I was on a crew on location at a US Airbase in an “undisclosed location in Southwest Asia”. (Although you can find it on Google Earth if you know where to look. Figure that one out.)

We were  being fed at the DiFac on base. I had just loaded up my tray with food, and immediately spun around and ran straight into a building support pole, spraying my dinner all over the spotless floor. Literally before I knew what was happening, three Airmen were on their knees cleaning up my mess. I may have been this embarrassed before, but I have never felt so truly humbled as to have our men and women in uniform cleaning up my mess.

Guys, you did not need to do that for me. I will remember you, that moment and your incredible professionalism whenever I hear about “our troops over there”. You truly are everything that is claimed of you. You clean up our “mess” every day. We should remember to be proud of you every day.

C.

On Mission Impossible III, starring Tom Cruise and directed by J. J. Abrams, which I was watching last night, there’s no commentary, but that means I do get to employ some guesswork, which is a fun process in itself. Cutting out or tightening up scenes is an important part of editing and can dramatically effect (literally) the way a movie looks and feels.

The first couple of deleted scenes from this film are extended fight sequences from a raid scene. Why would you want to cut a fight sequence from an action movie? Particularly, a pretty well shot and put together fight sequence? My guess is pacing. Either in the big picture sense that the raid scene itself was feeling too long, or the individual fighting sequences slowed the scene down and were a distraction from the main goal of rescuing the team member. This is an interesting thing to cut and it shows some real maturity, nuance and attention to detail on behalf of the director and editor to make choices like that.

Two of the other deleted scenes are plot/character exposition, dialog heavy involving secondary characters. These may have been cut for pacing, since they would have slowed things down, but they could have been dropped out because they seemed awkward and distracting. It’s hard to tell without seeing the film through with them cut in. It’s also possible that they just weren’t necessary. You have to leave something for the audience to figure out. It’s not fun to have everything spelled out, and in some cases you destroy your suspense by giving too much away. This is one of the most powerful parts of editing – the capacity to control just how enigmatic and mysterious your plot and characters get to be.

Cutting down is an essential skill for an editor. It’s frequently very difficult for the director, who crafted each scene and shot with a sometimes passionate belief in it. But tightening up a cut usually makes it more powerful. Think of it as getting to keep the best parts, even if you are dropping things that are merely “good”. And, if nothing else, it’ll give you something to put in the special features on your DVD!

C.

For me, as an editor (and now increasingly as a DP), you go through the process of reading a script and then seeing (or sometimes deciding) how that is going to translate into something visual. A lot of scripts we’re read, quite honestly, contain a great deal of fat. There’s a tendency to over explain or try to tell the story in dialog rather than action, visuals and performance. Remember that we’re making motion pictures, not radio. Even in a heavy dialog scene, your actors should have something to do, something to emote, some kind of drama and play and relationship in what is going on between them – that is, something for the audience to watch.

Kelly’s and Ken’s scripts are concise and to the point. They are efficient in establishing the scene by giving the audience the information needed to create a starting point. (Remember, an establish doesn’t have to tell the whole story, just set a starting point for the scene to follow.) But what really struck me is they get quickly into the conflict and meat of the stories.

Maybe this is because they know we’re trying to create shorts, and pretty short shorts at that; 1 or 2 minutes if possible. That might seem brutal but it’s about how long a scene will generally be anyway, even in a feature. I do believe that’s a temptation in writing to feel that longer is better, or somehow more clever. You need to write 90 pages, or 100 pages, or 110 pages. So, there’s a tendency to spin out individual scenes. An awful lot of the scripts we’ve read at Film Finish have had this problem: not much happens, but it takes 90 pages to do it. It’s not unusual to read a scene that’s 2 or 3 pages of set up to get to a relatively minor plot point. What you have then is about 60 pages of actual story with 30 pages of filler. Obviously in shorts it is very important to be concise, but this applies to some degree in all scripts.

