The latest issue is about directors and there are two interviews with interesting quotes — one from Danny Boyle, director of the stunningly directed 127 HOURS, and Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu, director of the haunting BIUTIFUL.  Both of them give advice to filmmakers about following their passion. Interestingly, I think this is great advice to anyone who is working on a piece of art — whether as a director, producer, actor, editor, cinematographer, sound designer or whatever.

In Mike Fleming’s interview with Danny Boyle, the director says:

“Beyond persistence, the only advice I ever give to young filmmakers is, ‘Don’t be shy in the way you tell a story. Be bold.’ There is that great quote, ‘Boldness has genius in it.’ People forgive you many things if you remember that.”

Fleming interviews Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and he says:

“We are not machinery. These things are individual expression, themes with original ideas. We may fail sometimes, but we attempt to move things forward.”

There are many types of boldness — in your work and in your work life — and both are rewarded (though to different degrees, depending on circumstances).  The boldness that Boyle talks about is obvious in his own films. And, yet, Inarritu hints at something much more. We are not machines and we often cannot be held back. But to push on our own envelopes require a boldness that is quite scary at times.

I remember when I was a music editor, back in New York City.  I was doing rather well, and had developed a reputation that was getting me offers on some great films – SOPHIE’S CHOICE, FAME, THE COTTON CLUB and more. I was having a great time and working with top notch people, but I had always wanted to edit picture.  I was extremely comfortable as a music editor, but I thought I wanted more.

It took some large degree of boldness, prompted by my wife, to give up the security (and, let’s be honest, the ego) of being a top-notch music editor. It meant starting back at the bottom. It meant admitting that I wasn’t the best at what I did — far from it. It meant giving up some financial security. Ultimately, it meant moving from New York City to Los Angeles.

But those first steps led me to where I am today — and very happy at being here.

That same kind of boldness is what makes directors like Inarritu and Boyle so exciting to watch. It is what clearly inspires the directors who admire the most — Stanley Kubrick, Francis Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard (I just saw BREATHLESS again, on a big screen in New York, and it is a stunning piece of work, even today when that sort of filmmaking has been done to death), Hal Ashby and several more. Because the reality is that there are more than enough people out there who are willing to do “just enough” to be good.  But it takes an ability to move outside your comfort zone to exceed.

Years later, people don’t remember Stanley Donen’s crappy films. They remember SINGING IN THE RAIN, because of its boldness. HIGH NOON is remembered for its stunning characterizations, use of music and montage and its sheer boldness in design. I don’t profess to know what will last from among this year’s crop of films. But my guess it will be more along the lines of INCEPTION than HOW DO YOU KNOW? (sorry for that catty comment, but you know what I mean).

Just a guess.

As an artist, you owe yourself a chance to be both responsible and irresponsible, at times. Boldness for boldness’ sake is not a virtue, but fear isn’t either.

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Advice On Boldness From The Best

One of the first things I learned from him, though, has very little to do with music, but everything to do with how films grow organically and how none of us can know everything.

Craig Wasson, Michael Huddleston and Jim Metzler from FOUR FRIENDS (Courtesy Festivalblog)

It was on the set of the film FOUR FRIENDS, which we shot in the Chicago area. One of the very first days of shooting was a night shoot in which the four high school friends, living in the mid-1960s, met in the middle of a suburban street, approaching each other from opposite sides of the street.

Arthur, who by this time had directed ten films (including the amazing works BONNIE AND CLYDE, ALICE’S RESTAURANT, MICKEY ONE, and THE MIRACLE WORKER), a few TV movies, and something like three dozen episodes of television shows, set up the first master shot so that it followed three of the characters as they danced down the street playing the New World, until they stopped — out of breath.

As the music editor on the film, one of my responsibilities on the film was to work with the four actors so they knew their musical parts (we were recording live, even though we would eventually replace the music in post) and could play it together. I watched as Arthur set up that first wide shot, and worked it until we got it done. We followed two of the characters down the street, as they played a bit from Dvorak’s New World Symphony on their instruments with the other two — who were off camera for most of the shot. Eventually, the camera (which was on Garrett Brown’s Steadicam) moved to the center of the street as the shot turned into a four shot, with the four friends playing to each other. (I should mention that Jodi Thelen’s character was named Georgia, and they all had a major crush on her in some way — hence the choice of the piece by screenwriter Steve Tesich).

After getting a good take on that first master shot, Arthur proceeded to line up the camera for the first piece of coverage. He and the d.p. (Oscar winner Ghislain Cloquet) walked around for a bit with their director’s viewfinders, setting up the shot until Arthur finally looked up and told the first assistant director, Cheryl Downey, that he had actually set up the first (Steadicam) shot incorrectly. Instead of ending up in the middle of the street pointing to the four characters, he really should have ended up with the camera on the sidewalk, pointing to the opposite side of the street for the characters’ four shot.

