I do certainly have a few interesting side-projects on the go – of which there will be more news as it comes. And two of the films I edited whilst at the NFTS are now on the IMDb, so I now have my own page there on which I am described as an editor… which feels good. Almost as if by being described as an editor on that site means that I really am a professional editor from an external point of view. And in such early stages of my career at a really difficult time in the industry, the validation is comforting.

In any case, I have updated my excerpt reel. I’m in the process of making a documentary reel to go alongside it, but this one is for drama and animation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As usual, any feedback is appreciated.

… at least that’s what the certificate says. If you remove certain words.

My time at the NFTS culminated in 3 days of graduation screenings at the British Film Institute on the South Bank in London. Wednesday and Thursday were industry days – where various members of the film and television industry were invited to see the graduation films and some other selected films from the two year course, and then we could discuss them over drinks afterwards.

Of course, this also means that we got to see each other’s films for the first times in many cases – when the films were shorter in the first year with more regular deadlines, we used to all attend reviews and screenings to give feedback and see what everyone else was doing with their brief. But in the second year we all got a bit too busy and had our own films to be concentrating on, and the tradition lapsed – but it was great to see how they’d all turned out after hearing varying amounts during the filming and editing processes.

In addition to the four graduation films, I had two other films which I’d edited in my first year (a fiction – Brixton 85, and a documentary – Davey’s Last Order) screened at the industry days, which gave me a new audience reaction to notice and a chance to evaluate the editing decisions I’d made over a year ago… which was both illuminating and painful in certain respects, as self-examination tends to be!

The graduation films themselves all went extremely well – the animation Cherry on the Cake had laughs and ‘aww’s in all the right places and looked fantastic on a huge screen. The Love Bureau went down extremely well with the right humour – and perhaps in retrospect an overabundance of cats… although it was fairly representative of the rushes! Park Close again went down very well in front of a new audience, although I was double-booked with the screening of  TV or not TV which was unfortunate as the cast and writers were also in attendance and I thought it would be more useful to get the fresh audience reaction there.

Friday was the friends and family day and the actual graduation itself – which may have been more nerve-racking in many respects! Although in true NFTS tradition it was all rather informal… we corrected Nik’s (the director of the school) speech en masse, got called scruffy by Michael Kuhn, had official photos taken with the stage party, and given sparkly certificates.

So on with the search for further employment! Whilst waiting for the less official ‘wrap’ party…

Now  that I live in London, I’ve continued to see plays old and new by the National Theatre, Royal Court, RSC, Almeida, and many others…. and I find that it stretches the part of my brain that I use for editing in a most pleasing way.

The Editing Process

During the course of becoming familiar with certain works – especially Shakespeare – a certain amount of work not dissimilar to film editing becomes apparent. The works of Shakespeare themselves are published in many different versions even whilst Shakespeare was still alive, and any given production may use aspects of a certain quarto or folio. The recent RSC run of Hamlet directed by Greg Doran moved the “To be or not to be” soliloquy back significantly to the first time we see Hamlet after he has conversed with the ghost of his father, having discovered that it made more sense for their interpretation to follow the first quarto version at that point rather than placing it in the more traditional place between the arrival of The Players and their performance. They also chose to end the play as Fortinbras entered after the death of Hamlet, rather than fully concluding that particular political sub-plot.

Audience Engagement

See any modern production of a  play more than once in the same run which involves the same cast (more on that later), and the chances are that you’ll notice some differences – even if you can’t exactly pinpoint what they were. Changes can be made during previews and even the run according to audience response – much like test screenings for films. Even one night to the next, audiences will react differently (and often unexpectedly) to lines and events, and the mark of a really good company is in how they’ll adapt to their audience response and make the evening even more memorable for those who are there.

Choice of seat can also have a marked effect on the experience a member of the audience will have. A balcony seat at the end of a row 100 feet away from a proscenium arch stage can imitate an extreme long over-shoulder shot for the duration of a pivotal conversation, whereas a centre stalls seat a few rows back can be an optimal position from which to choose whose reactions to monitor –  a sort of self-edit. A thrust stage side-on view can almost place an audience into the play itself, whilst a round situated below audience level gives an eerie uncomfortable CCTV feel to an audience witnessing scenes which become even more intensely private.

