best friend. I really needed his help in the third act of the film. The way the script was written in the first two thirds of the film were nonlinear, but the third act was completely linear. It worked well on the page, but after shooting and getting into editing, we realized we were having an issue around our climax — after all that build-up, it fell kind of flat. Matt devised what we referred to as the “third-act scramble.” He blew my mind when he went out on his own and created a whole chase sequence in the third act out of stock footage from other movies. That inspired me to go out and shoot this chase during our second unit photography.

Also, as Matt mentioned, getting the right tone for the film was very important to me, and music plays a huge role in setting the tone. Personally, I find the concept of temp music to be a little silly and challenging, but when Matt temps music, he is very careful and deliberate with what he chooses. This really helped my brother Scott when he became involved as composer, and things went to a whole new level when they started working together. Matt was definitely a co-author of the film.

Matthew, how were you seeing Matt’s cuts?
Gentile: We created in our own editorial bubble, and I would go over to Matt’s home editing bay in Los Feliz and work with him in person most days. It’s hard to replicate that creative synergy over a computer screen. A lot of times Matt and I would go on walks through the Franklin Hills in Los Feliz and talk about the edit.

Occasionally, I would look at cuts on Pix or use PacPost or Evercast when I was in New York. I would say the most amazing remote collaboration occurred between Matt —who not only edited the film, but also served as the score producer, previz editor, music editor and post supervisor — and my brother Scott, the composer. They did the entire score remotely with Matt in LA and Scott in New York and met for the first time at the film’s premiere at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy. Matt and Scott had this synergy working together that was fun to watch. It was so rewarding to watch Scott craft this first film score and bring all his incredible talent as a world-renowned conductor to the film world.

Side note: I got to meet my idol, Francis Ford Coppola, at the Taormina Film Festival!

Any examples of notes given during the edit?
Gentile: Matt was really good at taking feedback from me and the producers. Neither of us are precious. I didn’t find so much that I was “giving him notes” because I felt very much that Matt and I were on the same side and in it together. Co-authors, collaborators working together to tell the same story. The mission was to improve the picture. Period. We both want to craft the movie for the audience experience. And that was true of so many people on this film, who gave so much time and energy to bring this thing to life. They put the story first. A big thank you to our incredible Utah crew.

Matt, what system did you use to edit on? Any plugins?
Allen: I edited on Avid Media Composer. It’s my go-to nonlinear editing software, and it’s great for living with a film for a long time. To get the dialogue to sound extra-clean, I used the iZotope RX plugin. I also took advantage of the built-in RTAS (Real Time Audio Suite) plugins in Avid quite a bit, especially for music editing and sound design.

Often with gun shots and the club music, I wanted a particular reverb for the sound to sit in a specific space for a scene. I spent quite a bit of time getting the sound of the source music correct for the club scenes using reverb and other audio EQ tools in Avid.

Did you have an assistant editor on the film? If so, how did you work with them?
Allen: Lead assistant editor Jing Han played a pivotal role in the online/conform, turnovers and dropping in all the VFX. We wouldn’t have finished the movie without her. She is amazing. Jing is very skilled at her job as assistant editor and eager to learn. I would highly recommend that anyone hire her.

Gentile: Jing was a great asset to the editorial team, and we hope to have her on the next film.

Where was the film’s finishing done?
Allen: We had a great post team. The color was done by Katie Jordan at Light Iron, and John Chamberlin served as the sound mixer, with final mix completed at Warner Bros. Wes Hughes also served as a score producer and played a pivotal role in producing the film’s score.

Our VFX supervisor completed many of our visual effects and led a team of independent artists and visual effects grad students out of the Academy of Art in San Francisco to finish all VFX for the film.

What is something you both learned from making this film?
Allen: While making this movie, I learned the importance of having a great team around you. This was a very ambitious debut feature film, and we were fortunate to have so many wonderful collaborators in so many departments.

Gentile: What I learned from making this film is to hire Matt Allen. This guy has an amazing work ethic and is an incredible artist. And all his talent and hard work make me look good as a director. I know he would do a fantastic job for any director that hired him to cut a film. He’s definitely someone I would keep your eye on.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 25 years.

Composing Music for Horror Film The Accursed

October 27, 2022

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Director Kevin Lewis’ horror film The Accursed had him collaborating once more with composer Émoi. The two had previously worked together on Willy’s Wonderland.

The Accursed follows Elly (Sarah Grey), who is asked by a family friend (Mena Suvari) to spend a few relaxing days looking after an elderly woman (Meg Foster) living in a remote cabin. The cabin turns out to be anything but relaxing as Elly begins hallucinating in ways that blur reality with her dreams. It becomes clear there is a demonic presence waiting to break free.

