The Editor - Editing and SOUND Editing

One of the things that I haven’t gotten into at all in my posts is just how much what we do, as editors, goes beyond what many think film editors do. A cab driver once told me that “You guys cut out the dirty parts” which seems wrong to me, somehow. But the perception certainly is that what we do is manipulate pieces of picture somehow.  I could go on forever about the difference between what we do and what our audiences think we do.

But I won’t. Instead, I’d like to talk about the differences between what we do and what we think we do. And I want to start out by talking about sound.

Lawrence Jordan, the original founder of the 2-pop website for digital filmmakers, has started up a site, called HDFIlmtools.com, that keeps getting better and better. Among the coolest things he does is to conduct interviews with filmmakers and suppliers. In October he did an interview with Matt Wood, who is a supervising sound editor up at Skywalker Sound — George Lucas’ primo sound creation and mixing studio in Northern California. The first two parts of the interview are now online and you can get to the first one by going to the HDFilmTools website right here.

During the interview Wood talks about how and Ben Burtt were able to shape the voices in WALL•E, the fantastic Pixar movie from thispast summer and he mentions that his job starts “really early” for animation films in order to give the world a life that it oculd never have, since there is no “production sound.”

But the reality is that it is of great benefit to bring the sound editor/designer in as early as possible on ALL OF YOUR PROJECTS.  At the very least, you should be considering sound as you edit anyway. I like to cut temp sound effects into my tracks in much the same way as I cut temp music tracks in — to help tell the story and with great care. Any editor will tell you about the phenomenon of “temp love” where you fall in love with temporary music that you can’t possibly use in your final film. No matter what your composer does, you will always compare it to that fantastic temp piece, and the comparison really is unfair. It is also true that music tends to disguise editorial problems — since it is probably the most powerful way to shape an audience reaction (for more details on this, you should all go out and buy a copy of my new book THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT, and turn to chapter nine where I talk about the use of music).

As a result, I continually am turning off the audio tracks where I’ve put music (typically on tracks 7 and 8 — in stereo) in order to view the edit cleanly.

But music and sound are such crucial parts of telling the story that it seems silly to me to not use them in your initial edit. Why have a character say a line (”I’m scared.”) if you can get that feeling across with a proper sound effect?  How do I know how to pace an edit properly if there is a possibility that I’ll need an additional twelve frames for a gust of wind?

So, to repeat, I’ll add to my cut any music or sound that I need in order to tell the story to my audience. I know that it will all be smoothed out later, by a real sound editor (because they do what I could never do — specialize in crafting sound so it works with our minds), but I think that it’s important that everyone get a chance to see the film with something approximately a sound design during our working-it-out-in-the-editing-room time.

And that is way more interesting and better done, when it is the actual Sound Designer/Supervisor who is doing the work. It helps them to get to know the director, the editor, the producer and the film much better.

So, to twist the title of this post on its head — the best way to do sound (as in “sensible”) picture editing is to start thinking of its sound editing (as in… well… “sound editing”) early.

In the meantime, go read HDFilmtools.com.  You’ll be tested next week.

MACWORLD NEWS

I will be speaking at the upcoming Macworld Conference in San Francisco on January 9th at 12 noon. I’ll be at the Peachpit Press booth, immediately following Mark Christiansen’s informative talk on After Effects, and will be talking about how you could use visual effects to shape the storytelling of a scene. Please let me know if you’ll be there — I’d love to meet up with you.  I’ll be available to sign copies of my book there as well.

You might also be interested in dropping by the evening before at the LAFCPUG Supermeet, the annual funfest put on by the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group. There will be vendors like JVC and Apple doing announcements and the ever-informative Bruce Nazarian will do a presentation on Blu-Ray on the cheap and you’ll get to meet filmmaker M Dot Strange.

For complete details on the SuperMeet including driving and transit directions and instructions, a current list of raffle prizes and a link to where to buy tickets, visit the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro (lafcpug) web site.

Tags: Film, Film Blog, Movie, , Movie