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September 4, 2009

Some of you know that I teach at USC’s film school. Others of you know that I really like it — for a number of reasons. For one, the students here are pretty awesome.  And second, our faculty is truly tremendous as well.  One of the reasons why I’m happy to have given up a huge chunk of my editor’s salary to come here is that I get to learn from lots of people who know way more than I do — editors like Robert Jones and Kate Amend, for instance, have taught me a lot about editing. And there are a number of great theorists, production designers and directors and more — all of whom teach selflessly.

But this isn’t a post singing the praises of USC. It’s about the ways in which people can learn editing. One thing that I’ve heard a number of times from faculty is that our students just don’t seem to know movies that are older than five years. I’ve heard that from a number of faculty who bemoan  that people who love film and want to make film seem to know so little about what’s come before.

I’m going to agree and disagree with that.

First — the agreement. I think that our editing is informed by what our lives have been like and what input we’ve had in our lives.  I think that editors should be seeing theater, going to art museums, travelling to other cities and countries so they can experience the way other people think,  reading great books and — yes — seeing movies outside of their general life path.

So, I agree, we should see all kinds of media — including the ones  that we aren’t always familiar with (this includes surfing YouTube and Vimeo, and exploring new media installations).

Second — the disagreement.  It’s my observations that our students at USC do know other films than what’s been released in the last five years.  For the first week of classes I’ve always asked my students to fill out a questionnaire. One of the questions says “List your of five or six favorite films (recent film, old film, it doesn’t matter):” Here is what this semester’s students have come up with, in alphabetical order. [Note that these are undergraduates and graduates. Films with a number after their name were named by more than one student.]

• (500) Days of Summer
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 400 Blows
• Adaptation
• Aladdin
• American Beauty (2)
• Apocalypse Now (2)
• Atonement
• Babel
• Back to the Future
• Best In Show
• Big Lebowski
• Bonnie & Clyde
• Boogie Nights
• Bourne Ultimatum
• Boyz ‘n the Hood
• Breakfast Club
• Brokeback Mountain
• Casablanca
• Casino
• Chaser
• Children of Men
• Citizen Kane
• Collateral
• Contempt
• Count of Monte Cristo
• Dark Knight
• Die Hard (2)
• Distant
• Do The Right Thing
• Edge of Heaven
• ET
• Fistful of Dollars
• Fountain
• Ghostbusters I
• Ghostbusters II
• Godfather I (2)
• Godfather II
• Godzilla
• Gone with the Wind
• Halloween (original)
• Happy Together
• Head-On
• Hiroshima Mon Amour
• Ikiru
• In The Pool
• Inner Tour
• Internal Affairs
• It’s A Wonderful Life (2)
• Jaws
• JFK
• Jurassic Park
• Kid
• La Jetee
• Last Emperor
• Layer Cake
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Lost In Translation
• Lucky Number Slevin
• Maison de Himiko
• Matrix Reloaded
• Memento
• Midnight Express
• Monsters, Inc.
• Moulin Rouge
• Nosferatu
• Notorious
• On The Waterfront
• Orlando
• Predator
• Punch Drunk Love
• Rachel Getting Married
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Rambo: First Blood
• Rear Window
• Schnidler’s List
• Seven
• Singing In The Rain
• Slumdog Millionaire
• Star Wars IV (2)
• Star Wars V: Empire Strikes Back
• Stranger Than Fiction
• Summer at the Grandfather
• Sunset Blvd
• Taxi Driver
• Terminator 2
• Time To Leave
• Tokyo Story
• Top Gun
• Total Recall
• Umbrellas of Cherbourg
• Up! (2)
• Walkabout
• Wayne’s World
• The Wrestler (2)
• X2
• Yojimbo
• Zoolander

And while it is true that there are many recent films, there are also an extraordinary number of classics.  How do you account for YOJIMBO, CITIZEN KANE, LA JETEE and WALKABOUT if you feel that students watch only from their own experience?  And while you could attribute cinema studies classes to the number of foreign films as well as SUNSET BOULEVARD, CONTEMPT and HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, notice that these were films that they listed as among their favorites.