In other words, the shot we had spent forever setting up and getting would have to be redone.

Arthur looked around, apologized to the crew, and we all went out and prepped for the revised master shot.  Which we got in record time. Happily.

Now, the point that I’m making isn’t that even a director of Penn’s stature can make a mistake. We are all human, and we all can make mistakes. No, what I’m pointing out is that the genius of Arthur leading this crew and allowing himself the ability to discover the best filmmaking approach as the film develops.  Despite an amazing career, a great cinematographer, and a professional crew surrounding him, Arthur learned something about the scene and wasn’t afraid to take his lumps in front of the crew as he admitted it.

He learned as he shot. And that is an amazing ability. In my book THE FILM EDITING ROOM HANDBOOK, I said it myself (I believe in the first or second edition). I have never had a job in which I didn’t learn something. When I get to the place where I stop learning, it’s time to quit.

There was another time when I found myself amazed at something that Arthur did on that film. We were shooting a scene in which a group of high school students, in an auditorium, stormed the stage during an Army recruiting speech, singing “Hit The Road Jack.” We were shooting coverage onto the audience and Arthur put the camera on a very short dolly track and as the students came up to the front of the stage he pushed in ever so slightly. It didn’t look like much on the stage where we were all standing behind the camera. In fact, it didn’t even look so impressive the next night when we all watched it in dailies.

But, several months later, when I saw the scene as editor Barry Malkin had cut it, as I was smoothing out the music for a screening, that short little dolly move took my breath away. Even on my tiny 35mm Moviola screen.

FOUR FRIENDS came and went relatively quickly, but I learned several things about learning from Arthur Penn on that movie — I learned to question my own assumptions — that shot that I was sure wasn’t that impressive turned out to be just right. And I also learned how to act when something I learned changed my thinking in front of my collaborators. It’s never too late to learn, I learned. It’s only when we stop learning that it comes “too late.”

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

In fact, as I understand it, the auteur theory really says something much more interesting – that, over the course of a number of films, a good director imbues each film (no matter how different) with a recognizable point of view. The difference between an auteur and a journeyman director — common in Hollywood in the Sixties when that French theory came to prominence — is that each film of an auteur becomes inextricably intertwined with that director’s style, vision and personality. A “work-for-hire” director has no such distinctive stamp. In that theory, Michael Bay is as much an auteur as John Ford.

So, the auteur theory really talks about subtleties that are much more visible in retrospect. To some degree, they can’t be consciously added in at the outset. Yet, this theory has somehow become the torch by with which less talented directors tend to destroy their films, as they consciously attempt to force their “personal vision” onto each of their films.

That’s what I understand about the auteur theory. But now I’ll ignore that knowledge go with the second definition – that it’s about the directing imposing a vision on a work.

That auteur theory is bull.

These thoughts were raised by a question that someone asked me on Twitter a little while ago: “How do you deal with a director who has incredibly idiotic ideas?” the questioner asked. Implicit in that question was a second one: “And what do you do when that director forces those dumbnesses onto you?”

I’d like to address that question by looking at it from another angle.

Jeannette Catsoulis New York Times review of Robert Rodriguez’s film SHORTS is Exhibit Number One for me. This is a film in which a number of children live and learn in a town whose main company, Black Box Industries, manufactures one product – the Black Box – which she describes as “a strange, multipurpose gadget that resembles an ebony Rubk’s Cube and can serve as everything form a cheese grater to a solar panel.”

Catsoulis, who didn’t much like the film, boes one to say:

“Concocted by Robert Rodriguez, a kind of filmmaking Black Box (he wrote, directed, edited, produced, photographed, composed some of the music and supervised the visual effects), “Shorts” feels underwritten and overdressed.”

Aside from the fact that I have never particularly liked most of Rodriguez’s films (most of which seem to me to suffer from a love of technique and use shortcuts to character), it seems to me that Catsoulis is accusing the director here of falling in love with his own voice and his own work. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes sort of story, in which no one wants to tell the King that he’s nearly naked.

[As an aside, Manohla Dargis -- in the same paper -- off-handedly (and quite nastily, I thought) makes a similar claim on Quentin Tarentino’s last film, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, when she says:

“He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke,” a comment which manages to insult both the film and a fine editor at the same time (Menke’s been doing this long enough, and worked with enough people, to not take a job if she knows she is going to be treated like a mere pair of hands)]

Directors, listen to me hear — it’s impossible to make a film by yourself. Not every idea you’re going to have is good, and not all good ideas are going to come from you. The best comments I’ve gotten from directors are when they turn to me after viewing my Editor’s Cut and say “Wow, there were some things in there that I never would have thought of myself. Thanks.” Of course, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to use those ideas, but it does mean that the director’s creative juices are going to be kicked up a notch and there will new and better ideas flowing very shortly.

