ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
PRIME CUTS 2
TV Editors Talk Shop
By Michael Kunkes
A featured part of the American Cinema Editors’ (ACE) EditFest held in Los Angeles August 8 and 9, was the second annual Prime Cuts event, co-hosted on Saturday morning at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre by ACE and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS). Introduced by Jason Rosenfield, A.C.E., co-governor (along with Stuart Bass, A.C.E.) of the Picture Editors Peer Group of ATAS, the panel once again brought together editors from across a wide spread of programming, including drama, comedy, reality and MOWs.
 At the Prime Cuts seminar, top row from left, are: Jason Rosenfield, Chris Nelson, Andrew Seklir, Tatiana S. Riegel, Maris Berzins, Shawn Ryan; bottom row: Gregg Featherman and Leo Trombetta. Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging. |
Also for the second year, the panel was moderated by Shawn Ryan, executive producer of The Shield and The Unit, as he quizzed a diverse group made up of Chris Nelson, A.C.E. (Lost, Mad Men); Gregg Featherman (Entourage, The West Wing); Tatiana S. (Tanya) Riegel, A.C.E. (PU-239, Lars and the Real Girl); Leo Trombetta, A.C.E. (PU-239, Little Children, Big Love); Maris Berzins (Project Runway, Rock of Love); and Andrew Seklir (Battlestar Galactica, Eureka), about the finer points, creatively and politically, of editing for television. Some of those discussions follow.
Shawn Ryan: How do Lost and Mad Men differ?
Chris Nelson: For me as an editor, Lost is a more interesting show because it is more diverse, offers more deception and more ways to try and deceive the audience. You can play nuances and a lot more levels of subtext. Mad Men is a great show, but because it utilizes only a couple of main locations, once you’ve done half a dozen, you can wind up cutting a similar version of a scene that you’ve already done between two people in a similar room. Lost shakes up the box and it’s like cutting a new series every week.
Ryan: How has digital changed the face of editing?
Nelson: When I was working on Hill Street Blues and other shows of that vintage, a big day of dailies might be an hour. On Lost, it’s not uncommon to have four and a half hours on any given day––and last week, I had three hours on Mad Men for six pages of dialogue. Logistically, dealing with that amount of footage in a film environment would have been impossible; but on the other side of that coin, they were shooting 45-minute shows in seven days so the script page count per day was higher.
I do think Avid editing is a lot more humane than film editing used to be. In those days, I’d be working 15-hour days on the last week of an MOW, and it was really cumbersome with changes because you didn’t have an older version to refer to. Now, if we are discussing a change, its much easier to implement it rather than sitting around and theorizing about whether it’s better to make a change or not. In the film days, you just had people’s opinions; you didn’t have the opportunities to make drastic changes and turn things around, then go back if you didn’t like it.
 From left, moderator Shawn Ryan with editors Chris Nelson, Gregg Featherman, Tatiana S. Riegel, Leo Trombetta, Maris Berzins and Andrew Seklir. Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging. |
Ryan: Is there a downside to today’s working methods?
Nelson: We used to go to screenings and watch the show as a whole piece; on a daily basis, we could gauge the temperature of the room and throw out questions. Now, as editors, we don’t have time to look at four hours of dailies. I scrutinize them as I am cutting but don’t have time to sit and watch them. They come in on drives and are input directly into the system. At least when they were on tape, the assistant could sit there and do a QC on them, but now its drag-and-drop and here’s your stuff. Almost no one is seeing what they have until the first cut is done, and that can be a detriment in a lot of ways. People don’t always make little corrections on the tone, attitude or coverage during the process.
Ryan: Entourage is a comedy, but has its basis in reality. What do you do editorially to hit the humor in the show?
Featherman: It’s a very fast moving, crisp show and it comes down to adjusting the pacing of scenes.
Ryan: How closely do the actors stick with the dialogue? Is there a lot of improv?
Featherman: There’s a lot of overlapping dialogue in Entourage, but the dialogue is a lot less improvised than it might appear. It’s just that it feels very fresh. I originally learned to cut overlapping dialogue by not cutting at the beginning of sentences; at first, that used to bother me, but now I realize that it shouldn’t, because that often enhances performance. Now on Entourage, I cut on the second or third word of sentences, after the overlap is over. It’s just something I learned to work with, because we do almost no ADR on the show.
Ryan: How much to do lean on your assistants?
Featherman: Everything is shot multiple camera, so I will have everything grouped to make it easy for me to go from A camera to B camera, and I have my bins arranged in such a way that when I open my scenes, it’s very easy for me to see how each shot progresses through each setup. It’s a way of designing the bins within the groups, and makes it very easy for me to open them and see what that shot does. It also reminds me of what I did when I have to go back and open that shot again two weeks later. That bin preparation is also really good for the directors. Entourage also tends to shoot at extremely inconvenient locations such as Laker games, so they often have to go to isolated microphones, and I rely on my assistants to go back and add those isolated tracks when we cut.
Ryan: One of the more unusual things about the show is the
lack of an underscore.
How do you fit music into that style?