The point is that a lot of you out there aren’t ready to drop $50,000 a year on a film school.  I’m sympathetic.  Really.  And though not going to a top film school like USC, NYU, UCLA, Columbia College and the like means that you won’t get to take classes from all of the awesome faculty that I was talking about up at the beginning of this post, there is something to be said for the ultimate film teacher — film.

Go and watch CASABLANCA for its use of lighting to show character. Watch LA JETEE to see how voice over and still images can tell a story. Look at DO THE RIGHT THING to see how you can create a compelling shape to your story. Look at THE LAST EMPEROR to learn how to center a character in the midst of a complex canvas.  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s not just a question of avoiding the ‘reinventing the wheel” concept. It’s that the more we experience successful films (in the broadest possible sense) the better able we are to assimilate them into our own world view. The days of the apprentice programs are gone, more or less.  Schools like USC are the new apprenticeship programs. And for those who can’t afford to do these types of programs, we must educate ourselves.

In fact, you could do a lot worse than setting up your own film school viewing schedule courtesy of Netflix. Go through each of the film listed above and learn while having a great time. It’s not a chore. It’s what we do.

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The Final Cut Pro Users Group is in the midst of two great ventures. The first is the latest in their international series of SuperMeets, where you’ll get to hear top people in the post production field tell you stuff that you really want to know. If you’re in the vicinity of Amsterdam on September 13th, (at IBC)  you’ll want to spend an evening with these crazy editor types.  For more information check out the Supermeet page at the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group page. There will be talks on color grading in 10 minutes, Blu-Ray authoring in Adobe CS4, and much much more.

Secondly, FCPUG puts out a pretty awesome magazine which is distributed at their Supermeets. But what happens if you can’t get to those events. Well, they’ve figured out how to help you. You can download a PDF of the 117 page magazine for the low low price of FREE.  Just click right here and you should get it.

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And, just because this post has been rather FCP-centric, I wanted to let you know that Avid is going to be announcing some new stuff on September 10th and you’re going to want to pay attention to this.  Especially if you’re a student.  I can’t talk about it yet, but let me say that, as an educator, this is something that I’ve been shouting about for several years.

August 21, 2009

I’m going to admit right at the outset that I know that I’m distorting the “auteur theory” here, but I’m just doing what most people think that theory says. Ask anyone, even our amazing film students at USC, what the “auteur” theory is, and they’ll tell you that it’s about the supremacy of the director in terms of guiding the vision of a film.

In fact, as I understand it, the auteur theory really says something much subtler – that, over the course of a number of films, a good director imbues each film (no matter how different in subject matter) 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 this version of the theory, Michael Bay is as much an auteur as John Ford. And I think that’s true.

So, the auteur theory really talks about subtleties that are visible in retrospect. Yet, it has somehow become the torch by with which less talented directors tend to immolate their films (sorry for the strained metaphor there), as they consciously attempt to force their “personal vision” onto each of their films. (For yet another sense of what the auteur theory is, check out this rather well-crafted explanation on Wikipedia)

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

That auteur theory is bull.

These thoughts were raised by a question that someone asked me on Twitter several weeks 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?”

In typical Norman fashion, I’d like to address that question by looking at it from another angle.

In today’s New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis, reviews Robert Rodriguez’s new film SHORTS, 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 Rubik’s Cube and can serve as everything from a cheese grater to a solar panel.” Catsoulis, who didn’t much like the film, goes 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 warmed to Rodriguez’s films (most of which seem to me to suffer from a love of technique and 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 fable, in which no one wants to tell the King that he’s nearly naked.

[As an aside, Manohla Dargis off-handedly (and quite nastily, I thought) makes a similar claim on Quentin Tarentino’s new 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 Menk.” This comment  manages to insult both the film and a fine editor at the same time even though it is obvious to anyone who has actually worked in the industry that Menke’s been doing this long enough, and worked with enough people, to turn down a job if she knows she is going to be treated like a mere pair of hands, even if it’s from Tarentino.]