And that is the ideal way to work with any creative person: come to the table with an idea (the “thesis”), let that person come up with a different idea (the “antithesis”) and then to let those two opposing notions contribute to a third, usually better, idea (the “synthesis”). Directors who feel that they are the sole auteurs of their work, and are too afraid or guarded to open up to other ideas, will generally miss out on those “third, usually better” ideas, and their work will suffer. (I talk about this in the latest episode of the podcast that I do with Larry Jordan — 2 Reel Guys — in the episode on Collaboration.)

That’s why the more roles that a creator takes on, the more the work will usually suffer. Being a writer/director is dangerous enough. When you become a writer/director/editor the combination is almost always disastrous.  I’d venture that John Sayles solo films, for instance, were never as good as when he worked with an editor. Even the vaunted Coen Bros have suffered when they edited their own work.

It’s a problem that I’m continually fighting among those talented students at USC. I’d rather they learned how to talk to an editor to bring their ideas to the fore, than edit their film themselves. Simplifying the communication process, in this case by eliminating the editor, doesn’t make for a better film. Creating a common language (such as the one I talk about in my book THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT) does.

So, to get back to the Twitter question, “How do you deal with a director’s stupid ideas?”

In my opinion, the first thing to realize is that those ideas might not be stupid ideas at all. The fact that they seem stupid to you may say more about you than about the director. You might be jealousy guarding an idea of yours that you’d be better off questioning. Just as we want our directors to be collaborative, it is important for us (as editors) to be open to those “antithesis” ideas.

The second thing to realize is that, even if the ideas are stupid (“Can’t we take every other shot and turn it upside down?”), most directors who have done their homework are coming up with ideas because they are missing something. They aren’t getting the emotional kick from a scene that they wanted. They might not understand a character’s motivation the way that they feel is necessary. Or they might not feel tension or energy or humor. Or, there is more confusion by the end of a commercial than they desire.

The problems are myriad (haha, a very subtle HEATHERS reference there) but the psychology is the same. Unless the director is a complete moron, every idea and question that they have comes from some place. It is the job of the editor to dig below the question/comment and figure out what it is that the director (or producer or showrunner or whoever is in charge of the vision) really wants.

And the third thing is that if the director really is a complete moron, I’d take a look at yourself and ask why you took the job in the first place. I know that there’s always rent that you have to pay, but if that’s the deal that you’ve made with the devil, then you’ve got no business complaining about idiot directors. Life is too short to be working with people who don’t fill you up with artistic and/or emotional fulfillment.

(adapted from an old blog entry on another site)

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Collaboration and Why The Auteur Theory Is Bull

I’m not here to argue with his point of view, or anyone’s for that matter.  Though White would strongly disagree, I believe that (at its best) film watching is a visceral experience as much as an intellectual one and, as such, can lead to great divergence of opinions.  There is no absolute right and wrong if a film is really working.

White went to Columbia University’s School of the Arts, receiving his MFA there. This gives him the cudgel that he uses to slap around a mesmerized and overly polite Chen. In fact, he tells all three of these Internet film critics, that he feels that Web film criticism is mostly uninformed and shallow, and that everyone who calls him or herself a film critic should be trained in the profession.  ”Professional film critics,” such as himself, it seems, cannot be questioned by people who haven’t been to film school and taken courses where they sit with a Moviola (I’ll deal with this comment in a little bit) so they can examine films frame-by-frame. According to Wikipedia, White calls himself a “pedigreed film scholar,” without much definition of what he means by that broad statement (that statement can be found in a short, not particularly interesting, piece on him in Macleans, a more interesting and substantial read is a New York Magazine piece on him).

Now, I’m not here to support or bash White — plenty of much better writers, who are much more familiar with his work, have taken their shots already. But two comments that he made on /filmcast, as he argued against INCEPTION’s value as a film, strike me as immediately calling into question White’s qualifications, MFA and his “pedigree” claims aside (aside from the obvious one I mentioned above — that he still thinks that the Moviola is a viable tool to examine films frame-by-frame.  Where has he been for a decade?).

Here is my prejudice — right up front. Years ago, I found one critic (Art Murphy, in Daily Variety) who understood filmmaking, film history and film story well enough to actually tell me things that I didn’t know about films that I had worked on. I learned about filmmaking and storytelling from his comments. I pretty much haven’t found  another one since. Note, I am not saying that a film critic needs to  know all of those things to provide value, but it certainly raises the odds. Otherwise, they’re film reviewers — giving their opinions, for better or worse.