We reached out to Émoi — whose moniker is pronounced “emwa” and was chosen for its meaning (“to cause a deep emotional stir and great excitement”) — to talk about his work on The Accursed…

Can you describe your score for The Accursed?
In a lot of ways, the score is very classic, with lots of raw, grating solo strings and ethereal drones. It is horror, yes, but also very sorrowful. I had a wonderful conversation with one of the producers, Scott Harbert (who, coincidentally, scored Kevin’s first movie). The topic was the lost art of thematic scoring — scores with motifs and memorable melodies — and how a lot of modern scores are more atonal. I accepted the challenge.

What direction were you given in terms of the score?
The day Kevin received the script, he called me after reading the first several pages. From that moment on, we were very tight on the project the whole way through. So it was months of bouncing ideas off each other and discussing his vision.

He would keep me in the loop, sending me artwork, storyboards, photographs, rough cuts, etc. It was a lot of fun. When we finally started working on the music, we were so thoroughly aligned that there were very few revisions because we did most of the heavy lifting ahead of time.

You and director Kevin Lewis previously collaborated on the Nicholas Cage horror film Willy’s Wonderland. Because of this, did you get a little more freedom to experiment on The Accursed?
Absolutely. I shared a lot of the initial music beds with him prior to starting the film. I also had acquired a lot of unique, homemade instruments from around the world. I would send him previews early on, so when he got the finished score, there were very few surprises.

Are there any similarities between the music for The Accursed and Willy’s Wonderland?
In both films, I got the unique opportunity to write both the score and the songs that I would end up singing on. In Willy’s Wonderland, I wrote the ‘80s-inspired pinball theme song and voiced Willy on the singalongs.

For The Accursed I wrote the ‘50s-inspired “You Are My Baby Girl,” which is Elly and her mother’s theme song. I also wrote and sang the ‘90s-inspired “Alone I Wait,” which is the Dorothy Ambrose song. The underscore to both films relies primarily on dark, string-led orchestral arrangements.

Can you talk about what plugins you are currently using? Are there any new ones that have caught your eye?
I use probably every plugin library there is. My favorites are from Spitfire, Vienna Symphonic Library and EastWest. When I started on The Accursed, Spitfire had just released its Solstice library. I used that library quite a bit in making the soundtrack for The Accursed.

You work a lot on horror films. Why do you think your music resonates so well in this genre?
Halloween is in my DNA. I’ve been drawn to the macabre since I was a kid, and it just feels very natural and effortless. If I put my hands on a piano and just start playing without thought, I always gravitate toward dark and sorrowful. I do a lot of commercial composing too, which is the exact opposite, but jovial tunes require great effort on my behalf. However, I like the challenge, and it keeps me versatile.

Do you have a “go-to” instrument? If so, what is it?
I typically write the main progression organically on piano before I move to plugins. I love choir, so I’ll also write a lot by just singing or humming melodies. I feel like you get a much more natural-sounding result if you start on a real instrument before moving over to digital.

Are there other genres besides horror that you would like to work in?
Fantasy, animation, epic adventures, sci-fi and dark comedy.

Any favorite tricks and workflows tips that help when composing for film?
Build out your templates before you start working on a project. Organize your projects, and take the time to stay organized. It’s very easy to get whisked away on inspiration and start building things out without properly color-coding/labelling/organizing. All of a sudden you have 75 tracks that all say “violins,” when in actuality they are nothing of the sort. This will bite you down the road.

Also, I always try to keep at least 10% of my instruments live and organic. I feel like you can really tell when a track is all plugins, but putting a layer of live drums, live voice and/or live piano over the top makes a huge difference to the overall authenticity of the composition.

TIFF: Composer Kalaisan Kalaichelvan on This Place

October 17, 2022

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This Place’s Kalaisan Kalaichelvan is a Toronto-based composer and pianist who grew up falling in love with films, film music and classical. “With the encouragement of great teachers and mentors I ended up writing music for a living,” he says. “As a composer, I work in spaces of film, concert, dance and installation.”

Kalaichelvan, who was a 2021 Fellow of the Sundance Composers Lab, has held residency at the Canadian Film Centre and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In addition to the TIFF film This Place, directed by V.T. Nayani, Kalaichelvan has worked on the films Flypaper, Two Doves on a Painted Lake and A Feller and the Tree, just to name a few.