Both of these reveiws make for a good object lesson for directors which I will now shout out to them.  Directors –  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.” 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.

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.It’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 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 in order 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, let’s 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 they 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 jealously 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 these crazy ideas because they are missing something in the edit that they are watching. They aren’t getting the emotional kick from a scene that they wanted. They don’t understand a character’s motivation the way that they feel is necessary. 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. You knew the deal when you signed your contract or shook their hand. Here’s a piece of advice that I only learned after many years in the editing room - life is too short to be working with people who don’t fill you up with artistic and/or emotional fulfillment.

As an aside, on my other blog today (http://normanhollyn.com) I’m posting a piece about two times when collaborative editorial really worked well.

July 31, 2009

Dick Wirth, a good friend of mine who helps to run the USC film school editing facilities (including something like 160 editing stations, with Avid, ProTools, Final Cut and more) sent me this the other day.  It’s a job posting from the Avid-L2 group.

For those of you who don’t know, the L2 group, which is a Yahoo Group that anyone can subscribe to, is a fantastic central point for troubleshooting, gossiping and networking for people who use the Avid platform (that means all of the Avid machines, not just Media Composer). Though I don’t contribute, I try and read it religiously, and I’m constantly amazed by the level of Real World knowledge that the posters in the group share. If you have a very specific problem with Unity machines, chances are there’s someone on the group who has already had the same problem and has a solution for you. To see more about it, just click on this Avid-L2 Yahoo Group link.

Periodically you will also see postings of job offers from facilities that want to take advantage of this group and there was one just the other day that Dick sent tome that speaks volumes about what skills a good assistant editor needs to have in today’s competitive world:

From: Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com [Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2009 9:53 AM
To: Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Avid-L2] [job] Assiatant Avid Editor, Burbank / LA

Assiatant Avid Editor (Burbank / LA)

XXXXXXXXXXX Productions is looking for Freelance Assistant Editor with strong finishing, troubleshooting and media management skills as well as a solid understanding of post production work-flow.

This is an opportunity for a person with Assistant Editor experience (preferably 2 years) on the Avid Media Composer and Unity Media Networks. Avid Experience required. FCP experience is not relevant in our working environment. Experience in Motion Picture Marketing a plus.

Please Fax or e-mail resume AND cover letter (required) to Production Manager for immediate CONFIDENTIAL consideration. Please do not send reels. No phone calls will be accepted.

Let’s look at that in a bit more detail. This job is for a freelance editor. This company, which does a lot of motion picture marketing (trailers, DVD extras, etc.) isn’t looking to hire someone for a full-time/forever job.  They are looking for someone to come in and help them out of jam. They are looking for assistant editor, which is a great job for someone who wants to get deeper into the editing world (since there aren’t a lot of people handing out decent paying jobs as editors to people who don’t have a lot of editing experience). But they don’t want to hire someone and teach them.  They are looking for someone with skills already in place.

And what are those skills?

“Finishing, troubleshooting and media management skills.”

I see a lot of students who are fascinated to learn about color correction; I even meet a bunch who love talking about codecs and input/output formats. I also see people who are excellent at working the machines, which is a good first step towards being able to troubleshoot. But I see very few people who are interested in media maangement.

What is media management, you may ask? It’s the ability to organize all of the footage (whether it’s picture or sound, camera-shot or visual effects created, and more) in a way that makes it easy for anyone else to find and use it. That means that original material is sorted and saved in bins and folders in a very specific way for an assistant editor who is working on a show with a lot of visual effects, but entirely differently for the editor on that show. It means creating and executing a workable system that is appropriate to the personnel and the project that you are working on. A music video should be organized differently than a commercial, which is set up differently than an action film or a television show.

It means coming up with naming conventions that easily identify every day’s shoot, or subclip, or edited sequence. That means, for instance, that you should never ever see an edited sequence with the default name “Untitled Sequence” as you can see in the image to the left — above the record monitor on the right side, which is pulled — shockingly — from the otherwise excellent magazine put out by the Motion Picture Editors Guild (and which I’d heartily recommend you whip out your checkbooks and subscribe to Right This Minute).

