Editing With TONS of People In The Room

One of the banes of an editor’s existence may soon become a real plus (so please stick around to the end of this piece where I tie all of this together and talk about collaboration).

As any commercials editor can tell you, one of the worst moments in our lives comes when the client, the agency, the producer, the director and seven or eight other people of indeterminate title and use, pile into the editing room to look at the spot and give their valuable advice on how to”fix the damned thing.” The coolest times are when the client representatives disagree among themselves, and you hear definitive shouting about whether the product shot needs to be lengthened by ten frames or twelve.

On features and television shows the number of high-priced heads in a room is increasing on a daily basis it seems.  I remember seeing a film recently that had four producing bugs and about 15 producers listed.  Not everyone shows up in the edit suite — but most of them do.  And dealing with disagreements among those notes is one of the most frustrating things for an editor. The problem is even more acute now that those 15 producers are all taking DVDs home with them and emailing in their own comments, separately, often without consulting among their producing “partners.” The modern editor needs to learn how to interpret quickly written comments, with contradictory ideas, submitted without the ability to look into their generator’s eyes and read what they are really thinking.

What’s an editor to do?

Well, if my observations bear out — get used to it and more.  Long distance collaboration is increasing, which means that the number of people “talking” to you about  your edit is going to increase.

One process that I’m experimenting with myself, uses the technique of crowd sourcing to democratize animation. Now, VFX has long been outsourced to multiple vendors. Rhythm and Hues has a branch in India, for instance, which is tied into their overall pipeline/network and their own workflow. When you give an effects shot to R&H, they determine who does the work on the shot and when. Sometimes their LA office will handle it, sometimes it’s done in India. If the management is done properly you, as the client, never know the difference. The end result is that the shot is done faster, sincethis enables the process to go on for a full 24 hours, rather than be stuck in limbo while people sleep in one of the branches.

The next step for this is the Facebook application Mass Animation which is open to everyone who enjoys animating (you need to join Facebook in order to participate). Anyone who joins this Facebook group can download a number of shots (I believe that it’s up to 20) from a sequence of storyboarded shots for a short film called “Live Music” (a rock guitar named Riff, falls in love with a violin named Vanessa who lives in the front of a toney music store). Users can download a trial version of Maya (the animation software) and, using a character bible and a wonderful walk through by an animator from ReelFX, actually participate in the animation for the film, and win prizes. The user community votes on their favorites and a small panel of jurors (of which I am one — Truth In Advertisting) votes on their selections for each shot within their own sequences.

The fascinating aspect to me about this is how to manage the long distance collaboration. In this case, it comes from an intense amount of preparation — take a look at the video describing the characters that is supplied with the download package. Each shot was storyboarded with great attention to conveying information to the distant animators (though issues do come up, and are talked about in the discussion boards).

So, what can we learn from this and what are the lessons for collaborators? In a nutshell, it’s that clear, detailed communication is becoming increasingly more and more important. In the old days, directors and producers didn’t have to be articulate, so long as they could sit across from you at the editing machine (digital or not) and say “No, not that.  What happens if we cut… HERE.”  Now, we can edit on laptops thousands of miles away from each other and that is requiring different sorts of communication skills. It is true that the better directors and producers (and editors) were better at communicating with each other. And it is true that, even in the distributed world that we live in today, that there is value to sitting across from each other and communicating.

But asking for that relationship as a paradigm today, is much like asking that we go back to the days of horse-drawn carriages. Creative people are communicating over long distances. Writing partners co-write from different cities, commercials producers work with clients across the country with limited travel budgets, and editors are having to deal with the fact that directors and producers would often rather be sitting at home after a tough day of shooting than in a dailies screening room. So we’re not sitting with our directors during dailies. We’re not sitting across from our producers for notes meetings. And we’re often having to combine notes from 15 different people, with three different versions of a project, across multiple time zones and continents.

I’m not complaining. In fact, it’s pretty exciting to me. That’s why I’m involved in Mass Animation. That’s why the last feature I cut, JACK IN THE BOX, was done cross-country (the director and my co-editor were in Massachusetts, while I edited in California). That’s why a lot of my emphasis at USC is on long-distance collaboration. It’s the wave of the future. Come and jump on.