We reached out to him to discuss his process on This Place, a queer love story about Kawenniióhstha and Malai, both daughters of refugees who find one another in a Toronto laundromat. The film was shot by Conor Fisher and edited by Maureen Grant. Let’s find out more…

How did you get involved with This Place?
V.T. Nayani and I met during our time in residence at the Canadian Film Centre. She was part of the directors’ lab and I was in the Slaight Music Lab. During that time, we got to work together on some other projects and built a mutual chemistry around how we took in films and our own roles in the industry. We were just two Scarborough Tamil kids geeking out about what we loved.

Nayani eventually shared with me about how she was working on her debut feature and asked if I wanted to come on board as a composer. And that’s how it all began for me with This Place.

Can you walk us through the needs of the project?
It was about identifying what the story needed. This Place is about two young women finding their place in a complicated landscape while navigating the various relationships in their lives. This required us to find different thematic ideas and musical colors to represent all these voices that at once feel individualistic and united as a whole.

I think the big thing we were after was creating this suspended state of reality. Really leaning into building this dream-like world for these two characters. We wanted the sound to be detached from our immediate reality but guiding us into how both these women see Toronto and the lived experiences around them.

What gear did you use?
We recorded most of the score with live musicians, drawing from strings, brass, harp, voice, oboe and guitar, taking very acoustic timbres and warping them in really interesting ways. We found this palette really effective because they take these different kinds of chamber soloists and give them a kind of romantic expression you don’t always hear in modern indie dramas. And when distorted, there’s a youthfulness and modernity in that expression that feels very in the contemporary moment.

What were some of the interesting or unique challenges you faced on the project?
Finding the sound took a little time. What did Toronto as a city sound like? And how do we give voice to all the different narratives that the film builds space for? We started from a more pop-driven place before we moved into this romantic chamber sound that really opened up the film for us.

Of course, when we got to recording the music, we were in the middle of the Omicron wave of the pandemic. So we had to do a lot of the recording sessions remotely during a lockdown. But luckily, we had some really fantastic musicians give life to the music here in beautiful ways.

TIFF: How to Blow Up a Pipeline Editor Daniel Garber

October 11, 2022

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The heist thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which premiered at last month’s Toronto Film Festival (TIFF), follows eight young environmental activists engaging in a principled act of property destruction. The film is a loose adaptation of Andreas Malm’s manifesto of the same name.

The film’s editor was Brooklyn-based Daniel Garber, a long-time collaborator and friend of director Daniel Goldhaber. Shot by DP Tehillah De Castro, the film’s production took place in New Mexico. California and North Dakota, while post took place in New York.

We reached out to Garber to find out more about his process on this film…

Daniel Garber

How early did you get involved on this film?
The entire process unfolded rapidly — it took only about 18 months from conception to completion. Daniel and his co-writers, Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol, told me about the idea before they had begun to write in earnest, and I immediately ran out and bought a copy of Andreas’s book. It’s a quick read, and I was immediately invested in their vision for the project.

I reviewed several drafts of the script and gave feedback leading up to production. Then I was on call throughout principal photography, reviewing dailies and having frequent check-in calls with the team. That’s how I like to work. Writing and editing are just different phases in the storytelling process, and I like to work closely with the other “custodians of story,” both before the shoot and during the edit.

How did you work with Daniel? What direction were you given for the edit? How often was he taking a look at your cut?
Daniel’s earliest professional experience in film was in post, so he understands the importance of the edit and the sacredness of a director-editor bond. In college, we basically learned how to make films by making shorts together, so I have a shorthand with him that I have with virtually nobody else. On this project, he, Ariela, Jordan and I had many conversations at the script stage and reviewed a lot of the same reference films, so there was already a shared understanding of the style and mission of the film before a frame was shot.

I’m a firm believer in taking some time to myself to get acquainted with the footage without being beholden to the writers’ and director’s preconceived notions, but my favorite part of editing is spending time face to face with collaborators and working things out in the room together.

After my initial assembly, Daniel was in the editing room almost daily for most of the process. We had a uniquely fluid and inclusive process in this edit, with writers Ariela and Jordan offering frequent feedback and putting in long hours in the editing room as we approached picture lock. The four of us were aligned on the fundamentals but came from distinct sensibilities and backgrounds within the film world, resulting in a film that melded our variety of perspectives into a shared vision.

Was there a particular scene that was most challenging? If so, why? And how did you overcome that challenge?
The film has an unusual structure. The main action unfolds over the course of only two days as the crew of activists attempts to pull off their act of sabotage, flashing back intermittently to the backstories of each character in the ensemble. The flashback structure itself was hard to pull off organically, but the first flashback was the toughest to edit. It sets the stage for all of the additional flashbacks, establishing the expectation that we’ll continue to return to the past and gain greater insight into each character.

