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Marley & Me: Editing the World’s Worst Dog
by Mark Livolsi, A.C.E.
 A scene from Marley & Me. Photo by Barry Wetcher/SMPSP. Courtesy of Fox 2000 |
On the surface, Marley & Me (being released Christmas Day by Fox 2000 Pictures) is a wacky comedy about the world’s worst dog, but ultimately it’s a thoughtful journey through life. Based on the best-selling memoir by John Grogan, Marley & Me follows John (Owen Wilson), his wife Jenny (Jennifer Aniston) and their relationship with a rambunctious golden lab named Marley. In a story spanning 15 years, the film wrestles with such themes as marriage, children, career and mortality.
The Role of the Editor
I became involved with this picture as a result of editing director David Frankel's previous film, The Devil Wears Prada. He is easily one of the most unflappable, considerate directors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. David respects the abilities of those he hires; he lets us flex our creative muscles because he trusts our instincts. As a result of this trust, many of the scenes I cut remained unchanged to the very end.
 Mark Livolsi. Photo by David Rogow |
The most gratifying aspect of working with David is his slightly unorthodox 9in my experience) approach to editing. “I only get to see the movie as a movie once,” he told me. Therefore, he never wants to see scenes I’ve cut during shooting. Ever. David prefers to see the closest thing to a finished film as possible on the first day of the director’s cut. The implications of this are enormous; I can remove scenes I feel aren’t necessary, I have the film fully temp scored with sound effects, and have even mocked up all the main titles before his first viewing. David’s approach is liberating; it allows me to advance the cut (which hopefully shaves time off the schedule) and gives David a clearer perspective of what elements of the film need to be further modified.
Assistant editor David Rogow adds, “Because David wants to see a more or less finished cut of the film rather than an assembly, making the editor’s cut is a very creative time with a lot of ideas flying back and forth. Mark gives me a lot of creative freedom to try anything and continually build on what works.”
 David Rogow Photo by Gina Sansom |
During the director’s cut, David never stopped wrestling with the structural problems that surfaced. Early on, we realized the first act was too long and some of the beats seemed out of order. He poured over our scene cards again and again, shuffling and re-shuffling them, his writer’s instinct fully engaged, unable to let go until the problem was eventually solved.
Most of Marley & Me was shot in south Florida with shorter shoots in Pennsylvania and Ireland. For the editor’s cut and finishing, our picture dailies were flown in, already digitized. I relied heavily on my crew—assistant editors David Rogow and Bill Kruzykowski and PA Gina Sansom––to ensure the dailies delivery process went smoothly, so I could keep up with the camera. For the director’s cut, we relocated to a rented house in Miami, a block from David’s house. It was a communal experience, very unlike the typical enclosed office environments to which I’m accustomed. In between hurricanes, we flew to New York to output color-corrected HD versions and temp mix the picture.
 The Marley & Me post crew: Top row from left: Re-Recordist Brett Johnson, Apprentice Sound Editor Larry Zipf, 1st Assistant Sound Editor Rick Chefalas, Assistant Editor David Rogow, Editorial PA Gina Sansom, Additional Re-Recording Mixer Bob Chefalas, Assistant Editor William Kruzykowski, Assistant Re-Recordist Paul Tirony, Post Production Supervisor Jeff Harlacker; Bottom row: Supervising Music Editor Dan DiPrima, Co-Supervising Sound Editor Paul Urmson, Editor Mark Livolsi, Re-Recording Mixer Tom Fleischman, Co-Supervising Sound Editor Nick Renbeck. Photo by David Rogow. Courtesy of Soundtrack |
The Post Process
Marley & Me is the first film I’ve edited in HD. Between the editorial team, we had three Avid stations––two Mac-based Media Composer systems (Mac OS 10.4.10, 2.66GHZ dual-core Intel Xeon memory 5GB DDR2 FB-DIMM) for the offline, creative cut; and one PC-based Symphony Nitris system (v1.8.1, running Windows NT 5.0 on an HPxw8400 workstation), all sharing media on an Avid Unity Media Network. Most of the footage was shot in the Super 35mm 3- and 4-perf (2:40) film format, but we also had some P2 footage. We cut in a 1080p/23.976 35mm 4-perf project. We used OMF (48K .WAV OMF 24bit) rather than MXF to avoid excessive transcoding, and to be consistent with the preferences of the sound and music department using ProTools and existing libraries.
 Media Composer screengrab of Marley & Me. Courtesy of Barry Wetcher/SMPSP and David Rogow |
The sound work during the initial editing stage was challenging because one of the film’s main characters is a dog. During takes, trainers were often yelling out commands that needed to be removed. To accommodate this, David Rogow worked with location recordist Joe Foglia to import all of the audio tracks recorded on set. Then we’d re-sync manually, the old-fashioned way, using sticks and time code. I would then receive only the mixed audio track to work with, but the split audio tracks with separate mics were always readily available and accessible on separate subclips. Certain noisy locations also posed major problems and the key frame function in Avid was used extensively by our team.
We used a product called Toki TC to convert Quick Time references (made almost instantaneously in Avid systems) to any codec size and quality. It proved very timely and we relied heavily on DigiDelivery to send these real and partial turnovers to various departments and VFX venders. We also received temp cues from the composer, in-progress VFX shots that needed comments, and dialogue and FX sequences to clean up from supervising sound editors Paul Urmson and Nick Renbeck.