Performance

The most recent RSC production of Hamlet made the headlines in 2008 for the speed in which the London run (taking place after many months in the RSC’s home of Stratford-upon-Avon) sold out once the tickets went on public sale. This was largely due to the casting of David Tennant in the title role, rather well known for being in Doctor Who since 2005 – and generally seen by many as a good time to introduce the wider public to Shakespeare because of the casting.

Then, during the run, he got sick. Several weeks of a severely limited run were led by the understudy Edward Bennett. People still went, although empty seats were very noticeable in stark contrast to the lines outside the theatre overnight waiting for returns when Tennant was still in the role. Accusations of ’star casting’ had been largely vindicated by the press once the play had opened in Stratford (as I knew they would be, having seen him on stage several times in the past), but I took the opportunity to see the difference that casting can make.

In the RSC, when a lead player is ill and their understudy takes their place, it tends to have a knock-on effect amongst the entire cast. The understudy for Hamlet was playing Laertes in the same piece, the understudy for Laertes was playing Guildenstern, the understudy for Guildenstern was part of the general ensemble in the play, and on and on until there are just scenes with fewer people than there generally should be and someone with twice as many lines. I’ve seen understudy performances before, when Frances Barber was ill during the London run of Ian McKellen’s King Lear… but having seen this Hamlet in Stratford I was able to compare between the two characters.

The results were interesting. Ed Bennett had had relatively little stage experience prior to 2008, and certainly not within the context of such a leading role on a West End stage. And whilst the performance was consciously different, it still had to fit in with the remaining cast who were still playing their usual roles – notably Gertrude, Claudius, Horatio, Polonius, Ophelia – as well as the staging extensively rehearsed by all and the motivations worked out by the company in rehearsal.

Ultimately, I was quite surprised by how different the characterisation turned out to be within the constraints mentioned above. A fairly different relationship with Claudius largely communicated by eye contact and posture, a more subdued form of madness with less conveyed via physical comedy, and success with humour within entirely different parts of the script. Of course, whilst understudies lack the chance to rehearse as much as the principals OR adjust the aspects of performance to entirely suit their own preferences, there was still the sense of watching two actors play the same role with the same director and external circumstances. Different performances will always suit different tastes, but the points at which they took control of the stage or passed it over to other characters were varied enough to be significant.

So when this transfers to the medium of video, it can never be enough to cut between actors just because of the lines they’re saying.That’s editing by numbers, and more than usually following a set format of  ‘line, cut, line, cut’ … potentially with some variation. Performance is so key. With a really good actor who’s embodying the role and properly thinking about their motivations, their footage can be both a great signpost to appropriate editing decisions within the context of the story that their rushes are telling – as well as a joy to work with. A different actor in that role – even with the same director, motivation, surrounding cast – should result in a different edit, just as much as two editors would never edit the same scene in the exact same way or two concert pianists would never perform a sonata with the same emotional level at the same points.

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 week, for example. It’s the first week of the 5 week (scheduled) documentary graduation film. The animation grad film that I’ve been working on the storyboard/ animatic for has started shooting the live backgrounds with another shoot scheduled for next month, and there are treatments for the fiction (shooting July/August) flying around. To top it all off, in a certain amount of style admittedly, this week we’ve had Roger Deakins and Mike Leigh come in to the school to show us some of their work and answer questions on their work and techniques. I may be an editor rather than a cinematographer or director, but both of them were so inspiring and with enough to say about how they collaborated with the other departments that both sessions were truly unmissable.

So my intended post on my efforts and attempted/ intended workflow on working in a foreign language or two which I don’t speak will have to wait a while. But it’s an experience I knew I’d appreciate. And I’m picking up a bit of the language as I go too!

Still, the result cleared up a major plot point which had never really come across as well as it could have. The screenplay had already reorganised Will Shakespeare’s scenes (logical in theatre, potentially section-after-section in modern day film terms), so I can’t really feel too bad about my last minute shuffling. My most recent documentary edit utilised the scene rearrangement method from a very early stage, but this is the first time I’ve extensively reshaped in fiction in this style – our short films at the school don’t lend themselves open to much of that sort of thing. But having seen how effective it was, my mind feels blown open for future edits in all projects.

You really can read all of the books that you want on the theory of editing – but you just can’t learn how to edit from them. Because editing has to be instinctive, it has to be natural, you have to feel it… and even the most poetic instruction manual is still an instruction manual.