Back to selection
“We Didn’t Want to Just Chuck in a Bunch of New Bits”: Editor David Timoner on Dig! XX
A still from DIG! XX, a Sundance 2024 40th Edition Celebration Screening. Winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in 2004, Ondi Timoner’s DIG! used the developing careers of indie rock bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre to examine the complex, often incompatible relationship between art and commerce, as well as the one between the bands’ frontmen. Now, Dig! XX revisits the story, digitally remastered and enhanced and complete with an additional 35 minutes of footage.
Below, Editor David Timoner, Ondi Timoner’s brother and frequent collaborator, discusses revisiting his first major project and how he sought to improve it for its twentieth anniversary.
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film?
Timoner: I made the original Dig! with my sister Ondi back in 2004. We started it together right after I graduated college in 1996 and all through the seven-year process of making it we were cutting chunks together and building scenes. When it came time to finish Dig! I was starting a family and working in television as an editor, so Ondi took on the herculean task of cutting 2,500 hours of footage together into a compelling narrative and finishing it.
In the intervening years, Ondi and I continued to collaborate from time to time (me as editor, Ondi as director/editor on We Live in Public and Brand: A Second Coming). As this 20th anniversary approached, we knew we wanted to do something special with Dig!. We knew there were some amazing scenes that didn’t make the original cut—composed of source footage that was slowly decaying in Ondi’s garage. We felt like it was now or never. At this point, Ondi is an incredibly busy director—often juggling 4 or 5 projects in various stages of production at a time. As a TV editor, my life is considerably less hectic, so I stepped up to wrangle this beast into shape.
Filmmaker: What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Timoner: Ondi and I are the only ones who were there 27 years ago and went through the seven-year up-and-down marathon of making Dig!, so we were really the only ones who “knew where the bodies were buried” and could do it.
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?
Timoner: Except for our work in college, Dig! was our first feature length doc. Looking back on it after a career as an editor, there are always moments that I wince a bit at—moments that I wish were smoother or narratively clearer. So first off, this was an opportunity to take another polish pass. Beyond that, there were these incredible scenes that we remembered shooting that we wanted to insert into the film to make it better.
Dig! XX is the original Dig! expanded, remastered and reimagined. Every frame that was in the original Dig! is in Dig! XX, plus expanded scenes, whole new scenes and an entirely new voiceover narration. At first the biggest challenge was weaving the new footage into the old while not just preserving, but elucidating and deepening the narrative in the process.
The original Dig! had one narrator, Courtney Taylor of The Dandy Warhols. A lot of the scenes that we wanted to add or expand in this reimagined version took place inside The Brian Jonestown Massacre, the other band in the film. So, early on we reached out to Joel Gion, percussionist for The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Joel has been writing a memoir and was in the process of publishing it. (In the Jingle Jangle Jungle is available for pre-order and officially dropping on 2/29/24). His onscreen comedic performance was already a central part of Dig!, and adding his witty voiceover really opened up the narrative possibilities.
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Timoner: Before Ondi cut Dig! into shape 20 years ago, she started with an assembly that was five hours long. So first, we went back to the “five hour cut” sequence in Avid and relinked and redigitized as much as we could. We got about 90% back online. Then I took the old DIG! master and overlaid it on top of the five-hour cut. This way, we could see which scenes were originally cut longer and could be expanded and which could be added as brand-new scenes. Then I exported this cut in big chunks and we watched together, noting which additions were worth exploring and which were redundant or non-additive. We had a pretty high threshold. We didn’t want to just chuck in a bunch of new bits just because they were new. They had to serve the narrative and, most importantly, improve the viewing experience. Once we determined which scenes were worth expanding and adding, we turned our archival assistants loose on the boxes of tapes in Ondi’s garage. They found a lot of gold in those decaying Hi8 tapes!
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Timoner: I first learned how to edit when a public access station opened in New Haven, CT (Citizens Television). I started out editing tape to tape on 3/4″ decks, helping my sister with her first films. Right out of college we continued to collaborate, and I picked up Avid. My biggest early influences were the Maysles Brothers and D.A. Pennebaker. Don’t Look Back was a revelation to me the first time I saw it. I didn’t follow a traditional path as far as first being an assistant editor. By the time I started working in television in 2002, 2003, I had been my own assistant editor for several years and was comfortable breaking down footage and stringing stories together on my own.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Timoner: We used a number of systems along the way. We started our offline edit on Avid Media Composer. That was the software that the original DIG! was cut on, so we stayed there for relinking from the five-hour cut and building and expanding scenes.
One hiccup we ran into, though, was that the current version of Avid software no longer supports tape based redigitizing, especially from 20+ year old Hi8 and Mini DV decks. So for digitizing from tape, we used Media Express from BlackMagic Design and then imported the files into Media Composer.
Once we had a cut that we were feeling good about, we started upscaling our footage from Standard Definition (640x486i) to Hi Def (1440x1080p). These files were large and took a very long time to import into Avid, so at that point we switched to Adobe Premiere Pro for “online.” The ease of dragging and dropping the clips into Premiere and being able to cut in the native resolution was a real bonus. (Note: I now know and have been told by several of my editor friends that I could have stayed in Avid and “AMA’d” the clips in to save importing…. I had no AE on this project, so I did what I did!).
Finally, we exported the locked cut to DaVinci Resolve for coloring, and our colorist Mon Agranat did a masterful job.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Timoner: I think the most difficult scene was the fallout after the arrest in Georgia. In the original DIG!, Anton and Ondi get busted in Georgia for possession of a single joint, and then we quickly use a voiceover from Courtney Taylor to end the scene and move on with the story. Going back to the source footage this time, we decided to live in the desperation and “rock-bottom-ness” of it all and try to put the viewer in the position of the band members at that point. You’ve just gotten out of jail, you show up to the club too late to play so you don’t get paid, you’re broke and generally freaked out. Some members of the band try to joke around and play to the camera, while Anton loses it. We wanted to show the band members’ multiple sides—laughing in the face of hardship, coping with the trauma of being arrested and your tour running aground and the emotional fallout that ensues.
Crucial to making this scene work were three things. First, the extended footage that chronicles the band falling out at a low point. Second, Joel’s new voiceover that explains the circumstances and backstory. Now we know why Anton’s upset, and we also know that playing to the camera and joking around is also a form of coping. The third essential element to making this scene work is Morgan Doctor’s score. She threads the needle emotionally… subtly bubbling tension that boils over during a violent shouting match in a dingy Atlanta area motel room.
Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?
Timoner: Upscaling was our most essential and difficult postproduction process. To bring our interlaced SD master to HD life we relied on Franny Lane, our digital remasterer. She primarily employed Topaz AI to upscale our source clips. It was a painstaking process with seemingly endless revisions. Some particularly low res or otherwise challenging source clips looked very weird after their first run through Topaz. Franny tried multiple approaches and combinations of de-noisers and upscaling tools, sometimes removing noise and then re-adding it to a cleaned shot to achieve the best possible result.
Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?
Timoner: Dig! and Dig! XX will always be incredibly personal to me, as I spent most of my early 20s making them, and they functioned as a sort of film school in the wild for me. Every time I revisit it, I’m struck by the humanity of all the characters. Sure, some might label some characters narcissists or, others, burnouts, but each of them in their own way were sincerely pursuing their art, often in defiance of societal norms, and I admire their boldness and faith in their muse.
This time around, one neat surprise has been in the help and insight we’ve received from the next generation. Our archival assistants were in their teens and early 20s. They love the film (cool to know the kids dig it, haha) and they found some real gems in the vault—some funny, great additions that would have been overlooked without them.
