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’.”
Another problem is that editors used to play a big part in the sound mix, but now they are rarely employed during sound post.
“The editor intrinsically has a marriage with sound as much as with the picture when performing the edit. Then, upon picture lock the editor is excused from the film, and therefore isn’t there to support the director in the next phase,” argued Ballantine.
Peart said that pictures editors also have a great understanding of sound: “It’s really important to me because I may hear something that I’ve done deliberately in the cut, and I want make sure it’s in the mix. That understanding, that familiarity, is due to the fact that editors are the ones that pretty much watch and hear everything that’s been shot.”
Dr Karen Pearlman, outgoing president of the Guild and head of screen studies at AFTRS, says these are global issues originated from traditional media struggling to compete with the internet for audience share.
“Until a solution is found to making money from the internet, things are not likely to improve,” she anticipated.
FIGHTING INVISIBILITY
While the editor’s work is essential in creating a project’s structure – by organising the movement of plot and events to make sense and reveal information in a compelling way – and rhythm – by organising the movement of emotion, images and sound into cycles of tension and release for the audience -, it also goes largely ignored.
The availability of editing software like Final Cut Pro and Avid has generated a misconception: that knowing how to operate the programs is the same as knowing how to edit. From this perspective, anyone can be an
editor, but the reality is very different. Pearlman – who published the book Cutting Rhythms, Shaping the Film Edit in 2009 – says editing is “an art, a craft and a technique, not just a technical skill”.
Yet some, like Roland Gallois, feel that the work of editors is undervalued in terms of the pay, and misunderstood, because only producers and directors truly understand what they do.
“Everybody else is really in the dark about it, but it’s not really until you’ve done a four-month edit that you can really see what’s going on. The fact that the audience doesn’t understand editing is part of the magic, because they’re getting drawn into the cinematic language, but it’s a pity for us editors,” he said.
Incoming Guild president Jason Ballantine believes that the same technology that has allowed nonprofessionals to ‘edit’ the video from their Christmas party, might be able to inspire a new generation: “Editing desperately lacks an appreciation of how powerful it can be in manipulating the story. Hopefully, the fact that the younger generation has access to the available technology will breed a more appreciative audience.”
In terms of the industry, the Guild is an essential part in trying to unite editors so they don’t feel like they’re alone in a dark room.
“It’s a very isolated job, so the Guild encourages the discussion of the craft of editing, as well as wages and conditions,” said Deb Peart.
According to Pearlman, one of the main goals for the Guild is to educate producers and directors about the importance of editing and the special skills of editor.
“It’s very important that people know what we do, and don’t think of editing as ‘invisible’, otherwise they might just think anyone can operate the gear and edit.
“Upcoming producers, particularly those in the online space, don’t know what industry protocols are, what editors are supposed to be paid, and what conditions they should be working with,” she said.
FINDING THE RHYTHM
It’s been more than a decade since the industry made the transition to non-linear editing (NLE). According to Angus Mackay, segment marketing manager at Avid, the technology shift has allowed editors to become more complex storytellers with pictures and sound.
“NLE encourages exploration through the ease of manipulating picture and sound. The ability to quickly duplicate timelines for versions encourages this as physical mediums did not allow without a penalty of
cost or time. Previews are more complete; nothing is really left to the imagination as it can be done in the system,” he said.
Dany Cooper (Beneath Hill 60, Oranges & Sunshine, Battlestar Galactica) agrees: “We don’t need to visualise as much. When you’re cutting on film you must be able to visualise and imagine what your cut will look like. When cutting on a computer you can just do it, and as a result of that, you end up with many different versions. In the past you had one version and then you made adjustments to it; now you can have many different versions and just choose the best.”
But how do you choose which one is the best and has the correct pace and rhythm?
Jason Ballantine – whose upcoming projects include Wolf Creek 2 and Mad Max: Fury Road – believes the target audience is ultimately what dictates a project’s pace. While for many years people have been talking about an “MTV generation” used to faster and ‘cuttier’ films and shows, that conversation is now 30-years old.
“It’s reasonable to say that the kids who grew up on video clips are the editors of today and they’re bringing their influences in. There is, of course, an inherent difference in stylistic choices between somebody of Clint Eastwood’s age and somebody of [Wolf Creek director] Greg McLean’s age.
“But by and large, the nature of a film or TV show’s genre will determine the pace that it’s cut at.”
Cooper agrees that the rhythm is unique for each project, but believes that the pace of a film can also be determined by the main actors: “In my experience, I think we have a slower delivery in Australia. We talk less than Americans, we pause more between our thoughts, and our performances are slightly slower. I’m massively generalising, of course.”
According to Roland Gallois, while pace has “picked up a lot” in the course of cinema history, it is important to find the right one that will bring the feeling out of a scene, even a silent one like most of his work on Samson & Delilah” “Each shot has a certain amount of information and emotion, and you’re weighing up what the shot is telling you, even if the characters are not talking.”
Pearlman adds that while stories are faster and more complex in their use of time and movement – with the average shot length about half what it was 30 years ago -, the changes don’t affect an editor’s fundamental skill: “knowing how to make something make sense and giving it a compelling flow”.
There are many ways to make that happen, but some are more common in local storytelling than others. Pearlman believes the local industry tends to favour naturalism over spectacle and therefore, editing techniques such as parallel action are not exploited very often: “Visually stimulating montage sequences that exploit the cinematic principles of juxtaposition are also relatively unusual, because the focus in on ‘real’ as a measure of ‘good’, rather than on cinematic excitement or style.”
And so, as Australian editors start fighting the invisibility that has afflicted them for years, they also face an internal challenge: to think outside the box to help take our storytelling to the next level.
Its not just about Assistant Editors being useful – which they are all the way through an edit – it is about protecting the job as a sustainable career path. No one would argue that it is best to have the person who started the job – there again at the end, but the chances of finding another paying job to fill the space is next to zero. Considering how low wages are it is hardly an enormous cost to production to keep the Assistant on for the duration – and not doing so now is going to have drastic ramifications for our industry in a few years time when that pathway of learning has completely disappeared.
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Shrinking budgets and loss of time. They kill all of us.
Editors have more footage to go through, the picture cut takes longer to finish because the producers underestimate how long it wil take and set unrealistic goalposts. That knocks onto into audio post, with locked cut coming over later and later, the expectation that the audio guys have to chase the picture cut, breaking the flow of their work to fix sync changes and re-edit music ( “oh we only made two or three minor edits, it shouldn’t effect you much”…).
When are producers going to stop cutting budgets, cutting time, and preventing professionals for collaboration? Just like the video editor would like to be at the sound mix, the sound designer would like to be involved earlier during the cut, but sometimes they aren’t even hired until half way through the video edit!
Producers: Wake up. Give your craftspeople time to do their job properly so they can give you a product worth selling.
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