In short, it means that you need to know what the project is that you are working on, what the potential problems will be down the line (in terms of delivery, as well as working process), as well as what the individual preferences of your editor/s are going to be. Then you need to be able to come up with a system that will allow you to answer any question anyone may throw at you with an answer. And “I can’t find it” isn’t a good answer.

This is a huge job skill, and one which most independent editors never get a chance to learn (Hey, if you’re creating your workspace for yourself, does it really matter if you call your last three cuts “Final Edit,” “Really Final Edit” and “Final Final Final Edit”!) But the reality is that no one stays working by themselves forever, and most project are done with collaborators than not. So, it’s important to have a “a system” that works.

In the olden days, of 35mm film, there was a well-established system or two (that I actually documented in my book THE FILM EDITING ROOM HANDBOOK, which I’m now rewriting since it’s so out-of-date), but those days have gone the way of rotary telephones. And with the easy availability of NLE’s it is now possible to be editing before you know how to assistant edit.

But one glance at that want ad above will tell you the folly of avoiding good organizational knowledge.

The question of how to get these skills is something that I’ll leave for another week, if you’re interested. Next week I’m going to be in Fabulous New Orleans, attending the conference of the University Film and Video Association, which is a group of college film professors from all over the country. It’s actually way more fun than you’d think. I’m running a panel on how we use scenes from certain films to teach editing, and giving two talks on how making little adjustments in the editing of a scene can give a whole new story.  So it should be fun.

And then there’s New Orleans also.

See you in a few weeks!

 

July 24, 2009

 Alex, over at Editing Organizized, quotes Walter Murch from the book The Conversations:

When you’re putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding, over and over again, are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, the your film will be alive as it can be.

For me, the most rhythmically important decision of the three is the last: Where do you end the shot? You and it at the exact moment in which it has revealed everything that it’s going to reveal, in its fullness, without being over-ripe. If you end the shot too soon, you have the equivalent of youth cut off in its bloom. Its potential is unrealised. If you hold a shot too long, things tend to putrefy.

This is only the third part of what I’ve always said in my editing classes. The three guidelines that I use to determine when I end a shot are:

1. When there is something that I want the audience to see that is in another shot.
2. When there is something that I don’t want the audience to see that is in the shot they’re watching.
3. When the shot stops giving the audience any new information.

That last is, of course, highly subjective but is the crux of what Murch is talking about. Even in the 1920s, when there was much less cutting than there is today, edits were made when the shot started to get stale. That meant that directors had to get good at staging if they wanted to keep the audience involved.

I once was working with Arthur Penn (on the film FOUR FRIENDS) and he was staging a scene where an audience of high school kids was supposed to stand up and start singing “Hit The Road Jack.” Rather than shoot tons of coverage for the scene, he set up a tiny dolly in (from the stage that the kids were sitting in front of) to push in on the students moving towards the stage. What amazed me was how that slight move extended the interest of the shot for many seconds.

In this age of quick cutting, I don’t want to say that that sort of staging is a lost art.

But it’s getting to be a lost art.

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By the way, I highly recommend the book THE CONVERSATIONS which I talked about in the first sentence of this post. It is a series of talks that Murch had with Michael Ondaajte, the original writer of THE ENGLISH PATIENT. I find that it articulates the theories that Murch discussed in THE BLINK OF AN EYE much more clearly, and is an entertaining read as well.

I’d buy it today.  If I didn’t already own it.

July 10, 2009

A few months ago I wrote about a talk I gave at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference which I called “15 Film School Tips in 20 Minutes.” During that posting I gave three of those tips:

• Use L-Cuts — as much as you can
• Cut on action
• Matching Action is Overrated

Last week Marcin asked if I’d post some more. And, while you won’t have the benefit (??) of watching me leap around on stage, giving examples to these tips, I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to give you three more of them.