Additionally, that flashback contains the one scene we spent the most time on in the edit: an argument between Xochitl, who has recently lost her mother to an extreme weather event and is becoming increasingly radicalized, and a well-intentioned pro-divestment activist named Orin. The debate articulates some of the core ideas from Andreas’ book, dramatizing the ideological clash between devoutly pacifist environmentalists and their more radical counterparts.

That scene always risked coming across as overly didactic and cerebral, but by focusing on Xochitl’s subjective experience and working to foreground her psychological state rather than the political ideas, we managed to make the conflict come to life in what I think is an engaging and emotionally charged scene.

Can you talk about working on this during the pandemic? How did that affect the workflow?
Fortunately, the pandemic was not a huge setback for this film. Much of the film was shot outdoors on-location, with ample COVID precautions that kept everyone safe. During the edit, we worked primarily in-person, possible only because our team was so small. We were always prepared to switch at a moment’s notice to remote work, though, knowing that the course of the pandemic was unpredictable.

What system did you use to cut and why?
After two successful feature edits in Premiere Pro, I was eager to do it a third time, a decision that was hugely rewarding. The way Daniel and I work together, the ability to make rapid changes on the fly is paramount—and I simply find Premiere to be the speediest editing tool around, making it possible for me to easily try out numerous ideas and variations.

Sound design and temp VFX were such critical aspects of our edit, and the ease of taking on those tasks in Premiere helped streamline our workflow and make for way more productive test screenings. I used a number of split screens to adjust timing or combine performances, and Premiere makes it simple to mock up effects like that. The Productions feature has been a particularly empowering aspect of the software. You can keep the entire edit stable and organized while also allowing AE Emily Yue and me to collaborate seamlessly from wherever we were located. It’s been a game-changer, and we’re already working on setting up another big project in Premiere Productions as I write this.

Any tips you would like to share?
Most of my tips are not deep-cut tools but just ways of making the basics work more efficiently, especially when doing sound editing. At the beginning of each project, I create a template sequence from which I make all of my editing sequences. That template sequence has tracks laid out just how I need them, with dialogue, music and effects all separated out with some basic processing (compression, de-essing, EQ) on the relevant tracks. It’s a really simple way of elevating the sound from the very beginning of the editing process.

You mention your AE. How did you work with her? Did you allow her to edit scenes and/or give input on your edits?
Emily Yue was a phenomenal assistant editor who is just starting out in her career but has so much knowledge and skill already. She took on a ton of technical and organizational responsibilities and ultimately ended up stepping up to share the duties of post supervisor during a hectic finishing process. On time- and budget-constrained indie projects like this one, especially with the added demands of syncing piles of 16mm film and handling loads of VFX, the job can sometimes wind up feeling mostly technical, and that’s something I’d like to work against.

I really valued Emily’s creative input — from initial reactions to dailies to ideas on where we could tighten up the fine cut — and hope that the next project we’re doing together, a documentary, will give her more opportunities to actually cut scenes.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
We had very reasonable, trusting producers who supported the filmmaking team through and through. It almost never felt to me like demands were being made that could not be accomplished with the resources we had available to us. Toward the very end of the edit, on the eve of our picture lock deadline, our producers brought forward some new ideas that we on the filmmaking team agreed deserved more time to fully explore.

We ended up extending the timeline by a couple of weeks, and that last leg of the edit wound up being transformative: Just when we thought the film was as good as it could realistically get, we discovered improvements that hadn’t previously occurred to us. It was a blessing not only to have such great insights from our producers, but also to have their full support in taking the time to get things right.

How do you manage your time? Do you manage expectations or try everything they ask of you?
Time management becomes crucial leading up to test screenings and submissions to producers. While talking through notes, I start by prioritizing. What’s essential to tackle now — for instance, easy fixes that will instantly improve the viewing experience or bigger changes that could fundamentally reshape the film — and what can or should wait for later? I find that keeping a record of our notes from each version of the film and maintaining clear communication about priorities are essential to keeping everyone on the team feeling heard and invested in the process.

This team was so supportive and committed to talking through the story and ideas of the film each day, which gave me a lot of space to push back on ideas that I thought would be counterproductive. That level of trust is crucial. But editors get a bad rap, often coming across as naysayers who shut down many ideas out of hand. I’m not proud to say that I’ve been guilty of that myself, but I’ve learned that things go best when I try to give each idea my best shot, even if I’m confident that it won’t work.

