Editors
Interviews - Editors
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Anagram Creators May Abdalla and Amy Rose on Door into the Dark
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 […]
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Dealing with Archival Footage: Making The Prime Ministers
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 […]
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“Finish Your Scene Before You Go to Lunch”: Five Questions for After the Fall Director Saar Klein
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 […]
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Editing Boyhood: Dealing with Changing Technology
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 […]
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Lessons from the Cutting Edge Tour
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 […]
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“This is Softcore”: The History of Radley Metzger
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 […]
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Adam Epstein Talks Editing for SNL and “The Cutting Edge” Workshop
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 […]
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Sympathy, Said the Shark: Shooting in POV
Writer, director and editor Devin Lawrence says that when he set out to make Sympathy, Said the Shark he’d already gone through two projects which had stalled out due to lack of financing, so he decided he had to come up with something where “money can no longer be the ultimate road block.” The resulting project was shot in 14 days and primarily in one location, but it was by no means a simple project to make as much of it was shot using a POV rig built around the Blackmagic Pocket Camera. Lawrence, who works in LA primarily as […]
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A Round-Up of the Last Non-Linear Editor Updates
June proved to be a rich month for non-linear editor users. Adobe released their latest Creative Cloud update, Apple updated Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor, the public beta of DaVinci Resolve 11 was released, and the Mac beta of Lightworks finally appeared. Adobe Creative Cloud On June 17 Adobe released the second major update to Creative Cloud. For Premiere Pro this release adds a new masking feature for effects. You can now easily add an effect mask either using an Oval or a four-point polygon tool. A built-in tracking tool makes it possible to track a shape […]
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The New Ultra-Wide LG 34UM95 Monitor Is A Gamechanger for Sound and Video Editors (Sponsored)
The following is a sponsored editorial post from LG. For video and sound editors, getting enough screen space to get work done efficiently has long been a problem. Even with two 16:9 monitors running off one CPU, there’s still bezel barriers to contend with, and your working space quickly grows cramped, slowing down workflow as you struggle to make all your programs fit. Now there’s a solution: the LG 34UM95, an ultra-wide 21:9 monitor with 3440×1440 Quad HD resolution. Sound mixers can now see all their tracks in a wide, uninterrupted linear sequence, with the high resolution eliminating time wasted […]