There are certainly those out there who will, quite correctly, tell me that it isn’t necessary to know how to make a film in order to critique it. But I usually find that critics who don’t know much about filmmaking fail to understand the art of how films are shaped. And they make idiotic mistakes, usually with the same degree of self-confidence that they bring to all of their statements. (Both White and the guys on /filmcast tend to fall into the school of criticism that if you say something with enough conviction, then it must be true.  Sort of like I just did.)

Courtesy www.bscreview.com

First, early in the podcast, White states that INCEPTION’s director, Christopher Nolan, doesn’t understand film because he is not a visualist. White is entitled to his opinions, but he goes on to say that filmmaking is a primarily a visual work of art. “You don’t need sound, but you have to know what you’re doing with the images. And from the word ‘cinema’ you have to be able to handle or execute kinetics. And those are the basics.”

This point of view is so amazingly short-sighted and ignorant that it staggers my imagination. It seems to come from the mind of someone who has never observed intimately just how sound and music affect audiences. The fact is that the word “cinema” doesn’t come from the English word “kinetics,” it comes from the Greek word “kinema” (which means “movement”) and “kinein” (which means “to move”). Nowhere does it say  ”visual movement.” As anyone who has ever been in a darkened room can attest, movement comes from sound as well as visuals. In fact, some of the most emotional moments in my life have come from listening, as well as watching.

To dismiss sound and music, as White very easily does, shows an ignorance of  how filmmakers all over the world are today using the tools that filmmaking gives us and puts him firmly in a camp with very few other visitors (a place that I’m sure he really likes). My observation is that critics who come from a non-filmmaking background much more easily make these mistakes than those who have actually participated in the filmmaking process.  Ask any editor — it’s one thing to sit at your “Moviola” inching forward, frame-by-frame (assuming you can find an editor who works on a Moviola today). That is certainly one of the things that we need to do as we shape our films. But to truly appreciate how an actor’s performance affects us, or how a camera dolly can move us, or to hear what an actor is saying with inflection, or what a change in sound is doing to us, you need to run that puppy at 24 frames per second (or 25, if you’re in Europe) and really experience it.

This is one reason why, at USC, we make sure that the Critical Studies students take a filmmaking/production class as part of their curriculum. Many of them take more than one. I think it makes them better and smarter film critics and teachers.

Another real honker is when White tries to convince the three tongue-tied slash-film critics that everything on a movie can be laid at the foot of the director. One of them, I believe it was Quigley, falls right into that trap, claiming that many films are taken away from the director so that White’s point must be wrong. But that is giving White his point on a silver platter. The real point, as one of them does say, is that there are a lot of names listed on a film’s credits and, while the director is generally in charge of them all (and responsible for communicating the tone and style of the film to each of them), each of them contributes a staggering amount of their own personal vision to the film, in a way which deeply affects an audience.

I actually don’t really see the point of claiming that the director is the ultimate arbiter of a film. Often a director is not even the first person on a film — preceded by the writer and a producer. I certainly understand how someone without a vision can create a holy mess because their creative team isn’t working  together. But I don’t really understand what is so precious about attributing the complete vision of a film to one person. Look at the difference in Sam  Mendes work before and after Conrad  Hall’s death. One can also claim that Vittorio Storaro’s effect on Bernardo Bertolucci’s work was crucial to the successes that both of them had.

As White himself says, in an attempt to dodge a point made by the slash-casters, you’re not in the room with the director so you can’t really say who did what (this was in regards to Steven Spielberg’s effect on Michael Bay’s work on both TRANSFORMERS films). But he never connects that with the reality that most of the really good ideas, with really good directors, are shaped by collaborations, rather than just by a strong single vision.

And that is a mistake that non-filmmakers often make. White excoriates critics who pray at the altar of megabuck Hollywood films. Yet he prays an altar as well — that of the single-vision filmmaker. And that is just as shortsighted.

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Filmmaking, Critics and Sound

What is his number one?

Be on time or early. I am absolutely amazed at how little this is followed. Yes, I know there is traffic. Yes I know there is rain. But that means nothing to the person who has 5 meetings after the one with you. Show respect to them and their project. Be on time or early.

That is also one of my pet peeves. It is completely true that someone who shows up late one day on a set is rarely asked back for a second day. There are pretty much no excuses which are acceptable. I’m convinced that that’s why there’s the food truck (the infamous “Roach Coach”) on set bright and early — way before call time. They say it’s to make sure that crew members don’t wander off looking for breakfast, but I think it’s because so many of us leave so early to avoid being late to call time that we end up getting to set pretty early.  And, therefore, need to put something in our mouths to distract us.

If you’re working on a big film, then holding up a shoot is costing tens of thousands of dollars each hour. If you’re working on a low budget film, then holding up a shoot is stealing coverage from the director. If I’m not at a mix because I’m late, I can’t contribute to it — including the note that the director may have given me at midnight one time that only I know about.

Besides, it’s damned rude.

