David Rosenbloom calls them “movie moments,” those ephemeral slivers of magic discovered amongst the voluminous footage he sifts through in his role as an editor. They can be as small as a glance or as large as a cackle from Whitey Bulger. The latter can be found in Black Mass, Rosenbloom’s second collaboration with director Scott Cooper following 2013’s Out of the Furnace. The film traces the true story of Irish gangster Bulger’s thirty-year reign in Boston, abetted by his role as an FBI informant. Rosenbloom talked to Filmmaker about his start as an editor, his software of choice for […]
In order to make the submission deadline for the Toronto International Film Festival, writer/director Joe Begos and producer/editor Josh Ethier had a locked cut of The Mind’s Eye seven weeks into the editing; the effort paid off as the psychokinetic thriller is getting a World Premiere as part of Midnight Madness programme. The cinematic tale features Zack Connors (Graham Skipper) attempting to use his special abilities to prevent the mysterious Dr. Slovak from descending into a psychic rage. “Joe is a visual director who shoots and operates on his own films,” explains Ethier, who has collaborated with Begos ever since […]
A LEGO Brickumentary, a documentary that looks at the culture and appeal of the LEGO building block, opens July 31. Like many historical documentaries, this project involved working with a wide range of archival footage, but it also made use of footage shot with a wide range of modern cameras — in one case, all shooting the same event. Co-producer and post-production supervisor Chad Herschberger of Milkhaus talked to us about the work they did on this documentary and the ins and out of post-production work, including animating faces on LEGO bricks, moving media between Avid Media Composer and DaVinci […]
The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all. It was, instead, a lovely piece of conceptual counterprogramming in Tribeca’s Storyscapes section, Door into the Dark. An immersive theater piece by May Abdalla and Amy Rose of the U.K.-based company Anagram, Door into the Dark wasn’t positioned by curator Ingrid Kopp against the films in the festival. Rather, by including Door into the Dark within a program largely dominated by Oculus Rift VR work, Kopp used Door in the Dark‘s simply generated yet expansive mindscapes as a way of setting a high bar […]
Documentary films often rely extensively on archival film, and dealing with different archive sources and the variety of formats involved can become a significant headache. For The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, co-producer and editor Nimrod Erez had to deal with hundreds of sources and dozens of video formats. As editor and co-producer, Erez ran the post-production department, overseeing the additional editors brought in to work on the picture and seeing the movie through grading and final picture. The film will be released this year and is the second and final part to follow The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, which was released in 2013. The […]
First-time director Saar Klein got his start in Hollywood as an editor, where he’s been working with top directors for the past two decades. He has two Academy Award nominations under his belt, for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. His feature debut After the Fall joins the strong lineup of this year’s recession-era dramas. Wes Bentley plays a mediocre insurance appraisal agent who loses his job after being too generous with payouts. He turns to a life of crime in order to make payments on his house and keep his family above water. Becoming a petty […]
The filming of Boyhood, shot over 12 years, posed some unexpected challenges in post-production. At a recent meeting of the Boston Creative Pro Users Group, First Assistant Editor Mike Saenz explained the difficulties of the editing process, made more complicated by changes in technology that occurred over that 12-year period. Begun as what Saenz called “an indie side project” by director Richard Linklater, Boyhood was originally edited using Final Cut 3, as they couldn’t afford to rent an Avid system for 12 years. A couple of years into the project, they switched to Avid Xpress, a lower-end system from Avid. They […]
I spent a half-day at Adam Epstein’s “The Cutting Edge Post-Production Tour” last week. Epstein, who is the editor for the Saturday Night Live Film Unit, has spent the past month and a half traveling the country presenting on how to be a better editor. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t stay the whole day. Unfortunately for you, the tour ended this week, so you’ve missed it too. If you can come away from an event like this with an actual tip or technique that you start using and with one piece of inspiration to improve how you work, that actually […]
Opening today, August 7, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is This is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger, a survey of the director whose arty erotica more or less defined what in the ’70s was dubbed “porno chic.” On the occasion of this retrospective we are reposting, from our archives, this wide-ranging 1997 interview conducted by Steve Gallagher. Among the topics: Metzger’s days creating edited versions of European arthouse masterworks; the origins of his glamorous soft-core aesthetic; distribution in the ’60s and ’70s’ his hardcore work, including The Opening of Misty Beethoven, done under the name […]
Adam Epstein is a freelance editor. For the last five years, he’s worked with the Saturday Night Live film unit, editing parody pieces of all kinds. He’s just begun a nationwide workshop tour with “The Cutting Edge Post-Production Tour,” a day-long seminar covering techniques, theories and editing insights. We recently spoke to Epstein about editing, working on SNL and the workshop tour. Filmmaker: How did you become an editor? Epstein: In my experience, it’s never a direct path. I started out in school, working on a student-run sketch comedy show, and we were able to get our hands on some of the […]