Jennifer Brea had a challenge: to make a film from bed. Brea was a PhD student at Harvard when a sudden illness left her bedridden. She sought to create a documentary portrait of her experience and found support from labs at Sundance, IFP and elsewhere. She premiered Unrest, her debut film, in competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Kim Roberts, an editor and writer on the film, spoke with Filmmaker about what drew her to the project and finding the right tone for a story this personal.  Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What […]

For director Pamela Yates and her colleagues at Skylight, 500 YEARS marks the end of a documentary trilogy on Guatemala. The film follows When the Mountains Tremble (1983) and Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (2011), both of which screened in previous years at the Sundance Film Festival. Veteran documentary editor Peter Kinoy edited all three films. Below, he discusses Skylight’s unique model as both a human rights organization and a film production company.  Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Kinoy: I […]

French filmmaker Alexandre Moors made his feature debut in 2013 with Blue Caprice, an acclaimed indie inspired by the 2002 Washington, DC sniper attacks. He returns to Sundance (where Blue Caprice premiered) in 2017 with The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War drama screening in competition. Moors hired Joe Klotz to edit The Yellow Birds in part based on his affection for The Paperboy, one of three Lee Daniels films Klotz has edited. Below, Klotz discusses how he and Moors balanced “the fragmented nature of time” in the script with their mandate to tell a coherent narrative. The Yellow Birds will screen six times during the […]

Dominican writer/director José María Cabral has made several feature films at the age of just 28. His latest, Woodpeckers (Carpinteros), tells a love story inside the Najayo Prison in the Dominican Republic. As he’s done on most of his features to date, Cabral served as the editor on Woodpeckers. Below, Cabral discusses the challenges of editing this film, which relies heavily on a form of prison sign language (or wood-pecking) for communication. Woodpeckers premiered in competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to […]

MacArthur Fellow Stanley Nelson has devoted his career to documentary explorations of the African American experience. The 65-year-old director/producer has made films on Marcus Garvey, the Freedom Riders and the Black Panthers. His most recent film is Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities, which premiered this week at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Nelson hired editor Kim Miille to cut the film. Below, Miille shares her thoughts on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), making archival photos and letters cinematic and her origins as an editor. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the […]

Saschka Unseld and Lily Baldwin explore the phases and facets of love in Through You, a dance-infused VR piece that premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Unseld is an animator who directed the Pixar short The Blue Umbrella and is a cofounder of Oculus Story Studio, a VR media company. Baldwin arrived at filmmaking by way of dance, having worked with everyone from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet to David Byrne. As a creative challenge, the two decided to edit Through You themselves. Below, Unseld and Baldwin discuss the roughly 150-200 hours they spent editing a 14-minute VR experience. Filmmaker: How and why did […]

First-time director Rahul Jain made a strong impression in 2016 with Machines, his documentary portrait of a massive sweatshop in Sachin, India. The film premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and made its U.S. debut this week at Sundance. Praised for its visceral, experiential depiction of manual labor, the film provides a rare glimpse into the textile mills where many of our products originate. Jain hired the Paris-based Yael Bitton as one of multiple editors to give shape to his harrowing footage. Bitton spoke with Filmmaker before the film’s five Sundance screenings about Machines‘ unconventional narrative structure and […]

Katie Flaxman has edited 35 shorts, TV series, fiction films and documentaries in the past 12 years. Her most recent feature, Killing Ground, made its U.S. premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week. A violent thriller from director Damien Power, the film tells the story of a nightmarish camping trip in the Australian woods. Below, Flaxman discusses the film’s non-linear structure, her techniques for “storyboarding” a film in the editing suite and the importance of POV in thrillers. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]

Yesterday we shared part one of a podcast conducted with Walter Murch conducted by Glenn Kiser for the Dolby Institute Conversations with Sound Artists series. In this second part, Murch discusses how Apocalypse Now changed the state of film sound, why going to film school could be a good idea, and using sound effects to express a character’s emotional state.  

We’re pleased to be sharing this podcast conversation with legendary editor Walter Murch, conducted by Glenn Kiser and including questions from other leading sound designers including Randy Thom, Gary Rydstrom, and Ren Klyce, for the Dolby Institute Conversations with Sound Artists series. In this first part, he discusses documentaries’ effects on contemporary films, as well as aspects of his work on four of his most famous films: Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The Godfather and The English Patient. We’ll post part two of the podcast tomorrow.