Another very wise rule from Mr. Kammes:

Understand the processes outside of your concentration. What you work with is a direct result of what the previous department did; just as the next step in the post process relies on you doing things correctly. Someone will mess a step up – and you need to be able to track it down. [Emphasis is mine.]

That’s what collaboration is all about. Those of us who have worked in editing are usually the people who work with the end credits. As a result, we know better than most, just how many shoulders we stand on in order to do our jobs well and look great. So, it’s better to understand just what the lab printing process is, or the pulldown changes that the sound department needs to incorporate into their work. That way, when we talk to them we show that we care about what they need from us in order to do their job well.  And we can gain their respect. That respect means a lot more to them than how smart we are, when we have to call them in the middle of a tough day of shooting to ask them to re-send some paperwork, or to discuss a potential problem.

So… scoot on over to Michael’s Scott’s site to get some smart talkin’.

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Rules For Beginning Filmmakers

The biggest thing that attracted me to teach at USC full time, when I started there eight years ago, was the fact that the Dean told me that our mission was not to teach better toys (though we certainly have to teach technology) but to teach better storytelling.

I don’t know a single filmmaker who thinks that their job is to play with technology. Ask any cinematographer, editor, sound designer, production designer, actor, producer, director, etc. what they do for a living — and they’ll tell you that they’re storytellers.

So, it’s been a great disappointment that there is about fifty times more web content about what buttons you’d push then why you’d push those buttons. Sure, I learn a lot from video tutorials — I watch them all the time. I learn a ton from casts like Film Riot and Avid Screencast, as well as videos from Larry Jordan, Ripple Training, Lynda and more. But it pained me that there is so little out there about why you’d use a certain lens to tell a story, what costume designers do to help a script, how silence and sound work to push the meaning of a script, and more.

About a year ago, Larry Jordan (FCP guru, trainer and co-host of the necessary-to-listen-t0 show The Digital Production Buzz) and I were talking about working together, and it occurred to me that, together, we could create just such a videocast. Now, Larry is way more comfortable in front of a camera than I am, but I’ve been doing teaching and speaking for years, and had developed a number of very teachable concepts about story construction that I’d written about in my book THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT. Surely, we could pool our overlapping talents and come up with something that could help fill that gap.

Well, thanks to the support of Avid Technology, we’ve been able to do just that. We’ve already shot, and are finishing, 20 episodes of a new videocast called 2 Reel Guys in which we talk about the concepts of the Lean Forward Moment in storytelling. Each episode deals with a different aspect of how to use the initial storytelling concepts that we talk about in the first two episodes. Some of the concepts that we deal with (in 6-10 minutes each) include: how to work with actors, how sound design and camera techniques can help enforce the story that you want to tell. We’ll talk about editing, costume design, collaboration and much much more over the run of the series (which will hopefully go beyond these first 20). Starting yesterday, we’ve released the first two episodes of 2 Reel Guys, and we’ll unleash a new episode every two weeks — on the first and the fifteenth of each month. It’s the start of something which is quite exciting to me — bringing the concepts that we’ve been working with and teaching for years — to you; all for the low low cost of nothing.

That’s right. You can leave your wallets at the door (or on your night table, whichever is safer).

Give it a try and leave comments on our website.

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Telling Stories Without Getting Hung Up in Technology

Now, here’s where you can get involved.  First off, if you’re in the area, register for this two-day event.  It’s going to be well worth your while and, honestly, with the discounts for students, or many user groups (both FCP and Avid) you’ll more than get your money’s worth — cocktails on Friday, pizza and beer on Saturday, along with some great panels.

But here’s another way that you can involved.  I am going to ask each of the panelists to show a scene from a film that influenced that filmmakers, and then all six of us are going  to talk about it. Here is a preview (the first look — never before announced) at what you’ll see if you’re there:

1. Michael Berenbaum is showing the opening sequence from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, directed by Sergio Leone and edited by Nino Baragli in
2. Joe Klotz is showing an early scene from DOG DAY AFTERNOON, directed by Sidney Lumet and edited by Dede Allen in 1975
3. Andy Mondshein is showing the last scene from BONNIE AND CLYDE, directed by Arthur Penn and edited by Dede Allen (again!!  how fitting) in 1967,
4. Sandy Morse is showing the opening of THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, directed by Julian Schnabel and edited by Juliette Welfling in 2007,
5. Andrew Weisblum is showing the “birth of the hula hoop” scene from THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, directed by Joel Coen and edited by Thom Noble in 1994.

Whether you’re going to be at EditFestNY or not, what I’d love for you to do is submit questions for these editors.  I’ll select a few and ask them for you.  What is it that you’d like to know about that scene or how it affected each of these editors.  You can submit the questions here, or tweet them to me on Twitter.  My name there is @schnittman.