Now, certainly, if you are writing a feature you want to develop the characters more and you want to draw the audience more into the world of the story than you can do in a short. You don’t want to barrel through a bunch of information and action and activities without having some feeling to it, giving the actors space to perform and the audience a chance to connect. But I do think the tendency is to err more on the side of over-writing scenes, rather than being too short and too efficient. Take stock of how you are spending time in your script. You don’t want to bog down in minor details or secondary points. You want to be spending time where it is most important and most engaging. And you don’t need to spell everything out in dialog.

The other advantage I think Kelly and Ken have is that they know they are writing for performance. The point of these shorts is to showcase the Academy acting students, so the scenes are crafted to give the actors something to do. Isn’t that what we want from a scene anyway? I think this is why they avoid the mistake of slow, undramatic exposition of information and are thinking about the purposes of the characters and their relationships in the scene. This is where you get drama and personality and give the actors a chance to do something and create characters and moments. That’s what engages the audience. And it’s what takes you beyond telling a story to creating an experience.

So, don’t be afraid to be a little brutal and efficient. As editors, our job is sometimes to do that on the back end, and it is always about making the film stronger by cutting the fat and keeping the muscle.

C.

Basically, a lot of the criticisms of this movie are correct, but you might not care. I don’t think the look deserve the put downs it’s been given. The film is visually striking and draws on some of the classic themes paralleling city streets and circuit boards, the “wired” experience in both the real world and the virtual. Most of the real world scenes take place at night which plays into that.

The 2D/3D warning at the beginning was disturbing but the result wasn’t that bad. Some scenes are 2D, some are 3D, suggesting a decision to switch made part way through filming. On the whole, I think they made the right choice in switching to shoot in real 3D and not messing with the other scenes, rather than trying to rig the thing up in post production. The changes between 2D and 3D weren’t as jarring as I was expecting, and sometimes weren’t even noticeable until partway into a scene. That seems a better choice than the often messy results from trying to create 3D in post. (Although a couple of the action scenes had confusing 3D. Just too elaborate. I think it takes a little longer for the audience to get oriented in a 3D scene and you have to allow for that.)

The music, by Daft Punk, gave me a bit of a retro buzz. It was an interesting update of the style and instrumentation of the electronic music that was emerging in 1982 when the original Tron was released. If there was a down side, it was too relentless and an odd mix that made the speakers in our cinema rattle. If you try to be high energy all the time for 90 minutes you weaken your impact. There were several scenes where the score should have been a huge punch in the guts but the impact was reduced because previous scene had also tried to do that. And the scene before, etc.

The action and the visuals worked well. There are nice updates to both the disk and light cycle battles that play well in 3D. The VFX younger Jeff Bridges struck me as a little creepy and plastic at times.

I won’t say too much about performances. Others have made criticisms about this that are probably fair, although I am less inclined to fault the actors as much as some awkward dialog and a persistent feeling that some of the scenes should have been paced or staged differently to give the actors more space and something to work with.

From what I’d read ahead of time I was expecting Olivia Wilde would do more. She’s way more interesting in House than she had the chance to be here. Although, hers is one of the few characters that tries to develop some nuance – a hint of giving the Programs a sense of child-like simplicity. I wish they’d built on it. It reminded me a bit of Daryl Hannah’s character in Blade Runner and was something that could have really added an extra dimension to this movie had it been played through more thoroughly.

So, on the whole, this film did some things well, others not so well. But it was fun for a bit of nostalgia and a morning at the movies.

I don’t know if it’s fair to say, well, it’s a Disney movie.

C.

“Alfred Hitchcock referred to setpieces as crescendoes or ‘bumps’ and tried to put three of them in each of his movies. In Psycho, these are the shower murder, the murder on the stairs, and the discovery of ‘Mother’.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_piece_%28film%29

This seems like a good starting point for looking at pacing (and punctuation) within your film. That way you have to think about what are the most important moments in your film and don’t make either the run-on-sentence movie that never seems to know what it is about, or the tiring, frustrating movie in which everything is overplayed, the story bogs down and you never know what is supposed to matter.

C.

It goes like this: always monitor your recording device.

