Frame by Frame

The graduating editors of the NFTS got to spend the weekend at this year’s Doc/Fest - delegates pass, hotel and travel expenses paid by the school. So off we trotted up the M1… traffic accidents and randomly somehow getting lost in Coventry notwithstanding, it was great to spend some time with the others who went away from the edit suite. And see some films, of course. Here are some thoughts on some of the films I saw.

The good:

Even though it’s been released theatrically, I still hadn’t seen Man on Wire (dir. James Marsh) before going to the festival. But I’m so glad that I got to see it on a cinema screen. The scale of the stills and archive footage of the event itself and those leading up to it could never be fully appreciated on a home television. And the documentary itself is fantastic - it’s mostly led by interviews of those involved, chiefly the wire-walker himself (Philippe Petit) - who is just as charismatic as you’d expect of the person who dreamed up the stunt before the towers had even been built. What’s more, it helped turned the Twin Towers back into the things of beauty and achievement that it’s been difficult to see them as since 2001.

Japan: A Story of Love And Hate (dir. Sean McAllister) is also worth a mention. It’s a film of juxtapositions - English filmmaker in Japan, Japanese worker with anti-establishment leanings, previous and present situations for its lead character Naoki… everything about it seemed to enhance the story of Naoki and a side of Japan not often seen in the Western World.

The interesting:

A work-in-progress Manic Street Preachers documentary ‘No Manifesto‘ was screened at the festival, largely attended by fans of the band. At times it read a little like a PR piece for the band, at others confused about what it was trying to do when it tried to seamlessly blend input from the band members on certain events with speculation from the fans about the happenings (as if they wanted the band to say something specific but just filled it in with the nearest available source if it wasn’t there)…. which was at least partially explained when the director Q&A revealed that she made it because she was a fan of the band, and had got the band on board after compiling a reel of fan interviews and archive footage. This also explained the level of detail wherein we saw extended scenes of band members making their breakfast or talking about their compost heaps. I’ve certainly been so much a fan of something that I’ve wanted to know everything possible on the topic. And with that in mind, I’m sure it will sell well to the MSP fans out there. But within the context of the festival it fell short, somehow.

The downright hilarious:

We Are Wizards - a documentary about the growth of ‘wizard rock’ bands in the US. Admittedly, a certain degree of knowledge of the Harry Potter books will help massively here. But seeing the boys of ‘Harry and the Potters’ happily decide that they’ve come out on top over the high school kid who won class president over one of them because they’re in a documentary and he’s not, or listening to the ‘Draco and the Malfoys’ lyrics of “My dad’s rich and your dad’s dead”…. Fantastic stuff.

Whilst I’m desperately searching down the back of my sofa for spare change in an attempt to be able to afford some editing software and hardware whilst I’m still a student (and before the inevitable unemployment periods make it impossible to pay full price with a clear conscience), I’ve also been looking at the accessories that I’d like to get for the shiny new MacBook Pro 17″ that I’ve been coveting for so long.

One of the things which really impressed me was the silicone skins from editorskeys.com - from whom I’d previously ordered some Xpress Pro stickers in my early editing days. They cover Final Cut, ProTools, Premiere, Logic… all of the major ones. And with the silicone skins it’s apparently easy as anything to just swap between them on your laptop or USB apple keyboard, and not get confused by the different shortcuts if you don’t carry your own reverse settings around with you. Which I don’t, and it can take quite a while to even remember how to mark a clip in FCP if I’ve been solely on Avid for a while.

Anyway, here’s a pretty banner and picture if anyone reading is interested:

As a student, I got free access to the press and industry screenings at this year’s London Film Festival. I could also attend daytime (before 5pm) screenings so long as they hadn’t sold out. It’s a pretty good deal, and one that I’ll be sorry to see go once I leave the NFTS.

Student delegate pass for the London Film Festival 2008

I managed to get to four films in total, all press screenings.

Frost/Nixon was screened at the Odeon in Leicester Square (where a large number of UK/ world premieres are held), and drew quite a large crowd. Having recently taken quite an interest in film adaptations of theatrical pieces (since noticing a dialogue scene in a restaurant in David Hare’s My Zinc Bed SCREAM OUT that it was timed for live performance of a certain genre - even though it leant itself well to the discomfort of the on-screen situation), the adaptation of this was superb - notably so since both leads had of course been playing the roles for some time, and would have had to overcome differences within the adaptation. Similarly, the setting didn’t seem too ’sceney’ - the flow of locations and discussions and character encounters were precise and correct. And whilst I know just about nothing about the historical relevancies and accuracies of the story, enough information was given as was necessary for the plot and genre whilst not labouring it out. Fantastic film, brillliantly structured.

