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.

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:

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.

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

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”

This is one of the later stages, complete with temporary subtitles. The main video (and associated audio) is mostly coloured by character or location, which helped to give a decent at-a-glance indication of how the overall structure was looking without having to go through scene by scene every time we moved something.

Doc edit in AXP

Meanwhile, the animation’s been moving… well, as quickly as these things do, I guess. Most of the significant line drawing’s almost complete (there are assistants to do intermediate steps, as well as colouring once a few frames have been done), and we’ve altered the timing of a few shots now where it seemed right in the animatic, but had to change slightly once motion was added. There’s more still to come, but it makes the most sense to just spend half an hour each day with the director and run through any queries and recent work - less frequently if there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but she’s the fastest WACOM user in the West! Since she’s working with stills for the filmed backgrounds, the best bet’s probably going to be to reimport the final film with the new timings, alter the HDCAM backgrounds to sync with the film, then re-export for the compositing stages.

A still from the NFTS short animation 'Cherry On The Cake'

I’ve also been learning a bit of DVD Studio Pro in my downtime, with a view to producing a proper showreel DVD with complete films within each type of thing that I’ve cut (documentary, animation, fiction, adverts, promos etc). I’d done some really basic stuff with it in the past, and I’m still going the long way around on some things I’m sure, but anything which allows this amount of control is worth it:

Preliminary thoughts on editing showreel layout in DVD Studio Pro

… yes, that IS a picture from Cherry in the background. It’s intentionally blurred, and makes an appearance in the film in a photo frame - the level of detail on that model was fantastic.

Time to clear some of the 50+ hours of documentary rushes from my hard drives to make way for the fiction. After that is a sketch show (post planned for October/November), then it’s just supervising post on the films I’ve done and out into the ‘real’ world. Easy.

1. Optimism - “This could be really good.”
2. Confidence - “This is great!”
3. Doubt - “This is what they want, right?”
4. Resolve - “Fuck ‘em! We can do this!”
5. Despair - “Fuck, we can’t do this!”
6. Siege Mentality - “Fuck everyone, what the fuck do they know?”
7. Insane Euphoria - “Hahahahahaha! Who gives a fuck? Let’s edit with our toes like Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot. Let’s voice it ourselves. On helium. Let’s fashion part three from brie or jam or Old Spice or bits of dog.”
8. Relief - “Pub?”

This of course is a subject we’ve all discussed before - what if editing could have the user interface of Minority Report?

In the film, Tom Cruise reviews video footage of a crime (that has yet to happen, but that’s irrelevant here) and utilises all manner of time-lapse, zoom and selection tools via a pair of gloves and a projector.

The potential has always been obvious - mapping functions on an editing system to certain gestures (in the same way they can be mapped to buttons on the shuttlepro) to start with, with more specialist applications being developed to relate those gestures to certain areas of the screen/room or depending on the toolset you’d like to access at the time…. but with the wii remote and now the promised multi-touch mapping to multiple features and becoming a part of regular useage, the future seems to look bright. We’re getting there. Now just to combine them and not actually need a physical connection to input data.

Another ‘future’ development that came to my attention recently was in the 20th June issue of Broadcast - the UK TV trade paper. Within a more general section hypothesising the technology available in 2012 (with a fair number of mentions given to stereoscopic techniques, also known as 3D and previously discussed in this blog), there was a mention of the implications for post-production involved in tapeless filming. If rushes/ dailies are recorded straight to a disc, could that disc be part of a network which also includes an edit suite? How soon could editing theoretically begin after filming starts? And if an editor is on set/ receiving footage in real-time even in a remote location, how would that alter their role - as well as that of the director and cinematographer?

As a recent entrant to the post-production business, it’s easy for me to think of the current processes as how they’ve always been. My technological progression has more or less been from Premiere to various versions of Final Cut and Avid. As part of the Editing MA at the NFTS we do two excercises on Steenbecks with 16mm film, and I have a vague recollection of witnessing linear editing at Oxford Road in Manchester during some BBC outreach programme I participated in during my school years. Unless an article or book is specifically referring to the physical techniques involved, the view seems to be that the editor’s role and input has stayed largely the same over the conversion to digital even if the techniques have changed. But as I prepare to start my professional career (with any luck) with the tools that I think will see me through for the time being at least, I do wonder how different the job will look and be in 40 years’ time.

Playing around with Wordle, I entered in the text from my ‘about’ sections here and on my website as well as my CV…. and generated the above. It’s interesting to see without the surrounding context - some things are titles or synopses of projects, some things are background information which aren’t so relevant to what I do now, seperate words are broken up… but I suppose it’s fairly similar to how a computer would see the site, and also shows the emphasis (however unintentional) on certain words.

It’s fairly elementary, but the Doctor Who Confidential (BBC iPlayer - I believe only accessible from the UK) from last week has quite a nice insight to sound post-production processes for the uninitiated. Sound is always something I feel I’m lacking in - either I put off laying temp tracks etc for longer than I should within the editing process, or I just play around for ages with controls without any real sense of what I’m doing when I try to achieve a certain technical effect. Foley recording, however, I love. Take that as you will…. it seems fairly counter-intuitive for an editor, but the rhythms and the precise timbres of sounds synched to a video just appeals to a certain side of me which I guess I usually use in dialogue scenes more than anything, but comes from my musical and orchestral past.

Also, I’m considering my next phone. I think I’ll need email and internet, and I’m torn between the iPhone, a Blackberry, or a Nokia (E90) Communicator.It’s a few months away, but I’m currently swaying towards the Nokia, unless anyone has any insights?

http://reel-exchange.com/members/cc8e25f7/profile/

I intend to do another one in a few months’ time once all of the grad projects are over, since they should technically be my showcase pieces… but I find it useful to at least know that I’ve got something up before the great (and quite probably eternal) job search begins. There’s just no way of knowing what time I’ll have free between now and then - though my documentary edit has at least now resumed after reshoots. Which means yet more digitising… in many ways I can’t wait for everything to go tapeless, but if it could hold off for just a bit longer whilst I’m not relying on digitising jobs to eat, that’d be fantastic…. Though my recent frustrations with exporting and uploading to network (for backup) a 22,000+ HDCAM resolution TARGA sequence suggest that there’ll still be jobs around for a while yet. Also that my WD 1TB firewire drive was indeed a good investment. It’s turned out to be a vital piece of kit in the last few weeks.