In horror movies, kids are often exempt from the carnage. It’s a trope of the genre—the cute moppet that any experienced horror viewer knows is in absolutely no peril within the confines of the film. Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of It opens with a grade-schooler in a yellow rain slicker having his arm torn off by a sewer dwelling clown—a creature who then drags the child into the underground bowels of Derry, Maine. The film’s brutal ground rules are immediately established – anyone is fair game and no appendage is safe. “I am very conscious watching any film where the main cast […]

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 […]

A motion picture camera used to be a light-sealed box with a strip of film running through it. Was it easy to thread? Did it run quiet? How bright was the viewfinder? Today’s cameras are exponentially more complex. They are literal bundles of separate technologies, each lurching forward at a different rate. To understand today’s cameras, you must understand the parts to understand the whole. This is my third annual overview of digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker, and it is being written in the run-up to NAB 2013 in Las Vegas, the world’s largest trade show devoted to digital video […]

Two weeks ago RED announced that they were suing Sony for patent infringement for technology used in Sony’s PMW-F5, PMW-F55, and F65 cameras. Last week Sony posted a response on their Pro video website. First noting that the F65 has been commercially available for over a year, and that the F5/F55 were announced in October, they go on to say: Sony has now had an opportunity to study Red’s complaint and the asserted patents, and categorically denies Red’s allegations. Sony intends to defend itself vigorously in the Red lawsuit. Sony looks forward to prevailing in court, thus vindicating the Sony […]

When 3D TVs were the rage, I was convinced it was just a cynical push by the electronics manufacturers to sell TVs and nothing else. To me, 3D was a fad that would be used for a few things, but was unlikely to become mainstream. I’d seen the future before; I saw Jaws 3D when it was first released. So when the manufacturers started talking up 4K cameras, with promises of 4K TV sets, I was convinced that this too was a push to sell new TV sets that wouldn’t amount to much. Sure filmmakers with a big budget will […]

Editing is older than motion pictures. The ordering and pacing of dialogues, scenes, entrances and exits to build conflict and resolution have long defined Western theater, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung [Der Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot that modernized 18th- and 19th-century novels and clever sequencing of mechanically animated magic lantern glass slides that thrilled Victorian audiences to popular epics like Ben-Hur.

At the start of my interview with Tim Squyres, the editor of most of Ang Lee’s films, including his latest, Life of Pi, I tell him how much I like the movie. I say that I know I like it because its images, its ingeniously affecting conclusion, and, most of all, the headspace it created for me have lingered for days. Upon waking each morning, scenes have come flooding back. And the subtleties of the film’s ending, which contains a rich meditation on the role stories play in our lives, have resonated in my mind in unexpected ways. “I get […]

Editor Alan Edward Bell began his career in the late ’80s, working first as an assistant editor (Heathers, Lord of the Flies, Misery, A Few Good Men) and then, a decade later, as editor on a string of both independent and studio films including Little Manhattan, The Story of Us, Water for Elephants and (500) Days of Summer. It was the latter film that connected Bell with director Marc Webb, and the two recently completed their second project together — The Amazing Spider-Man. Below I talk to Bell about cutting a blockbuster, 3D, the AVID, Final Cut Pro, how multiple […]

Postproduction is in a state of flux. As is well known by now, Apple’s latest Final Cut Pro iteration left a lot to be desired for professional editors, and competitors Avid and Adobe were quick to step in and lure away Final Cut users. And now the newest competitor is also the oldest. Lightworks, one of the first viable nonlinear editing systems when it was first released in 1989, has been used by luminaries like Thelma Schoonmaker and has racked up a number of Oscars and other awards, including a technical Oscar and Emmy  for the system itself. It couldn’t […]