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Help Me Interview 5 Great Editors

Now, I’m not romanticizing those Good Old Days. The idea that my students (and thousands of You Tubers) don’t have to wait eight years to start editing something on their own is pretty great, considering that they’ve grown up surrounded by edited material in a way that I did not. And my students, for better or worse, have spent 3-5 years experimenting with the form and developing great skills.

Still, the chance to meet and hear really fantastic editors talk about their craft is never to be passed up, as is the chance to have some drinks and pizza with them.  Which is why I am heartily recommending that those of you within driving distance of Manhattan on June 11-12 register today for the upcoming EditFestNY.  This is a 1-1/2 day meetup of editors where we are going to discuss our craft.  There are panels galore, with editors such of features and television, fiction and documentaries.

It starts off on Friday June 11 at 7:15pm with a panel that I am thrilled to be moderating (called with the editors Michael Berenbaum, A.C.E. (Sex and the City 1 and 2), Joe Klotz, A.C.E. (Precious, Junebug),  Andrew Mondshein, A.C.E. (Remember Me, Chocolat, The Sixth Sense),  Susan Morse, A.C.E. (Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters), and  Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E. (Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Wrestler).  I’m asking each one of these editors to show a scene from a film that inspires them in some way, and the entire panel is going to talk about the clips.  It should be a huge blast.

To get more information about this two-day event (including the guests) and to register, just click on the link at A.C.E., which is sponsoring the event along with the Manhattan Editing Workshop.  Discounts are available for students and for members of a ton of user groups (including any Avid or Final Cut Pro user groups — and since membership in LAFCPUG, for instance, is free you can get the $100 discount just by signing up).  The event promises to give you great access and knowledge all in one friendly weekend — and there’s drinks on Friday night, and pizza and beer on Saturday, so how can you go wrong?

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Meet Editors, Talk Editing, Have Cocktails

First, not everybody’s learning curve is the same so you can’t teach  a concept only once. In other words, since everybody is going to learn at different times, you’ve got to structure your teaching so the same thing is taught in several places in several ways because you never know when a student’s teachable moment will be. To most effectively teach many people you need to structure your teaching so you’re teaching concepts from many different perspectives at many different times.

Allied with this is the fact that most people (and this applies particularly to teaching artistic concepts) really learn something only when they need to learn it. It’s why I’ve always believed in project based learning. I can talk about pre-lapped audio all I want, and I can show you examples of it until the cows come home. But most of us aren’t going to really learn it until we need to do it in our own editing in order to push the energy at a cut. I don’t know about you, but I rarely read manuals until after I’ve started playing with a piece of software. Most of my students don’t want to learn how to change the opacity of an effect until they realize that they don’t like the effect that they’ve just created and need to change it. If it can get better with a tweak to the opacity then they will really remember that setting forever. If they don’t need to tweak the opacity, all I can do is bore them with instructions.

The second thing I was told (and this goes with the first points I think), is that you need to tell your audience what they’re going to learn before you teach it, let them know what they’re learning while you’re teaching it, and remind them what they’ve learned after you’ve taught it. It’s reassuring to the learner to understand that there is a new concept being taught and that they’ve learned it. It also gives them three chances to figure out how this new concept works for them.

Third, all teaching is really about entertainment. Most people don’t learn things just because you tell them they need to, any more than they’re going to like swallowing medicine that’s good for them. They have to be involved in the process, and that often happens when they’re entertained in that process. Mary Poppins said it (or sung it, to be precise): “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

I was thinking about these thoughts as I began playing with the latest version of Avid Media Composer — 5.0. It’s not available to everyone right now, but there are a few advantages to running the editing track here at USC, and seeing some software in early stages is one of them.  You’ll all get to play with it soon enough, and you can certainly see enough videos about the new features (there’s one on the Avid web site, and another from a German media site) but one of the most interesting points about the new version is that it changes some of the interface, partially in an attempt to make it more Final Cut Pro-like in that it allows for more direct manipulation of the tools right within the timeline without jumping into various modes.

Naturally, there are editors who are already not liking it.

If you ask me, a large part of the eternally stupid debate between FCP and MC users boils down to what we are most comfortable with. And that boils down to what we learned on. I remember when NLEs first started coming onto the market there was a great hue and cry among editors about how giving up 35mm or 16mm film editing was going to make for sloppier editing. Sitting here in 2010, I don’t know of any editors who still edit exclusively on film. As for me, I’d leave the country before going back to the days when we spent more time hunting for tiny two-frame trims hidden in the bottom of our shoes than we did working our films with those trimlets.

Editing on the Lightworks

My first NLE experience was on the Lightworks, a great tool that had the advantage of feeling more like a flatbed film editing machine than the Avid did at that time. It had a timeline in which I could open and close splices (there was no editing on the Avid timeline at that point). It was so much better than editing on film (even with its horrible screen resolution and limited storage space) that I was immediately won over.

