NEWS
Editorializing
ACE Panel Talks Shop at HD Expo
story and photos by Bill Stetz
 Editors Glen Scantlebury, left, Mary Jo Markey, Darren Holmes and Michael Tronick. |
HD Expo in Burbank, California was the forum for a distinguished panel of editors in a discussion entitled “Cut to the Chase” at the Marriott Burbank Airport Hotel & Convention Center November 7. HD Expo is the main venue for all things production and post-production in the high definition realm.
Sponsored by the American Cinema Editors (ACE) and moderated by Carolyn Giardina of The Hollywood Reporter, “Cut to the Chase” featured panelists Glen Scantlebury (Transformers), Mary Jo Markey, ACE (Mission Impossible III), Darren Holmes, ACE (Ratatouille) and Michael Tronick, ACE (Hairspray).
Following are some choice excerpts from the discussion.
On Pre-Visualization:
GS: Pre-visualization is a great starting point to give the director inspiration of how he’s going to go and shoot something. On Transformers, I mainly worked a lot with director Michael Bay on the visual effects––which took months and months of haggling and arguing: “That’s not going to work!” “That’s tiny!” “That’s all wrong!”
It seems really easy when you see those clips. You’d think, for instance, that Michael is going to go out and shoot that shot when Optimist slides his truck into position and then Megatron shoots off the top of a building and he zips off. But Michael goes out and shoots it with ten cameras. You’ve got all these different possible ways of putting it together, but shooting it each way costs a million bucks.
MJM: The shots are never as simple as the pre-visualization, I guess. One of the difficulties is that clarity of action is so much more there in pre-visualization. I don’t really like action, personally. I get frustrated with action sequences where I can’t quite understand what’s going on. I really want it to be clear.
DH: With animation, we do basically the whole film in pre-visualization, as it was even rougher than that in storyboard form. I think this is actually a great advantage in some aspects. You actually get to screen your script in a darkened theatre at 90 feet a minute, as if it was film. But we go through this process of building the story as it was scripted and you get to look at it. You get to see that there are dragging parts in the middle. We’d rather have certain elements of the story, or certain characters, that you can actually change without being locked into footage that you’ve shot.
The storyboards ended up being about 72,000 individual drawings. It isn’t quite as bad as it used to be in the old days––when it would have been 72,000 pieces of paper! We use a program that Pixar has developed where you can draw in Photoshop. And basically, you can draw a background once and draw a character once, and then just change the eye position to make it a new version of that panel. You can make it a new drawing even though all you had to do was redraw one element of it.
MT: I think director Adam Shankman had the storyboards in his head for Hairspray. I know he rehearsed these numbers quite a bit and knew for the most part where he wanted to put the cameras. There were five cameras on the exterior shots, or something like that. No storyboards––it was one of those really wonderful projects where no additional photography was required, no pick-ups. When it was finished, it was finished. We only lost one song, which I knew would happen as soon as I saw in the dailies that it didn’t belong in the movie.
On Working with Directors:
GS: The hardest thing about cutting Michael’s films is that the cameras are very active and you hunt for these little pieces that tell the story at the right pace and the right speed. It’s all about finding these little pieces. You could be given an epileptic fit [because of the frenetic shots] if you sit and watch a select reel that you’ve made from Michael’s footage, because you’ve got to look at it for an hour to find minutes of stuff. Everything is going zoom, zoom, zoom. It’s hard. This is one of his most “un-cutty” films, for what that’s worth.
But that’s the way Michael shoots. You can’t cut it any differently. It’s really dependent on how a director shoots it. I don’t think editors really have styles as much as they are constantly ad-libbing with what the directors shot. If they shoot it that way with wild cameras swinging around, then that’s what they’re going to get.
MJM: On of the joys of working with J.J. Abrams is that he is full of ideas––sometimes he’s full of too many ideas. It was interesting to hear what you had to say about wanting your shots to be longer. J.J. got Mission Impossible III because Tom Cruise had seen the first two seasons of Alias, which he directed. I didn’t cut all of them but I was one of the editors on the first two seasons of Alias. One of the commitments that we had on that series was that we wanted to do really kick-ass action––but we wanted the characters to have real emotional lives too.
DH: Brad Bird is quite an amazing director to work with. He generally knows exactly where he wants to go. We spend a lot of time actually forming the dialogue, where in live action you would have to pretty much be constrained to the takes that were shot and the number of times you can cut in any given scene. Whereas here, we start with raw dialogue just the same as we would with the storyboard drawings. We’ll build a performance, sometimes even down to cutting syllables together so that the right word has a different ending that goes up or down depending on what’s needed. Brad finds these little gems and he knows what he wants the animators to do with that performance so he can bring that to the character on screen.
MT: I had never worked with Adam before. I got the job based on an interview at lunch––at the Daily Grill in Studio City. My background as a music editor before I became a picture editor put me in good stead, especially having the great fortune to have worked on a couple of Bob Fosse movies. I could talk to Adam about choreography! I had never seen the stage play of Hairspray, which in a way worked to my advantage; I had no pre-conceived notions of what I thought the movie should be. I just read the script, talked to Adam about it and was fortunate enough to be hired.
On Working in High Definition:
GS: The cool part of high definition is that you do get to really feel like you’re in it and you’re not watching that bacony, dewy stuff you see on a normal Avid. Other than that, I actually have to say that HD is still a little buggy. I have a couple of things I don’t like about it. I’m working on the Avid; it doesn’t stop when I want it to stop. It always goes a little bit further. It’s not good. I’ve also had a lot of crashes, more than I’d like to see.
MJM: I don’t know how much I have to say because we’re getting our first HD Star Trek dailies tomorrow! High definition is all new to me. I’m very excited about doing it, but I haven’t done it before. I just finished a pilot with J.J. a couple of months ago. He was really determined to sell us on high definition, and he set up this whole thing so we could play around with it. It was great.
MT: We had Adrenalines on Iron Man, which was HD,
and I found the response on the Avid much slower. I’m all for new technology,
but I’d go back to Mac OS 9 in a heartbeat! The Adrenalines that we
are using now on Hannah Montana are quicker, but I agree with Glen––I
find myself having to re-edit things where normally I could be pretty accurate.
I realize I’m like three or four frames off. Then I have to go back
and readjust.
The systems aren’t that stable. HD is beautiful and it’s here
to stay, but I just think it still has a ways to go.
Bill Stetz is a photographer, producer and the art director of Editors Guild Magazine. He may be reached at design@clik.net.
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 RED ONE. |
THE FUTURE OF HD IS RED
After intensive product development, RED Digital Cinema showed a working
camera. RED ONE, at HD Expo, after only two years of development.
By using RED’s own propriety sensor, it can capture and deliver
full-frame, full-resolution and compressed images in any format from
4K 35mm, 3-perf frame size down to one-third-inch sensor size, and
deliver the image via RED’s own codec, which has been implemented
in Final Cut Pro and other application/platforms for editing.
Director Peter Jackson, loaned a RED camera for testing in New Zealand, delivered a fully finished short, themed on a World War I scenario––including aerial scenes––that looked amazing when screened. Shot in two and a half days, using PL mount lenses, the picture quality was sharp, saturated and rock-solid steady, an intrinsic aspect of digital delivery and digital projection methods. The picture was as good and in many ways better than the best motion picture presentation one could imagine. Editors should anticipate using media from this production camera soon as RED ONE is currently shipping.
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