The Surrogate was shot on the Red One MX and edited on a software-only Avid Media Composer system by Lisa Bromwell, an Avid veteran who took on the film as a rare unpaid gig because she believed in the material. When we spoke to her this week, she had just returned from the film's world premiere in the cavernous Eccles Theater in Park City and was already back at work cutting two episodes of Criminal Minds, but she said The Surrogate represented a satisfying departure from her normal mix of editorial jobs.... »
Wiseman may be best known as a pioneer of the cinema vérité school of documentary, which minimizes the director’s presence, but here, he comes close to Busby Berkeley territory, as he acknowledges in the following interview. Working for the first time in HD, he shows new possibilities in the medium, asCrazy Horse matches the color and beauty of 35mm.... »
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close deals with one of the most fraught subjects that can be tackled by a filmmaker — the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Set in New York City between 2001 and 2003, the film sees the events through the eyes of a child who lived them. The subject matter complicated things for the editorial team, which was tasked not just with handling the material with appropriate sensitivity, but with organizing a significant amount of VFX work depicting the New York City of 10 years ago, all with an end-of-year release date looming ever closer. Film & Video spoke with associate editor David A. Smith about the special challenges of the project.... »
The latest collaboration between Tedeschi and Scorsese is George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Here, Tedeschi talks about his collaborative process with the director.... »
Still frustrated by the introduction of Final Cut Pro X? Baffled by the trackless timeline? Flummoxed by the lack of support for XML and EDLs? Irritated by the missing pro features? Evan Schechtman feels your pain. The founder of Outpost Digital and CTO of @Radical Media in New York doesn't think FCPX is ready for prime time, either. But if the widely perceived failings of FCPX are making you consider abandoning Final Cut completely as an editorial platform, he has some advice: "Everybody just breathe. Just chill."... »
Editors on a Transformers movie use the script and previsualizations as starting points, then build the picture scene by scene — even as the evolution of VFX shots opens new directions in storytelling and the effects of 3D help dictate the editing rhythms.... »
You've no doubt been reading a lot about Final Cut Pro X. So have I. On Thursday I met with Apple and brought with me the litany of concerns voiced by current FCP 7 users.... »
In 1994, Pamela Martin edited director David O. Russell's first film, Spanking the Monkey, which was also her first feature as a lead editor. She got her start assisting Tim Squyres and Ang Lee for Lee's first two features, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, only a few years earlier. She has since edited a string of sharp, dialogue-driven comedies with stellar ensemble casts, notably Little Miss Sunshine. In a slight shift in genre but a return to her roots, she and Russell joined forces for this year's multi-nominated ensemble drama, The Fighter.... »
Historical recreations are expensive. That's why director Robert Child determined that he would shoot footage for The Wereth 11 one little piece at a time — he was getting elements in the can, not full scene tableaux. StudioDaily asked Frederic Lumiere of Lumiere Media to describe the challenge of editing a project that's made up of tiny bits and pieces, rather than coherent shots and scenes.... »
Film & Video got editors Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter to take a break from their work on Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — which is, like The Social Network, being edited with Final Cut Pro — and talk about bringing Fincher's and Sorkin's vision of Business 3.0 (and a bit of old-fashioned loneliness) to bracing life.... »
Avid today underscored its leadership position in open media production solutions with the introduction of new versions of its flagship editing systems—Media Composer version 5.5, NewsCutter version 9.5 and Symphony version 5.5—in response to customer requests for increased third-party hardware support, enhanced “in the box” functionality, and more open, collaborative workflows with added control integration and format flexibility.... »
The new music video for MGMT's "Congratulations" is striking and unusual. Framed in widescreen as it chronicles the slow decay of a strange (pet?) animal against a desert landscape, the carefully assembled story ends on a note that may be depressing, baffling or uplifting, depending on your point of view.... »
One of the more powerful secret weapons for NLEs is Avid Media Composer's ScriptSync feature, which uses speech-recognition algorithms to organize footage. Editor David Helfand told us how he uses it on Weeds.... »
Cameras were tearing through 35mm scope, 35mm VistaVision and 65mm (five-perf) stock, and super-high-speed footage was being captured with cameras from Vision Research (Phantom digital cameras) and Photo-Sonics (35mm flat film). As usual with Nolan’s projects, the film did not get digital dailies or go through a digital intermediate. Film & Video got on the phone with editor Lee Smith and additional editor John Lee to learn about a workflow that mixes the best of digital and analog technologies.... »
F&V took a look inside post-production on Predators by talking to editor Dan Zimmerman and re-recording mixer/dialogue editor Brad Engleking about living up to Robert Rodriguez’s mantra — at Troublemaker, filmmaking takes place “at the speed of thought.”... »