Attract The Eye

Let me start out by stating the obvious: filmmaking is all about manipulting the audience. Now, that’s not a word that I’m afraid of. If we’re good filmmakers we all should have stories that we want to tell other people. When we show our audiences our finished films we want them to be affected by them. For better or worse. When I edited HEATHERS there were clearly people who were affected by the film — some of them hated it.  Of course, a lot of people also liked it, equally as passionately. And that’s why I loved working on that film — it affected people.

But you can’t affect people in a direction that you want, without manipulating them. So, alot of filmmaking is about trying to get the audience to see and feel what you want them to see and feel.

Much of that is about controlling their eye.

There are three main ways to control the audience’s eye and you’ll usually use them in some combination. [I know that I’ve oversimplifying here. If you want to go into more details about this, come and take a class with me. You’ll hear more than you probably want to know about all of this.] The first is by size. If you’ve got five people standing in a row and one is taller than the other, the audience’s eye is generally (all else being equal) going to go the taller one. The second is by color. If you’ve got five people standing in a row and four are wearing black and one is wearing white — well, the audience’s eye is (generally) going to go to the one wearing white. The third control method is action. If four of the people are standing and one is moving in some bigger way, the audience’s eye is almost always going to go to the character who is moving.

This last point is the most potent of them all, for editors. We use movement to distract the audience from seeing mismatches, we use it to attract the audience’s attention to an important plot point, and we certainly use it to keep energy moving at a cut.

So what do all three of these points have in common? They are all about creating change. And that leads to point number two

Change Things

What this means that is that, if you want to impress a point on the audience, you can best do it by changing something at that point. Cutting from a wide shot to a closer one emphasizes what is happening at that point. Adding a piece of music emphasizes what is happening at that point. Dropping out most of the sound emphasizes what is happening at that point (look at the Caravaggio interrogation scene in THE ENGLISH PATIENT for a great example).

Put another way, if every scene in your film is high energy then none are high energy. If every moment in a scene is frought with deep pensive thought, then none of them will feel deep and pensive to the audience. A movie like IN THE BEDROOM was, to me, made much less effective since the lead characterswere constantly undergoing heavy, meaningful moments.

This means  you want identify these individual scripted moments in a scene.  Oddly enough,  I’ve written an entire book to help you do exactly that. It’s called THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT and it takes you through this process in every filmmaking craft, not just editing. And once you identify these moments, then you can decide what things to change around them. The Lean Forward Moments are always identified with important story points, and there’s at least one in every storytelling chunk/scene in your project. Finding them, and then using that knowlege to help to make the audience lean forward and pay added attention to what you’re saying, is what effective storytelling is all about.

Matching Sizes

A corollary to the previous point is that you shouldn’t change anything if you don’t want the audience to lean forward and pay added attention. Don’t begin music at Point A, if you want the audience to feel an important point later on down the line at Point B.

Since changing lens sizes is an effective way of creating a Lean Forward Moment (banging into a closeup when you’ve been working in medium shots is a sure attention-grabber) you will want to make sure that you don‘t change lens sizes unless you want to. What this means is that, in a dialogue scene between three people, you should make sure that you have matching medium shots on all three.  That way, when you cut from one character to another, you’re not emphasizing one of the characters more than another, and you’re not calling attention to the editing moments if you don’t want to.

That’s also why most narrative directors will cover all of their characters in matching sizes no matter what size shots you use. If you cover Character A in both a medium and a clean single shot, you will make sure that you cover Characters B and C in both sizes as well. If you don’t have time to shoot all six set-ups (plus a wide shot of all three) then you should lose pieces of coverage on the least important person in the scene, though even that is horribly risky. Sometimes cutting from a series of matching closeups to a medium carries as much impact as cutting from the medium to the closeup.

In other words, changing anything on screen is going to have an affect on the audience. It would be WAY better if that affect was something that helped push your story forward rather than a side effect of a random production decision you made in order to save time or money.

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So there you have it.  Three more handy-dandy tips from Film School.  All without the tuition fees.