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ASSEMBLY
EDITING MOCKINGJAY PART 2An Interview with Alan Edward Bell
HOW THE VIEWER SEES A CUTwith Tim Smith
MEMORY IN THE MOMENTAn interview with Christopher Donaldson, editor of Remember
FALL 2015
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CONTENTS
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32facebook.com/aotgnetwork
youtube.com/Aotgdotcom
@AOTGNetwork
list of advertisers Shutterstock
Blackmagic DesignSony Creative Software
LAPPGManhattan Edit Workshop
Moviola
Letter from the Editor 5
Editing Mockingjay Part 2 7
How the Viewer Sees a Cut 18
How to Get An Agent 26
Memory in the Moment 32An interview with Christopher Donaldson, editor of Remember
CONTENTS
4
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Letter from the Editor
To the Readers,
It’s that time of the year! Snow’s falling, you’ve just come in from the blustery cold, put your warm sweater on as the sky grows darker earlier and earlier. You sit down in front of your Netflix-provided fireplace to enjoy a good read, and that’s what we’re hoping to provide you with in this Winter 2016 issue of Assembly magazine. Of course, if you are in LA you’ll be a little warmer than the rest of us, so enjoy the weather and read this edition outside with your favourite mixed drink.In this release of the Assembly we dug deep into things you might not have thought about from an editing perspective. We return to psychology, but this time focus on the viewer’s subconscious physical and cognitive responses to films, when we sit down with Tim Smith to discuss his research on how the audience views images and edits, and how it can help editors improve their editing. (If you are interested, you can actually test your cuts with the technology he’s created!)I also got to sit down with Alan Edward Bell to discuss his work and editing process for (500) Days of Summer and Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2. Our interview may make you question the boundary between editing and VFX. We also have the popular writer Parker Mott return with his interview with Christopher Donaldson, as they discuss the film Remember.All that and so much more! So get yourself a cup of hot cocoa, sit back, and enjoy this edition of the Assembly.
Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season!
Sincerely,
Gordon Burkell
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Interview withAlan Edward BellInterviewed byGordon Burkell
ALAN’S IMDB
ALAN’S WEBPAGE
INTERVIEW
ALAN’S TWITTER
HUNGER GAMES WIKIPEDIA
Editing Mockingjay Part 2
The Assembly: How did you get into the film industry?Alan Bell: Well, I kinda got into it in a random way. I started out as a rock climber. I really wasn’t into the film industry, but I had friends who were in the film industry, and I really just wanted to climb rocks when I was young. So, I left high school a year-and-a-half early, I got my diploma early, and then set out and just started climbing the rocks full-time and guiding. And I noticed that all the people that I was guiding, the people with money were in the film industry.I had a very close friend named Steve Nevius who was a first assistant editor for a man named Robert Leighton, who eventually became my mentor. Robert (Bob), cut all of Rob Reiner’s films. So Steve and Bob were friends of mine.
PART 2EDITING MOCKINGJAY
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I knew Bob through Steve, and I just asked them one day, “Hey how do you become an assistant editor?” And they were like, “Well, you really got to dedicate yourself.”They kind of laughed at me because I was just this guy who really didn’t have a lot of responsibility and just wanted to be outside all the time. So I set out to prove them wrong in a way, and just kind of ended up working for free for Roger Corman. One of the first jobs I got was with Norman Hollyn, who is a USC professor today. It was on this movie called Big Mama’s Boy. Or Daddy’s Boys. I think it was released as Daddy’s Boys.It was Roger Corman produced, and it was made off of leftover money from Big Bad Mama 2 with Angie Dickinson. And so I basically, you know, got that job, I worked for free, and I just treated it as if I was working for the most money I’ve ever made. I really put my heart and soul into it.Norman hired me on another movie after that called Silence of Bethany. Then I did a Disney project with him. And then eventually we did Heathers and I was the second assistant on Heathers. Those were non-union jobs. After that I was offered by Maryann Brandon to be her first assistant on this motorcycle racing movie that she was doing. And I think she hired me because I was really into racing motorcycles too, so I knew a lot of motorcycle racing and she thought it’d be helpful.I got my first break as a first assistance with Maryann Brandon, and then shortly after my good friend Steve said he was gonna move from being a first assistant to an editor soon, and he thought it would be wise for me to come work as second assistant with him and Bob, so that maybe eventually I could be Bob’s first assistant. And that’s kind of what happened - I went and worked with them, and eventually impressed Bob enough that he hired me as his first, and I became Bob Leighton’s first assistant.I got in the union and started working on these Rob Reiner movies with Bob Leighton. And then eventually Bob really supported me and helped me get into the editor’s chair and mentored me.