Sounds simple, right? It is. Be that device a tape deck, digital recorder or a camera you should always, always, every time look at the meters to make sure you are getting good levels and listen to the record device monitor to make sure you are getting good, clean sound. Even if monitoring at some other point (mixer or transmitter monitors) might be the only thing practical while you are rolling, always check and recheck your signal strength and quality at the recording device whenever you have a chance.

The general extension of this is Murphy’s Law – if something can go wrong, it will – as it applies to audio engineering. Every professional sound person I ever worked with or trained with checked their equipment before going to the shoot, when they set up at the shoot and at various times during the shoot.

There are plenty of things that can go wrong, and chances are one of them will when you least expect it. Somebody might have changed the settings on the mixer. Or the recorder. Your favorite cable unexpectedly doesn’t work. A construction crew is using the same frequency your wireless mics are set to. Somebody sat on your boom mic during the break. (Although my personal favorite was a Jimmy Carter speech we were covering, where every one of our meticulously checked and double-checked wireless links went dead the moment the president stepped into the room. CIA? Secret service jamming system? We’ll never know.)

Listening to the record device is our version of measure twice, cut once. I can not tell you how much footage I’ve seen as an editor where the crew were certain they were getting good sound on set, but came back with nothing (or next to nothing) on tape.

By the way, a simple thing to check for that is often missed is to make sure the MIC/LINE settings on the record device match your mixer or other source device. Line levels are much, much higher voltage than mic levels. You will get a variety of problems if you don’t have them matched correctly. More technically, there is also an impedance difference (electrical resistance of the circuit) between mic and line level analog circuitry. A mismatch will really mess up your sound quality in nasty ways.

So, remember Murphy and keep up a healthy degree of paranoia. Overconfidence is not your friend on set. Checking twice will help you avoid embarrassment later on.

C.

We just made 10 shorts in 7 days for the Creative Studios of Atlanta Winter Showcase. Shot on Saturday the 4th and Sunday the 5th, screened at the Plaza Theatre on Saturday the 11th.

I haven’t done the math but this is certainly a slam. I was both DP and Editor, which I think helped us get done quickly because I already knew the footage and how it was supposed to work before I sat down to cut the scenes.

This sort of work is an interesting exercise in making decisions on the fly – both during the shoot and in the edit. Whether or not that seems very creative, I think it was. We tried to come up with different ways to shoot the scenes and different styles for them that suited the material – interiors, exteriors, some handheld footage, some off sticks, some moving camera and some traditional. We shot once scene as a single shot with camera movement. It’s all good practice and I think helps you get into a mode where you can make quick decisions and feel good about them.

It’s hard to say what I might have learnt from it specifically, still being so close to it. Maybe one thing to say is shoot at least one cutaway, whether you think you’ll need it or not. It can get you out of a hole. It’s easy to out smart yourself by trying to be too efficient and only get what you think you definitively need.

Something that adds a bit of polish is thinking of in-outs, beginnings and ends for scenes. We did a few of those off the cuff and they turned out quite well.

I try to shoot for the edit. This sometimes means creating options and sometimes creating opportunity. Doing both camera work and editing means learning a lot about what works and what doesn’t in both roles and what you need to make things work.

I was glad to not be trying to direct as well. There’s only so much you can pay attention to at a time.

Shorts were directed by Ken Feinberg. Written (variously) by Kelly Nettles and Ken Feinberg. Breland Warren was boom operator. Anthony McHie and Olufemi S. Sowemimo were script supervisors with Nathan Standridge was production coordinator.

C.

Yeah, I know the book has been out for a while, but it still seems to be relevant. In fact, I’m intrigued that the problems that Robert Redford sought to address by starting Sundance in the ’70s are the same ones that still dog the Independent filmmaker today. Certainly, the landscape has changed technologically, but the issues are pretty much the same. Maybe they an inherent part of the scene and not as much of a conspiracy as we tend to feel like they are? The scary part is that maybe it’s all gotten more cut-throat, more down and dirty.

What’s also striking is the big gap between the world of film making and the world of film distribution. It’s a totally different game, with different people and different attitudes. But both sides need each other. At least, once you decide that filmmaking is going to be your bread and butter.