The Impact of HD
We edited the picture using the Avid DNxHD36 codec, which looks incredible and uses relatively little drive space. All takes of the 35mm 3 and 4-perf camera original were transferred to HDCAMSR and then digitized. At the beginning of production, our DP, Florian Ballhaus, worked with the DI colorist to set the look that we would live with for the post process until the DI.
From a storytelling perspective, the biggest impact of working in HD was having the upfront creative control down to the smallest detail. The image quality of Avid DNxHD36 helped us flag focus issues, fine tune visual effects in progress, and provide an overall sense of polish that allowed us to concentrate on more creative dilemmas. The crystal clear image quality made it possible for me to hold screenings for the director––and then later the studio––on a 50-inch plasma monitor right in my cutting room in Miami.
When we moved back to New York City, we were able to jump into a color suite/screening room to view our Avid media directly off our Unity system and onto a big screen. At one point, in preparing for a preview while the cutting room was still in Miami, we set up a satellite Mac-based Avid system in New York that had all our media running off two very small multi-terabyte drives. For studio screenings, we literally handed the consolidated cut to Ted Gagliano (head of Fox post-production) on a 100GB pocket drive to take back to Los Angeles for screening on Avid systems at Fox. We applied this same workflow for getting material to our New York-based colorist who worked with DP Ballhaus in Los Angeles.
We imported color-corrected bins from the Symphony Nitris and re-linked to the original media in Miami. The corrections stayed with us through the rest of the process. Shots requiring a little more detail were up-rez’d to Avid DnxHD175 for the previews with color corrections intact. This was a phenomenally graceful and high-quality way to keep the look we sought throughout the film’s post. Once the color corrections were rendered in our Symphony Nitris system, they stayed in the other Avid systems for all screenings, turnovers and Quick Times. They also provided a color reference for VFX and a starting point for the DI.
Telling the Story
Building the character of Marley is something for which I can’t take a whole lot of credit. Before shooting, I had expected to be confronted with miles and miles of footage and had reconciled myself to the fact that I would have to construct Marley’s performance out of whole cloth. David’s approach took me completely by surprise. The shoot was very trainer-intensive and most was shot in such a way that the dog was actually performing in the scenes with the actors (there were actually 22 dogs in total, including puppies playing Marley in various stages of growth). Many of the scenes were carefully coordinated masters, and we didn’t have to coax a performance strictly through the editing process or visual effects. Since the film is really about the journey of a family, the dog was often just another character in the room.
While adapting a beloved book to the screen has its share of pitfalls, our approach was clear. Everyone involved wanted the movie to be the best it could be as a film in its own right. Although our intent was to honor the book as best we could, we all understood that the movie and the book were two very different media. In light of that understanding, editing this film wasn’t really any different than my previous fiction work––we treated it as its own beast.
A favorite scene of mine to cut was the “two-year montage,” and it involved a unique collaboration amongst myself, the film’s music composer Teddy Shapiro and supervising music editor Dan DiPrima. The scene is a stylistic departure from the film’s rather polished widescreen look. It depicts the passage of two years in the Grogans’ lives and was shot verité style, with minimal lighting and a P2 video camera. The P2 footage was transferred to HDCAMSR and digitized to Avid DNxHD 36 codec (this became our new master––we never went back to P2 again). Since little pieces were shot throughout production, it was one of the last scenes I cut. Shapiro started composing score while I was still assembling scenes. I asked him to write a piece of music for the montage so I had a solid foundation for cutting it from the start. I sent him cuts, and looked to DiPrima to help convey any feedback so Shapiro could revise the music. Creating a montage of rapid-fire edits and multiple scenes supported by voiceover and epic music was a gratifying experience.
I learn something new on every film. As an assistant, I was privileged to sit at the knee, so-to-speak, of talented editors such as Susan Morse, David Brenner and Alan Heim. I was able to learn from, and later collaborate with, my mentor Joe Hutshing, who taught me to edit for dialogue first, among other things. I was given access to a wide array of talented directors, each one bringing to the table his own unique style and emphasis. Working with Cameron Crowe on Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky grounded me in editing for performance--which is always my number one consideration. Vanilla Sky in particular opened my mind to the possibilities of improvisational editing. At one point, Cameron urged me to “play jazz,” in other words, don’t just follow the words on the script page; edit from an emotional or instinctual place.
Hutshing’s advice on editing for dialogue rhythms saved my life on Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are formidable improvisers. During some of their riffs, which were often never alike from take-to-take, I would literally construct a flowing dialogue by closing my eyes and building the scene, sometimes word-by-word. Then I’d clean up the picture and hide the jump cuts.
David Frankel is a very economical director. On the production side, he does not overshoot footage, and our mantra while editing The Devil Wears Prada was pacing. That film is essentially, in his words, about “a girl who gets coffee,” and he didn’t want to run the risk of losing the audience. Marley & Me is a bit more complicated in that it’s a kind of tone poem (again, David’s description), episodic in nature. Although we were cognizant of overall pace, we were careful to maintain the emotional balance by avoiding trimming or lifting scenes that were not necessarily plot-driven.
In the end, David always referred to Prada as a “soufflé,” and that best sums up the experience of editing for him: a healthy mixture of collaboration, creativity, humor, respect, and last but not least, fun.
Editor Mark Livolsi, A.C.E., counts among his editing credits Pieces of April, The Girl Next Door, Wedding Crashers, Fred Claus and The Devil Wears Prada.