One of the criticisms that student films here often get is that the motivation of characters is missing, or their actions are unbelievable. By the time this point is raised to a significant level, we’re usually within the final stages of the edit and the “do we need to reshoot or can we fix it?” question is whispered amongst the significant production crew members.  Of course by that point we’re usually so far into the process that either the budget’s disappeared in its entirety (along with the contingency and any ‘extra funding’ occasionally raised on the sly), or we’re so far into the woods on a crammed schedule that we can’t see the trees for the caterpillars on the leaves. So it’s useful to be able to spot it and other common flaws in the work of others, as a known easy pitfall. And I certainly recognised the signs in 1234, a low budget British first feature. Their press release focusses massively on the looks, cast and music… which for a film about a band are all clearly major points and probably the things that a target box office audience would care most about after all (and the music backing/ references are certainly all in place). And it certainly functions as a story - the first half concerning the build-up of the band is great, and the audience at the screening were all along for the ride. But then during the gradual break-up of the band, the film seemed to come apart too. Things which seemed inevitable were treated as surprises, significant actions came either completely out of the blue or after a massive delay during which the pace of the film seemed to slow…. still, it makes it clear just how much I’ve learnt from making the mistakes that I’ve made whilst cutting myself.

Director/ Editor Antonio Campos on Afterschool:

I made a short film in 2004 called Buy it now, which was about a teenage girl who sells her virginity on eBay [...] But there was so much rapid cutting and too much music on the soundtrack; it took away from the experience because it felt so cluttered. I decided to make a film about teenagers and do everything in the opposite manner. As opposed to a lot of cutting and a heavy score to try to communicate the sense of adolesence, I decided to watch a confused adolescent in a room, watch two kids talk, observe a conversation between a mother and daughter uninterrupted. And I liked it. I liked watching people.

I had read that before watching the film, and it did help to explain a lot of the decisions… which were often well-judged (a section where the principal of the school is leading a service for the two dead girls is framed for him - and remains so when the mostly much shorter school children go up to deliver their tributes), but did sometimes feel like something he was stubbornly trying to do past the usefulness of the shot. The tribute video which the main character co-shoots and edits is a lesson in editing appropriately for the purpose, though!

Last up was Slumdog Millionaire - Danny Boyle’s latest film, set in India and investigating the life of a child from the slums in India who is one question away from winning the top prize in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? And it was fantastic. Gritty, emotional, harrowing, beautiful, funny, human. The overall effect was outstanding. It’s not out til next year, and does mark a massive change of pace and scene for its director, but I’d recommend it even above Frost/Nixon for the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of the story.

Having picture locked* the graduation fiction ‘Mr Perfect’ (working title), I’m now on my FINAL edit whilst at the NFTS. Animation is still very much an on-going process, but we’re still meeting up for tweaks of recent work and discussion of recent tutor comments.

What I’m now working on (inbetween supervising mixes and onlines where theoretically possible) is JUNK TV, a grad project from the TV department in the form of a 30 minute sketch show. There’s a real mix of studio-based multicamera, location, footage shot on mobile phones, adlibbing…. it’s going to be great fun to cut.

*I say picture locked…. it’s basically at 95%. One of our sequences had music composed very early to a fairly loose cut and when it was trimmed down it lost a lot of its humour. I believe that it’s a case of getting the music to sync again (the composer’s working on it still - it’s the way we do things here), but we may have to look a bit more at the sequence to see if there’s any way to bring certain elements out more once the music’s been finalised with a new tempo

(in, out, in, out, shake it all about - for those unfamiliar with the childrens song)

The past month or so has been devoted to the Fiction graduation film. It’s been a bit of a journey, and our final structure is borne of the knowledge that we’ve tried just about all reasonable alternatives in-keeping with the genre. We’re at the stage now where if someone suggests something different to the version they’re seeing, I can just grab it from another sequence and demonstrate why it was rejected.

However, the fact that we’ve arrived at something which bears a strong resemblence to the first cut (barring two scenes swapped and others shortened or deleted) may have been a product of not trimming the scenes down at an earlier stage, to work with their position at the time - which would have made it easier to isolate the reasons why certain themes weren’t working so well rather than leading us around a mad semi-fantasy world in which half of the virgin audience thought that our main character was mad (we’re aiming for rom-com)! Not that that didn’t have its value of course - we determined the precise value of the dream section and returned it to its original form, cutting out all recurrences or flashbacks - even those originally scripted.

But whilst I thought I was going in and trimming as much as I could whilst we were still moving scenes around - thereby saving time because of not having to massively adjust scenes when we’d changed the order of events, I can see now just how much it held us back. In one sense.

In the other sense, we’re still on track to picture lock on the original schedule - and we almost certainly wouldn’t have arrived at the same film with the same confidence had we not gone through the stages that we did.

A still from “Mr Perfect”