Many of my editor friends were not. They weren’t willing to sacrifice 35mm projection quality (even though they generally looked at the film on the tiny screens of their upright Moviolas) for the ease of making splices. They didn’t need to see a dissolve in order to know what it would feel like. And they were right, up to a point.

That point came a few years later, when they all had to move over to digital editing.

For me, I had made that move a few years earlier on the Lightworks and then learned the Ediflex and Montage editing platforms. And when I was told that I had to learn the Avid Film Composer (back then there were two versions of Avid — one for 30fps and another for 24fps) for a new job, I tried my best to learn it.  But it wasn’t easy.  I was just so invested in the Lightworks interface — including the silly little red shark that we’d use to trash items (check it out on the left).

Of course, I eventually did make the move, and added Final Cut into my arsenal several years later (I still know nothing about Premiere, but that’s more my old brain refusing to hold onto a third set of keyboard commands). But it taught me that, despite our best intentions, our brain tends to gravitate to things that are what we already know. Many of us refuse to learn something new just because we’re told it’s good for us. It’s only when our producers or directors tell us — “Hey, you’re going to be doing the color correction on this show” that we open up Color, or the 3-way color correction tools in our NLEs and really try to learn them.

Avid knew about this when they started to change the interface for 5.0. They knew damn well that editors who were totally invested in the way the trim tool had worked in MC for the last ten years were not going to be happy adapting to a new paradigm (or, to be precise, to the choice of the new paradigm). When they floated a few of these ideas to a small group of editors a year ago, you would have thought that they had announced that they were taking our children out to a field and auctioning them off. I was recently talking to another editor about some of the changes (he has not had a chance to see or play with them, so the conversation was theoretical) and he wondered whether it was a good idea for Avid to be catering to the “easy edit” crowd.

But that misses the point entirely. The question for me is “what holds us back from jumping in and learning new things?” If our kids didn’t learn anything new in a year at school we’d be really pissed off.  Why is it okay for us to stop learning once we get really good at something? The world is littered with people who were really really good at things until the world no longer needed that thing. Now they’re flipping burgers.

But the reality is that, as human beings, most of us are not about to learn something new unless 1) we really have to, or 2) we really want to.

So, what does this mean for all of the editors, cinematographers and filmmakers of the world, as well as for the manufacturers of the equipment that we use? It means that as we move into new processes, these technologies have to make it easier or more fun to work. The “teachable moments” of how to work with stereoscopic technology, or “performance capture” or new file-based camera and editing technologies, for instance, will have to be accessible and frequent. They will have to be entertaining and delivered in a way that we understand. This means that Avid and Apple and Adobe will need, as a small part of their cost of doing business, to create well-made video and interactive tutorials, instead of hundreds of pages of written manuals. Ever try and wade through Sony’s manuals for their EX-1 and EX-3?  Don’t bother. Go to Alistair Chapman’s videos instead. Want to meander through Apple’s Final Cut Studio manuals? Yeah, neither do I.  Instead, sign up for some of macProVideo’s video tutorials (some of which you can get streamed or downloaded to your iPhone, using their N.E.D.i app) or check out some of the great tutorials at Ripple Training (some good, though outdated free tutorials are available here), or Larry Jordan’s site, among numerous others.

It also means that you and I can’t be comfortable anymore. We can’t learn something, even if it’s the cool new Media Composer AMA feature (and it is cool to be able to instantaneously work with Red, P2 or Quicktime files), and then sit back and collect our salaries. Nope, in order to keep earning our salaries we’re going to have to learn color correction, and visual effects manipulation, and how to use the RTAS audio plug-ins, and how to do good compression, and how to work colalboratively long-distance.

Once we learn how to do those things, then we still can’t sit back and collect salaries. We’ll have to learn more.

The only way we can do that is if it feeds our curiosity. We can’t see this learning as medicine that we need to swallow, or classes that we have to take. We have to be open to learning new things simply because it’s cool. And the people giving us this new technology will have to figure out how to provide those teachable moments, so we can continue to be interested.

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

How We Learn and Why We Resist It

Every year it seems that camera manufacturers create many “improved” codecs that answer their needs — increased quality with reduced file size. However, that goal is pretty much immaterial to post-production professionals. We don’t care if an image takes up a large file size. In fact, with the faster processors and cheaper storage costs (last I checked, a medium-ish quality 2Tb drive costs less than $300 on Amazon), we don’t much care what size the original file is. If it’s too big to use, we’ll just create a lower rez transcode in ProRes or DNxHD and edit with that. In fact, it’s more important to editors that it be easy to edit.

