MUSIC EDITING IN THE 21st CENTURY More Teeth, Less Cogs by Mark Jan Wlodarkiewics Another crash-bang final dub has wrapped and everyone is elated, especially the director. As usual, it was a battle: sometimes the struggle was against each other, with heated aesthetic arguments, but mostly it was against time, that limit against which all good work now seems to be done. We've all been through it: the late nights, the stress, the sincere wish to be anywhere but here (the editing room, the dubbing stage, etc.) and somehow we always triumph. There may be missed opportunities, and sometimes lingering tastes that aren't so sweet, but at the end of the process, there is this thing, the film, that is ultimately enjoyed by many people regardless of our experience in making it. Filmmaking never stops evolving. There has been technical innovation from day one, but recently the evolution and revolution of film post-production has accelerated to a fever pitch. Of course, I am talking about nonlinear editing. Both a blessing and a curse, the ability to always keep the edit alive throughout the post-production process has created a new sort of quandary. I'm sure that our film-making forebears had to deal with tight schedules, limited budgets and the desire to do the best sort of creative work. Just like us, theyexperienced that universal bargain between better/faster/cheaper. But now it is clear that we are running into the limits of what can be done. Sure there are places to make the process more efficient, conforming picture and track for example, but ultimately, adequate time is needed to do good creative work. As everything has become compressed and more flexible, we editors are being forced to evolve. Once it was the painstaking work of building reels from the Moviola and KEM, with each effect, cue and line cut in one at a time against picture. Now it is workstations and plugins and DSP and the confusion of, 'is it editorial if we lower the volume of this track, or is it mixing'. Not long ago, union battle lines were drawn between the mouse or the finger moving a fader. But we are all union 'brothers and sisters' these days and the difference between mouse and finger is no longer technical but aesthetic. (This is not to say that the discussion is over, just different). We've seen picture and sound departments shrink, with fewer people doing more work. Gone are the days when, in the final push, a project would 'go wide', hiring extra editors and assistants to get everything to the stage on time. 'Going wide' these days usually means hiring another assistant to make sure that the tracks get cue-sheeted properly. We are not only doing more work, but we need more skills to do it. It is now clear that picture editors need to be fluent in the technical and aesthetic language that is required to make a well-honed track. Temps that are fleshed out in the Avid are now de rigueur and some editor's effects and almost all their cut dialog make it to the final dub stage. I've seen full temp tracks edited and mixed the cutting room, with DA-88's printed to mag hours before a screening. It is up to us as creative individuals to set boundaries and limits. I recently found myself on two projects as a music editor that have truly extended my skill-set as an editor and a technician. The first project was a temp for a big studio film. I edited together pieces of preexisting music to create the temp score as usual, but the difference, in this case, was that all the temp mixing was done in the sound designer's cutting room. Consequently, all of the temp music was 'premixed' in my cutting room against the guide track. I did all the perspective shifts, eq'ing as needed and setting up reverbs for source futzes. Sessions were then 'published' (saved to a new location, copying all the sound files) using a removable Kingston drive which was then mounted on a Pro Tools rig in the sound designer's room. All my tracks and effects were routed out to two stereo pairs feeding a Sonic Solutions workstation. I had to think like a mixer and an editor at the same time and though I have done both things, I had yet to make the logical extension to a large feature film. After all, we are trained to 'leave' certain things to the mixer. We may indicate them, but we almost never execute them. The second gig was for a much smaller studio film that had hired a band in Tucson to create a score. I flew there on December 20th and in the next three weeks recorded and mixed well over forty minutes of music directly into Pro Tools. For all intents and purposes I functioned as the producer of the session, making creative suggestions, working with the engineer to get the 'sound' and supervising the mix (dictating the appropriate splits for a final film dub). Generally, a music editor will observe the scoring, making notes about how best to prepare the work for the final dub, but in this case, I supervised the recording, editing and mixing and thus all became my responsibility. During the recording I tweaked the basic tracks against picture so that each cue fit perfectly to image. Often, overdubs were edited together to make a composite track. Since the tracking and the mixing occurred in the same environment, no work was thrown away. Equalization, compression and reverb were added to flesh out each cue while tracking. Thus, when it came time to premix the music, the mixing engineer had a very good starting point, and could proceed quickly and efficiently. In these two jobs I acted as engineer, roadie, producer, creative temp editor and all-around good guy. I am pleased that I could pull all that stuff off, but ultimately it makes me aware that there are real drawbacks to this new paradigm. The person who can harness so many skills to serve a film gets placed under a tremendous amount of pressure. The hours were long and hard (though not so hard when I was enjoying myself...) and it required discipline to say 'enough,' especially when the deadline loomed close. I've found that the more we say yes to these complicated gigs, the more directors and producers have come to expect of us. This is not a bad thing, per se, but we must be careful of being taken advantage of. We've all heard 'it's a small film - we have no money'. My response these days, from a post-production standpoint, is that they are all 'small films'. If you are asked to go beyond the call of duty, make sure that you are compensated. It is much too easy to be taken advantage of (but, then again, learning on the job and stretching yourself can be it's own reward: be fair, but also ask to be treated fairly). Yes, the future holds more hard work, but it is up to us as creative individuals to set boundaries and limits, even if they appear to be artificial to those who employ us. Ultimately they are our collaborators and they need to understand how difficult this stuff can actually be. Let them know and your work will be better for it. So this is the future: less cogs, more teeth. Less people, more skills. Now, more than ever, we need to learn as much as we can about the whole process: mixers about editorial, editors about engineering and everyone about the aesthetic of the whole track, not just our little corner of it. If we do it right, then the early part of the 21st century will be looked at as the golden age of film as a collaborative art.   Mark Jan Wlodarkiewicz has edited music and effects, done sound design and mixed. His credits include "Romeo and Juliet", "Wag the Dog", "Armageddon and Modulations He can be reached via email. Want to talk about this? Click here to visit our Discussion Groups   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 21, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 2000   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700