The Assembly: How did you get onto (500) Days of Summer, because that was one of your first big indie films?Alan Bell: Well, it was the first indie film I worked on that became a big success. My agent called me and said, “There’s a script and you should read it.” I read it and I fell in love with the script. At the time I was up for a fix-it job for Fox Studios, just to come in and… not really so much fix it, but just take over, because the original editor was leaving and it was gonna be a job that would pay me a decent rate.I had to decide whether I was gonna do (500) Days of Summer or this much higher paying job. When I read the script for (500) Days of Summer and went on the interview, I really got along with Marc Webb and Jessica and Steve Wolfe, the producers, and I just decided that I had to do (500) Days of Summer. It was a great script and everybody seemed really cool. As opposed to working on something that’s gonna pay me a lot more that I knew wasn’t gonna be very good, I went for less money and good content. I think that is a formula that I’m trying to continue because it’s the only one that’s really worked consistently.The Assembly: Well, the reason I wanted to get into (500) Day of Summer is because when I re-watched it, I was thinking about Zooey Deschanel’s acting delivery and how she sort of sits in this awkwardness, and I was wondering, in terms of editing when you’re editing awkward moments or editing, you know, moments that are supposed to make the audience feel awkward, how do you work with the footage to either help enhance something like Zooey’s work, or help improve the awkwardness in a scene?Alan Bell: Well, that’s an interesting question. You know, what you have to do is you have to look at the performance that the actor’s delivering, look at the performance that the script is calling for, and consider those two. Are they equal? Does the director have a difference of opinion in terms of how the actor performed it? And how much is too much or how little is too little? I think you’re really kind of just modulating
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the level of awkwardness that she’s giving you.Zooey Deschanel has a quirky aspect to her personality, and it’s one of the things that she brings to movies a lot. I think that in (500) Days we tried to really modulate it because we knew that what she was bringing to that character was this quirky kind of charm. But at the same time, if you’re not careful, that quirkiness, the eye rolls and the head tilts and those things can really feel like an actor’s just vying for time to remember their lines. You have to be really careful that you don’t overdo it.Sometimes it is a technique that she would use to get to the next line. So you just kind of have to modulate it and figure out which ones work best on an emotional level in terms of connecting her character with the audience and connecting her character with the other characters.The Assembly: From an editing standpoint, when I watched (500) Days of Summer again, there’s a couple of moments where the two leads would be discussing something and then someone would say something awkward. And then there would be this… We would cut to a two shot and sort of just sit in that awkwardness, and that’s where the humor of the moment would come from. And I was wondering how you
structured those. Or if that was part of the script? Was that written in or…Alan Bell: Well, it’s not written in. Human interaction is all about timing, and a lot of these awkward moments. In order for an awkward moment to play, it’s really the silence after the statement, or the question, or the whatever the moment is, and letting a character sit with it can really add a lot of tension, or humor, or whatever. It increases the effectiveness of the awkward moment.If they just said something quirky and you went on, you wouldn’t be giving it its due weight and esteem, I guess is the best way to describe it. Because that, their relationship really was… it was an unusual relationship and she was very awkward with him, and he was awkward with her. That was part of where the charm came from. So in order to really make it work, you had to sit on certain moments and let them breathe.And then other things had to go quickly. I always felt that that movie was kind of a rollercoaster ride of his emotions. Everybody loved those day slates. And I didn’t really. When I read the script, I missed that the cover page [from the script was missing] and that explained that they were day slates. So the script I read just had these big, giant, in parentheses numbers before various
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scenes, and I didn’t know what they were. I just thought it was like a weird problem with the script, with the PDF that had been given to me.So I went into the interview and I had read the script without realizing that they were day slates, and it didn’t really matter to me. I still feel that the movie plays as well without the day slates. I mean, it’s perfectly fine to have them there, but you always know where you are in time … It’s either before Summer, during Summer, or after Summer, just based on how Joseph Gordon-Levitt is behaving the minute you get to the scene. You know immediately when you look into his eyes whether he’s happy, sad, or, you know, just being himself.The Assembly: The other thing that raised a question for me from an editing perspective would be the documentary. When I was reading up about (500) Days, the documentary was in the film and I guess the studio wanted it, out or there was discussions about removing it. From an editing standpoint, how do you tackle an issue where there’s a disagreement and parts, or sections of the film are coming out or going back in? Not a disagreement with the studios, but from a structural perspective? Alan Bell: I’m confused. The doc?The Assembly: Sorry. The black and white footage that introduces Summer as a character in documentary format.Alan Bell: Right. Structurally, you do what you think is right for the movie. And when you screen it for audiences, they give you more information. I think that wise filmmakers pay close attention to that information.An audience is very good, if you ask them, at telling you what they think they should be seeing. What we should really be listening to is less about what they think they should be seeing, but more about what are they feeling at any given time and what do they understand or not understand.Structurally, you’ll learn a lot from playing your movie. And emotionally, you’ll learn a lot.