This means that Long GOP file formats, where most frames are not stored as full frames but as a smaller list of changes from the preceding frame, are horrible. They are exceedingly hard to edit with. Whatever speed gains we might conceivably get from working in a smaller file size are more than undermined by the extra work our NLEs need to do in order to display them.

[Note of ignorance. I haven't yet had a chance to play with the parts of the new version (5.0) of Avid Media Composer which allegedly make a lie out of that last sentence. Pushing their Avid Media Access technology forward, and allowing the Media Composer to natively work in Quicktime, Red and various Long GOP formats, they promise to make editing much easier with these previously hated formats. This has proved to be true in my experience with the Sony EX-1 and EX-3 cameras, so this could be a great boon. And I'll talk about that in a few paragraphs, so stay tuned.]

Let’s face it. Editors are never going to get camera manufacturers to stop looking for their version of “better” codecs. We’ve long since learned to live with it. But it does mean that, unless these manufacturers work ahead of time with the NLE manufacturers (the way Red did with Apple, for instance, before the initial release of the Red One) it’s going to take some time for our favorite NLEs to catch up with each new release of a camera codec.

It’s a war and the winner of that war is… well… no one. But the biggest loser is the filmmaker.

This is less of a visible problem on the bigger budget productions where the camera and editorial departments are made up of different people, each of whom have varying levels of tech support that go beyond typing “Long GOP won’t work” into a Google search bar. But as more and more of us are shooting with small crews, and taking it back into the editing room where we have to ingest and edit it (and output it) ourselves, this becomes more than an annoyance, it becomes an impediment to our livelihoods (you know who I’m talking about, you WEVA folks out there).

So, what’s the best solution to this war? Is hope for reconciliation only slightly less feasible than the Democrats and Republicans agreeing on anything in Washington today?

Well, yes it is. But there are some signs of hope.

I’ve already mentioned Avid’s AMA. What that does is create a set of open architecture hooks for camera manufacturers, so that they can more easily create a way for editors to edit natively in the Media Composer. It’s an attempt to make it easier to do what Red did with Final Cut before the Red One’s release.

In both cases, it’s the NLE manufacturers telling the camera manufacturers — “Hey, if you’re going to create your own camera codecs, you’ll have to create your own editing codecs.” Well, not exactly, but Apple and Avid are placing the onus on the camera manufacturers to dig themselves out of their self-constructed hole. And that makes sense, so long as your NLE is one that has enough of an audience to make it worth the camera folks’ attention. I might be wrong, but I doubt that Sony, Panasonic, Red and the HD-DSLR manufacturers are going to spend buckets of money writing plug-ins for Liquid or Vegas.

So, what are our other alternatives?

In the old days, every single camera manufacturer had to create cameras that worked with the industry standard 35mm film gauge. If they wanted to create a film that was a different width — such as, say, 38mm — they had to be able to manufacture the film, the lab processing equipment, the editing equipment and the projectors to accommodate that.

Needless to say, we never saw 38mm film. [We did see 16mm and 70mm film -- which at half and double the normal size was easy for Kodak to manufacture film for. When it became clear how it opened up new markets, the camera, editing and distribution worlds came along for the ride (to greater or lesser degree).]

But what if a company could manufacture a camera and editing and distribution equipment (like Sony) and didn’t have their heads up their posteriors (like, uh.., like… oh never mind)? In a frighteningly anti-competitive way, they could then create a camera codec that worked fine in both capture and post production.

We haven’t yet seen that company, though if Red bought Final Cut from Apple (or MC from Avid, let’s say) it would certainly be a start in that direction. Please note, I have absolutely no inside information on anything that Red, Final Cut or Avid might be up to. For all I know, Apple is planning on buying Red, though that would shock me in ways that I can’t describe in public.

In the meantime, Red Cine X and AMA are two ways that post and production are attempting to bridge the gap. last time I looked, Avid wasn’t manufacturing cameras, which will make it more difficult to keep up with Red Cine X.

When Cisco bought Flip last year, I was hoping that we’d see some real synergy in the production and post areas. At the very least, I was hoping that we’d see some changes in the Flip that would enable them to interact with the web backbone much more easily. That hasn’t happened yet, and there’s no indication that it’s imminent.

But wouldn’t it be awesome if someone came up with a series of codecs that could take footage shot by a camera, make it easily editing ready and trivially distribution ready. By this, I mean more than projector-ready (something that I am hoping that Red Ray will pave a path for) but will make it easier to distribute files safely to theater owners, television networks, web distributors, mobile device partners, et al.

And, I’m hoping that these solutions are provided by multiple companies so we don’t have to be tied to one technology.

Whoever creates that chain will be the Dag Hammarskjöld of all things digital video, and their company will be its United Nations. Peace at last!

Post from: HOLLYN-wood by Norman Hollyn

Production and Post Wars (or Why Red Should Buy Final Cut)