Editing: Like cutting off three fingers

The work of editors is often overlooked. Miguel Gonzalez found that, as if that wasn’t bad enough, they now have more footage to work through but not more time to do so, and tight budgets mean assistant editors are becoming a rare luxury.

“It’s like cuttting off three of an editor’s fingers,” said Underbelly editor Deb Peart about the absence of assistant editors during the crucial moments of the editing process.
Due to budgetary reasons, assistants are frequently taken off jobs once the film has been shot, and then brought back at the end.
“I started as an assistant, learning from sitting with directors and editors and observing them work together in the cutting room and watching the cut develop. They’re now taking away that period of learning from assistants, because when they’re doing rushes they’re chained to their desk, getting what they can out for their editor and missing out on the opportunity to watch them work.
“Assistants are never ‘not needed’. Even when you’re fine-cutting you still need them; you want to throw them stuff to work on,” said Peart.
John Lee is a perfect example of this kind of on-the-job learning. He’s been Lee Smith’s assistant editor on the Australian film Two Hands and Hollywood blockbusters Master & Commander, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight, and this work allowed him to become additional editor on this year’s acclaimed Christopher Nolan film Inception.
Smith was still working on Peter Weir’s The Way Back when work began on Inception, so an arrangement was reached for Lee to cut when Smith was not available. He also had to test multiple formats; set up a post pipeline for shoots in Tokyo, London, Paris, Morocco, LA and Canada; set up cutting rooms in LA, London and Paris; hire crew and rent equipment; set up with labs and telecine houses, etc.

“Luckily I had some really great assistants who could take a lot of the load from me when I was editing. It’s terrible that lower budget films try to eliminate assistants, but I guess I can’t really blame them. It’s very hard to be editor and assistant at the same time; I find that the two jobs use different sides of the brain.
“When I’m assisting, I’m emailing and texting and on the phone, organising as solving problems. It’s really a rush on a big movie. And when you’re editing, you want to be in a room with the door shut and no distractions. On low budget films the editor is doing both jobs; it’s not good for the health and I’m sure the work suffers too,” explained Lee.
Lee has been fortunate enough to be able to compare both systems. Working on Two Hands, “obviously resources were tight… no need for a VFX editor; there was an editor and a first assistant. You get paid less and you’re on the film for a shorter time, but you just get it done with what you’ve got and you stick to a schedule. It’s all quite civilised really; no studio to stick their nose in,” he recalled.
However, on Inception there was an editor, an additional editor, a first assistant editor for Avid, a first assistant editor for film, three or four assistant film editors to conform the 35mm print, one Avid assistant,
three VFX editors, two post-production assistants, a post-production supervisor and a post-production coordinator.
“I think we had eight or nine Avids at the height of the madness, plus a full 35mm film cutting room at all times,” said Lee. “The long hours are terrible for health and family stability, and extremely short schedules are also very stressful, but I can’t complain too much; I work on very big films with lots of resources.”
THE PRESSURES OF TECHNOLOGY
Those with more limited resources are facing another issue that started with the arrival of digital acquisition formats. Productions, now working with multiple cameras and free from film processing costs,
are shooting a much higher amount of footage. This situation is also happening in television.

“A film in the 70s shot at around 12-18 to 1; for each minute on screen, 12-18 minutes had been shot. Nowadays it’s quite commonplace for a feature to do 100 to 1. The economy of scale is ridiculous; technology has placed more pressure on a current day editor in terms of expectations,” explained the new president of The Australian Screen Editors Guild, Jason Ballantine (Wolf Creek).
“But schedules don’t reflect that, and you’re pushing yourself to get something done and try to do justice to the material, but when you have a lot to work through and only a limited time to do it, it can be to the detriment of the production,” added Peart.
Roland Gallois, who has recently completed Here I Am and is now working on The Hunter, believes creative time is not being respected: “It’s the time it takes for people to absorb all the information that’s been shot
to come to feel comfortable with it and come up with a creative solution. It’s about that sense of really exploring the material and being able to say ‘that’s as good as I can get it to be and the closest to the original vision’.”