And then in terms of clarity of story and story structure, for me it always starts like this: you cut a movie and you cut every scene as if it’s the most important scene in the movie, and you cut them all for emotion and character strength. Really do justice to the characters. And then you concern yourself with structure. By doing those two steps you end up with a story. And if the story’s working, the audience will react positively. If it’s not working, then you’ll have areas where people are saying, “Oh, it’s moving too slow,” or, “I didn’t understand this,” or, “I didn’t like that character,” and,”I love this character, but that didn’t feel real.”And that just tells me that you haven’t addressed some of those things in the first place, which is to make each scene as efficient and work as strongly as possible. And then potentially some of the structural things will have an effect on how people are feeling about characters as they progress through the story.So it’s emotion, structure, and from those two things you end up with a story. In terms of whether the studio wants a scene in or not in, or whether the filmmakers or yourself want a scene in or not in, for me it all comes down to playability. If the audience is really enjoying a scene and it doesn’t really serve any other purpose but to give them enjoyment, and maybe structurally you could pull it out and the story doesn’t suffer at all, well, you have to ask yourself when and where is that happening.Can we afford the time? if I take it out, is the movie losing an element of joy or an element of suspense, or something that’s actually impacting something else later on down the road? Or does it pay off for something that happened earlier, but maybe it’s not really pushing the story at all? All those questions need to be answered, essentially, by the audience. And I think that part of my job is listening to their reactions and making judgment calls about whether or not things should stay in or be altered or pulled out.The Assembly: That’s interesting because a
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lot of times when I talk to editors, they’re sort of frustrated by the screen process. But it sounds like you almost see it as a relationship with the audience and an opportunity to engage them.Alan Bell: It could be frustrating when you have a film that’s not working fully and you’re very close to it, so you may not exactly understand why or how to make it better.There’s this thing that I hear, and I don’t hear too much from seasoned editors. It’s more from young people or people who haven’t cut very many films, where they get really upset about the notes. They get studio notes, they don’t like the focus groups. I mean, I understand that sometimes focus groups can really be a pain in the ass in Hollywood because you get these film students that have an ax to grind and they’ll just really derail things, if you’re not careful. But people have reactions to your material, and you have to take them seriously. The other thing is that a lot of people really get bent out of shape when it comes to studio notes. They’ll look at notes and go, “Well, that’s the dumbest note I’ve ever heard,” and that “That executive’s an idiot.” And the reality is, whether or not that executive is an idiot or not, it has no baring. That executive is paying to make this film. Their company is paying you. And they are not out to make a movie that is bad.If you look at what they want and what you want, it is the same thing - a good movie that’s successful. And if that’s not what you’re interested in, you shouldn’t be in the film business because it is the film business.So, the way I look at it is: if I get a note from an executive that maybe, on the surface, doesn’t seem like it’s the most intelligent thing, then I look deeper and I ask myself, “Why are they giving me that note?” Because chances are they’re hitting on something …It’s because something isn’t working for them.Now, maybe addressing the note the way they’re asking to isn’t the solution. You have to ask them some questions. Why are you feeling this way? Why do you think we should make this change?
[Find out] where does that come from.And then when they start to describe what they’re feeling and what’s going on, you can get some really great, interesting feedback that’s actionable. The note on the surface may seem really stupid, but when you find out what it’s really about, because you’re intimate with the footage and the characters and the story, whereas, they’re more thinking about broad story or various different demographics and things like that, you’re able to sometimes address notes in ways that make them happy and actually make you happy and make the movie better.I see notes as an opportunity, not as a, “Oh man, they’re trying to ruin the movie,” because they really are coming from the same place.Now, having said that, you can be in situations where the director and the creative producer may have very strong differences of opinions than the studio. If you’re trying to make a comedy and the studio’s trying to make a drama, you’re going to have huge problems. And as an editor, it’s difficult to be in the middle, but those are relatively rare circumstances where that’s happening.So I just think that a lot of young editors make the mistake of complaining about notes and studio executives and people coming up with opinions. I want to hear them all. That doesn’t mean that I’m gonna agree with everyone. But when you get a lot of people saying the same things, it’s a good idea to pay attention to that.
