EDITOR'S NOTE
It Happens Every Spring
by Tomm Carroll
 Tomm Carroll |
It’s nearly Spring. And this means that while the annual Awards Season is all over––but the crying and some residual sour grapes (our coverage of the post-production winners will appear in the next issue)––the industry now turns its attention to NAB.
The planet’s largest electronic media trade show, staged each April in Las Vegas by the National Association of Broadcasters, is always a reliable harbinger of future trends and technology. Regular NAB attendee Pam Malouf, ACE, offers a preview of this year’s show, which begins April 14, in this issue.
Future technology, in fact, is a thread running throughout this edition of Editors Guild Magazine. In our cover story, editor Angus Wall explains to Michael Kunkes how he and director David Fincher conceived and executed an entirely tapeless post-production workflow for the feature Zodiac, their telling of the story of the notorious “Zodiac Killer” who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film hits theatres March 2. Kunkes also interviews Fincher about digital filmmaking.
Tapeless workflows are not the domain of only big-budget movies, however. As he informs Kunkes, editor Erik C. Andersen used the same techniques for the indie horror film Killer Pad, directed by Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger), and achieved similar success. He is now another digital HD convert.
Also blurring the once distinct line between production and post is Codex Digital, a new high-resolution media converter championed by the visionary Paul Bamborough, one of the co-founders of Lightworks. Bamborough describes the functions of this new piece of equipment and also shares his vision of digital cinema with Debra Kaufman.
Even Park City, Utah is not remote enough of a location to be insulated from this relentless march of post-production technology. As Norman Hollyn discovered while covering the Sundance Film Festival in January, the festival was rife with independent films which employed new digital tools, that make filmmaking available at a higher level and on a lower budget than ever before. He discusses post-production technology with the editors of two films at the festival––Andy Keir (Dedication) and David Michael Maurer (Four Sheets to the Wind).
Not that this whole issue is given over to future, or even state-of-the-art, tech. Kevin Lewis takes a look back some 50 years ago, when Hollywood discovered the burgeoning cultural force known as rock ‘n’ roll music. It was not love at first sight, but a symbiotic relationship eventually developed between the two media.
And finally, a special thanks to Wall, our cover subject. He composited artwork (the scrawlings of the real Zodiac Killer) onto his portraits in this issue (by Gregory Schwartz), as he did throughout scenes of the film Zodiac.
Until next time, when we celebrate the Editors Guild’s 70th anniversary, thanks for reading.