Featherman: We use songs, but they have to be the right songs, with just the right tone. We get lots of choices and spend a lot of time going through the material. I cut the show first without music, then spot the show, figure out where music should go, gather five or six options for each place and just start plugging them in. One way that I measure the success of each episode is by how much of the music from the cutting room made it into the final show.
Ryan: Entourage has a major coolness factor.
Featherman: Yes it does. For some reason, it seems that all doctors love watching Entourage. It has been very helpful in my medical care; my gastroenterologist even quotes lines form the show verbatim!
Ryan: Tanya, PU-239 is an MOW. How do you go about getting a job on a project like that?
Tatiana Riegel: Ultimately, it comes down to personality. Will a director want to spend a year in a room with you? Obviously, they see your work, you talk about your ideas on the script, but there may not be anything tangible for the editor to see.
Ryan: How did you build your relationship with the director?
Riegel: PU-239 had a small budget, so I could not be on location the entire time. So instead, I went to the Romania location for over a week but didn’t do any editing. I just hung out on the set, watched dailies at night, and got to know [director] Scott Z. Burns and what he was looking for so that I could be ready to work when I returned to Los Angeles.
Ryan: What was the most challenging thing about the project?
Riegel: There were two lead characters and two very separate tones—the Timofey character that is dying of Plutonium exposure, and Shiv, a bumbling, Pulp Fiction-esque Russian Mafia guy. Their stories are similar; the way it was at the beginning, we follow them both separately for 45 minutes until they finally meet. However, figuring out the back and forth between the characters was extremely challenging; we tried every possible option. Ultimately, the decision was made to have them meet right at the beginning so that the story made more sense as it went on.
Ryan: How did you get into the business?
Riegel: It was just dumb luck. I took an unpaid job on a small film and they taught me how to sync, code, log, pop track and all those things. It’s much harder to come up now; you must have a tremendous amount of knowledge just to break in. One of the biggest drawbacks today is that assistants just don’t have that true apprenticeship process where they hang trims, see everything, talk about the cuts. They are missing out on a lot, and I always try and include my assistants in the process as much as I can.
Ryan: Leo, where do you feel your responsibilities lie?
Leo Trombetta: My role is to respond to the footage as a viewer. A movie is not like a book where you can take a year to read it and every time you pick it up you are right back there. An editor is watching a movie in real time, and you have to be aware of the audience, keeping the story’s focus and telling the story in as tight a fashion as you can.
When you are working with writer-directors, it’s very tough to tell them something isn’t working, especially when it’s their stories. I recently finished a film where the first cut was over two and a half hours long, but I was very proud because I was able to convince the director to lose 75 percent of the things that I felt were hurting the film. There was a great movie in there, but it was going off on these tangents where the story lost focus. Of course, it was his film, so I still had to live with that other 25 percent.
Ryan: Can you edit a scene too much? Can you get lost in a scene to the point that your fourth cut might have been better than your tenth?
Riegel: That’s one of the things I love about going back and forth between TV and features. In TV, you have to be much more instinctual because of the schedule, but in features you have the luxury of being able to walk away from it a little bit and then come back.
Trombetta: It all depends on the “notes” situation. You can cut a scene and be really happy with it; then the notes start coming in from the studio and network, and you can lose the essence of what these scenes were originally––especially on network television. I just finished a pilot where we had a two-hour notes session with four executives just piling on, and you start to think this is just a camel that was a horse designed by a committee. There can be too many directions.
Ryan: Maris, editors are starting to get more credit for the success of reality shows. How responsible are you for putting these stories together from massive amounts of footage?
Maris Berzins: Project Runway shoots between 120 and 150 hours for each hour episode, and the process starts way back before I even see the footage, because the story department is cutting it all way down. By the time I get it, there’s about 45 minutes of footage for a sequence that ends up being ten minutes. That means there’s a very high trust level among the people that work on the show.
Ryan: Are you ever in the position of having to manufacture drama or tension?
Berzins: We have the advantage of having these interview bites that we can interplay with the reality scenes; they really feed off each other. Oftentimes, we don’t have the scenes we need on camera and we will need to do some tricky editing, but it’s never totally misleading or deceptive.
Ryan: On Battlestar Galactica, how do you make sure the plot isn’t overwhelmed by the effects and what are the editorial challenges?
Andrew Seklir: In a sci-fi drama, you are completely involved in another world, so you’re always asking, “What does that world sound like?” “What are its unique rules?” We’ll have actors who may be playing multiple versions of themselves; some that may appear only in people’s minds, and others interacting with an invisible presence. The challenge in editorial is to communicate that world to the audience, knowing the right points to cut out from the effects and release the drama that’s going on.
Ryan: As supervising editor on the show, how collaborative is the process with the other editors on the show?
Seklir: Being a supervising editor is a new experience for me, but on Battlestar, which is a complicated show with story arcs that spread over multiple shows, it’s helpful to have one person tracking things from episode to episode to make sure that things that may not seem that important in a current show are established and preserved for later shows. I also can communicate ideas to the other editors as well as do additional editing where it’s needed.
Ryan: At what point do you say, “It’s done; I’ve done the best I can do?”
Featherman: From my point of view: Never. I may run out of time, but I never want to sign off…
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.