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The Assembly: Yeah. Like you were saying, you’re so intimate with the footage, whereas if you send it off to a studio head or someone to watch, they’re not. They don’t have that connection that you might have. So they’re giving you insight into something that you might not have seen.Alan Bell: Absolutely. And the thing is, they don’t have the same intimacy. These people [executives] are often working on two/ three films at a time, so they’re not watching twelve hours of dailies everyday for all their movies. Whereas, I’m watching four to six hours of dailies or two to three hours of dailies a day, depending on the scene or the film. So sometimes their notes are gonna be like, “What if?” or “Wouldn’t it be great if we could have them enter this way?”
And the reality is that it was never shot. Well, they’re hoping that it was, but it was never shot. But I look at it and go, “Oh, they have a problem with the entrance. Well, maybe there’s a different way to start the scene off,” and I can look at it differently. Not, “Oh, that idiot, he hasn’t looked at the dailies. He doesn’t even know what we have.” It’s like, “Okay, I could do that,” and I might make myself feel smarter than they are, but in reality they’re giving me a valuable piece of information - the entrance of the scene doesn’t work for them… So is there another way in?The Assembly: When I was doing research, I noticed that you had done a lot of VFX for other projects, or had been the effect supervisor. How did that inform your work as an editor?Alan Bell: Well, it’s changed my editing considerably. One of the reasons why I have these visual effects skills is because when I was an assistant editor, I knew that I was going to stop assisting and become an editor, and I started teaching myself how to do visual effects. And that was really because I wanted to have a skillset that could earn me a living. I’d looked around and I saw all my friends who were assistants had gone off to edit. Very few out of the the ones that went off to cut their own feature and then went back to assisting remained editors. And what I realized is that you needed to act like you are starting over. Since the film industry’s built on relationships, all the relationships I had made while I was an assistant, well, all those people thought of me as an assistant, so I needed to create new relationships where people thought of me as an editor. And that meant never going back to assisting.Visual effects was a way for me to make some money and stay in the film business, while I was waiting for the right film to come along. And it was also a way for me to get more of the money pie so that when I did do an indie film I would have more to offer. It was a doubled-edged sword for me, in a positive way, which allowed me to A) Slice through the pie and get a little more money, and B) Have more services to offer my future employers.
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The visual effects world for me started out as just teaching myself as much as possible. And fortunately, I really enjoyed doing all that stuff, so it wasn’t like a struggle for me. I still am constantly studying it.And I use various techniques to enhance performances in structured scenes, as well as internal performances within the frame all the time. It’s just part of my toolbox, and I can do it as I edit. It’s not a matter of, “Oh, wouldn’t it be good if this happened?” And sending it off to somebody and having them do an Avid effect and send it back and have it look all crappy. I just do it right there, using Fusion or Nuke. Now I primarily use Fusion, and you can’t tell that I’ve done anything to the performance.It changes my editing considerably. In fact, it’s a part and parcel of how I work now. And I think it’s something that directors, really appreciate. Certainly when they don’t have it, they miss it, because I’m able to solve problems that they weren’t able to, that other editors just can’t even dream of.The Assembly: I have to ask, and sorry for my ignorance, but how do you use Fusion to enhance [an actor’s] performance?Alan Bell: Well, for instance, in Mockingjay Part One, when they’ve just suffered this enormous bombing, and she walks out into that crater and it’s full of roses. At the bottom of the scene, she takes this long time. Gale says, “Why would they do this?” And she’s like, “They did it for me.” And Cresta is telling her to say “All right, I’m Katniss Everdeen and I’m here in district thirteen where we just suffered a bombing.” Katniss is sitting there and she’s not saying anything. And then eventually she says, “He’s gonna kill Peeta. He’s gonna kill Peeta. I can’t do this.”Originally, the way that was photographed, she always said, “I can’t do this. He’s gonna kill Peeta. He’s gonna kill Peeta. I can’t do this.” Every single take has her saying “I can’t do this” first. Well, I could cut around and get rid of that first “I can’t do this” by going to somebody else, but that takes away from the emotion of her build-up to, “Oh my God, he’s gonna kill Peeta.”