Much of the work I’m proudest of has come from trying out ideas that I initially found suspect. After all, what would be the point of collaboration if others’ ideas didn’t meaningfully contribute to my work? And sometimes it’s more time-consuming to debate whether or not an idea should be tried out than to simply to make the change, audition it and have a more educated discussion based on what’s in front of you rather than a hypothetical.

Finally, any tips for those just starting out?
Try to balance these two truths in your mind: Trust your instincts because you know more than you think, and you still know nothing, so try to learn from every project and artistic collaborator.

Editor Courtney Ware on Cutting Indie Film Acidman

July 26, 2022

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Editor Courtney Ware cut the Tribeca film Acidman, which follows Maggie (Dianna Agron) as she tracks down her estranged and reclusive father (Thomas Haden Church) in a desperate effort to repair their relationship. It was directed by Alex Lehmann, shot by DP John Matysiak and posted at Tunnel Post.

postPerspective had the pleasure of interviewing Ware — at Sundance in 2019 and 2020 — about her work on the films Light From Light and Miss Juneteenth, respectively.

We reached out to Ware, who is also a writer, director and producer, once more to talk about Acidman.

Courtney Ware

How early did you get involved on the film?
I’ve worked closely with producer Liz Cardenas in the past, and it was she who initially contacted me about the project. I really connected with the script, so when Alex and I spoke for the first time I was excited that we were on the same page. We just clicked creatively, and I was officially brought on the project before filming began.

What direction were you given for the edit? How often was Alex taking a look at your cut?
Working with Alex was a dream collaboration. His process could be defined as all about “discovery,” and that’s how we both approached the edit. There was a lot of room for improvisation (and therefore, discovery) within the actors’ dialogue and performances through the framing of the script. So we didn’t discuss much during the assembly stage as he was interested in seeing what spoke to me. This gave me a lot of freedom to try things.

We then had extensive conversations after watching the first cut and dove into each individual scene. We would discuss his intention, other performance choices the actors gave and what I connected with. It was exciting to have the freedom and ability to explore what we had and shape the narrative. We worked together in person for about a week, but the rest of the edit was done remotely through screen sharing.

Where were you based when working remotely?
I worked in my studio in Dallas while Alex was in LA.

Was there a particular scene or scenes that were most challenging? If so, why? And how did you overcome that challenge?
There is a scene near the end of the film that changed significantly from the first cut to the final cut. We realized that the actors were giving us some incredible takes of a defining moment, and we ended up stripping almost all of the dialogue and instead carried the scene completely through their looks. Recutting that scene and seeing it work so well was really challenging…and really exciting.

Courtney Ware’s editing setup in Dallas.

What system did you use to cut, and is there a tool within that system that you find yourself calling on over and over?
I use Adobe Premiere to edit, and I found myself using After Effects and Content Aware Fill a lot on this project. I mainly used it to try out a visual effect or to see if something would work.

One great example of this: There is a dog (Migo) in the film. In one take, he didn’t quite clear the frame and was (adorably) distracting. We ultimately ended up not using that particular take, but it was so useful to essentially remove him from the edge of frame to see if that take was a viable option. It gave us some extended flexibility on takes that otherwise might not have been usable.

How did you manage your time?
I’m extremely deadline-driven. I generally know how long something will take me to attack, and I work backwards from when it’s due. We had a few touchstone dates that kept us on track.

Did you have an assistant editor on this?
I did not have an assistant editor on this project. But I do believe that AEs can be great collaborators, not just there to lend a technical hand.

How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
This boils down to communication. It’s important that the producers communicate their expectations and are capable of hearing why we can achieve something or not. It’s always my goal to attempt anything (within reason) and not to shut down any requests. It is equally important to clearly explain any reasons or examples for why or why not something can be done.

How do you manage your time? Do you manage expectations or try everything they ask of you?
For me, I feel like it’s a combination of both. Again, I am very open to trying things. So it comes down to knowing yourself enough to communicate any limitations or timing issues.

How do you take criticism? Do you find yourself defensive or accepting of others’ ideas (good and bad)?
I prefer to look at criticism as a conversation. Every idea is on the table, including my own. I like to use language around criticism like what “works” and what “doesn’t work.” If something isn’t working, then I definitely want to figure out what to do to get it to work.

Finally, any tips for those just starting out?
I think all editors should direct and edit their own project at least once. I have gained so much perspective and become a better editor by directing. Editing is so much about solving puzzles and problems. Having the opportunity to solve the puzzle that you created yourself — well that will teach you more than you think.

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