I had been meaning to read this book for a while but put it on the Amazon.com wish life and let it sit. Actually, I always felt that despite some good information it would be disillusioning and maybe depressing. Perhaps if I had read it when it first came out it would have been. But I’ve been in this industry long enough now that I know I’m not going to quit and, so far, I’m finding the book validates a lot of my own experience and observations about modern filmmaking. Things are rough out there. Which means you shouldn’t give up if at first you don’t succeed. And you shouldn’t take any of the negative stuff in the industry personally. It happens.

That’s my take on the book so far, a couple of chapters in. If things are tough, weird, unpredictable and take a while, that’s part of the scene. So are “personalities” and players. I’ll keep reading and see what I can discover that just might help us be smarter here about how we’re handling our own projects. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that everything keeps changing, nobody can tell you “no”, and there could always be something new around the corner. Nobody knows anything.

C.

Why?

On the head end, for two reasons. Firstly, the very start of the tape tends to be unstable because of its physical connection to the hub, since it’s likely to be left wound around the mechanism inside the tape if you rewind it before you eject it, and because it’s the part of the tape most commonly loaded and unloaded in the tape mechanism. Sometimes you can see this happening when you insert or eject a tape into your camera (or a deck). There are little metal arms that grab the tape and place it in the transport. If this is done with the same part of the tape over and over (like the beginning) the tape can get stretched or wrinkled, causing playback problems.

The second problem that comes up is the ability of the tape deck (or camera) and the edit system to capture the very first thing on a tape close to the start of the roll. There’s not only the chance of that playback being unstable, but depending on your combination of equipment you may not be able to capture the first second or so of the footage. I have run into this enough to feel it’s worth mentioning here and because the solution is very simple.

So, when you start a new tape, record a little bit of something unimportant at the beginning. Traditionally, this would be the color bars; the SMPTE test pattern. However, it is also not unusual to slate the tape either visually or audibly with something that says the project, date and maybe the names of director or DP. You might also just roll with the lens cap or your hand over the lens. Keep recording for 10 to 30 seconds. Longer is safer (because you get farther away from the sensitive area at the head of the tape) but you shouldn’t need more than 30 seconds.

How about the tail?

I’ve seen fewer problems at the tails of tape but on a couple of occasions I’ve had to deal with footage where the camera operator stopped hard on the end of a scene or an interview and, for whatever reason, the last second of video has become unstable or can’t be captured by the edit system. It’s another one of those cases where there’s a simple preventative for what could be a huge problem. Just let your tape keep rolling a couple of seconds longer at the end of a shot. Or, if you’re really serious, record 5 or 10 seconds with the lens cap on or your hand across the lens.

So, there you have a couple of simple ways to avoid some potentially big headaches. There’s nothing more frustrating than a great shot that’s just missing a fraction of a second off its beginning or end. It’s worth taking a few seconds to avoid that, believe me.

C.

Something that struck me at the time and has intrigued me since from a writing perspective is how Teems handled audience expectations towards the end of the film. A big issue for filmmakers now is that so many good ideas, so many dramatically correct ideas, so many great endings have been done before. Your audience has probably seen something like your movie dozens, if not hundreds of times before in the cinema and on TV. How do you deal with that?

Another good movie to look at in this context, which came out at around the same time, is Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. (imdb) Tarantino has a lot of fun playing with, teasing, and frustrating his audience’s expectations of classic dramatic scenes. Half of the fun of this movie is that Tarantino makes you so certain you know how a scene is going to turn out that you suddenly realize you don’t.

In That Evening Sun Teems actually has one of the characters explicitly state the  “Hollywood ending” that you would stereotypically expect to see in a mainstream film. Then he leaves you hanging for a while to find out whether, in fact, that is going to happen. It’s a bold move, and I found it a smart and entertaining way to broach the issue, deal with the problem of whether your audience is going to feel cheated or gratified by your ending.

See this movie if you have a chance. It’s an intelligent and heartfelt piece of independent filmmaking with a lot to recommend it. Congratulations, Scott.

Craig Tollis (c) 2010 Film Finish, LLC.