The evolution of digital moviemaking continued this year with the end-of-summer release of Crank, a sex-drugs-and-violence-pumped thrill ride starring Jason Statham (The Transporter), who is quickly becoming an icon in this sort of physically blunt, no-stuntman B movie. Injected with an exotic Chinese poison, hit man Chev Chelios (Statham) races across Los Angeles in a hunt for his would-be murderers. Writer/director team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (billed as Neveldine/Taylor) also operated the cameras, opting for a handheld style and giving editor Brian Berdan [IMDb resume] plenty of room to move. Working toward a 4:2:2 Avid DS Nitris conform (executed at LaserPacific) that encouraged experimentation in the creative-editing process, Berdan's witty vision of Chelios's desperate adventure includes cutaways to Google maps, reverse-angle views of subtitles, and even an unprintable expletive briefly plastered across the protagonist's forehead. On a more practical note, he color-tweaked some Canon XL2 footage so it wouldn't look radically different from the rest of the movie's HDCAM footage. We talked to him about workflow, technique, and the continuing evolution of film editing.
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