So instead, I very quickly took her face, slowed it down, and stretched it over the line and morphed it back onto itself, and I didn’t have to cut away so that she’s there, she’s looking, she’s thinking, she’s cogitating, and she comes up with, “He’s gonna kill Peeta. He’s gonna kill Peeta. I can’t do that.”That’s a performance enhancement that allowed me to stay with her and not cut. That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about. And it goes right down to split screens, re-times, face morphs, whole actors and actresses being replaced across scenes and things like that.The Assembly: Wow. That, must take a lot of time just to get it right.Alan Bell: Well, that’s the thing, if you’re skilled and you’re used to doing this stuff, you can do it really quickly. And that’s where the value comes in.The Assembly: Do you send it out afterwards to get re-done? Or is that it?Alan Bell: Well, I’m working on the Avid material, so eventually it has to be done at the final. I’m certainly capable of doing the finals, but not in the time frame that editing allowed.If we were cutting with the raw materials, then I would say probably thirty percent of the shots that I do in the system would be final right out the get go, but the seventy percent would have to go back to be cleaned up.I’m more interested in the performance and whether or not it works, than whether or not it’s exactly perfect. I will tell you that the work that I do on these movies, I do between a hundred and fifty and three hundred shots whether they be just basic splits or re-times or face morphs. On virtually every film, and every single one of those shots that I do gets previewed and screened with an audience multiple times before it’s ever taken by somebody elseand re-done. And nobody is aware of any of it. It’s completely invisible, unless you know what to look for. The Assembly: But even so, it would be going so fast, if you’re engaged with the film, you
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probably wouldn’t even notice it even if you were looking…Alan Bell: Well, that’s exactly it. The Assembly: Now you brought up the Mockingjay series and I was wondering, from an editing point of view, the films were split into two, so the original book was split up into two films. How did you work with the momentum and the pace, from the ending of one film into the next? Because it’s an odd situation where we’re leaving a film before the story’s finished, but it’s about to pick up again. And I’m wondering how you bridged those two films so that it ended on a completion note, and then picked up for us in the next film.Alan Bell: Originally, Mockingjay [part] one was set to end right as Peeta [gets smashed] in the head with the medical tray, and it goes right to black. And that was the end of the film in terms of how the scripts were written.The two movies were shot concurrently so, you know, as sequentially as possible. While we were cutting them together it was very clear that it was a perfectly acceptable place to end the movie, but we thought it wasn’t really fair to the fans. Also, there was a part of it that just didn’t feel complete because we didn’t wanna leave people with the feeling, if they hadn’t read the books, that perhaps Katniss Everdeen wasn’t alive.We wanted everybody to know that everything was completely messed up, but the players were still there. We wanted to have Coin giving one of her speeches and see how she is progressing. So we thought it would be a good idea to actually end it - take the beginning of Mockingjay two and add it to the end of Mockingjay one. And we did that even before we were done shooting Mockingjay one.I had a version where I intercut Coin’s speech with Katniss getting up and walking down the hall and seeing Peeta in the room just completely bonkers. That just seemed like the best place for us, both emotionally, and in terms of completing one of the two chapters that’s going to break the book in two. It just made the most sense.
It also allowed us to start Mockingjay two in a really nice place - Katniss is healed now and we didn’t have to go through this process of her healing. All that stuff is done, and it seemed like a real clean chapter break. And we didn’t really have to do any of the “previously on” kinda stuff that you get on TV shows because, you get it. Oh, she’s healed, and we just kinda carried forward and figured that fans would [get it].The Assembly: One of the things that I found really fascinating was the constant shift of Peeta going from in love with Katniss to hating her, to back in love or to questioning his choices. And, the way it’s cut gives us the sense that you don’t know when he could snap and sort of switch back to his hate side.So I’m wondering how did this come about? Was it in the script? Or did you have to manipulate the footage to help build the tone and the tension in those moments so that it was more of a surprise… How did you cut Peeta’s footage?Alan Bell: Well, it was actually scripted, but it was more something that Francis and Nina, and Josh, working with the character, they recognized and Peter Craig, the writer, recognized that once Peeta is introduced into the group… We’ve already seen him snap… So it was a complete surprise, when he jumps at Katniss at the end of Mockingjay one. And then once Coin introduces them into the group, we knew that he had to be this kind of ticking time bomb, and so he was performing it in that way.It’s a fine line between Okay, is he going to snap? Is he not going to snap? And if you watch Mockingjay two, it’s like he’s faking that he’s going to sleep all the time. And it happens twice where Katniss sits down, and he starts talking to her. And even though they’re real, those are real innocent talks, there’s something that’s kind of unsettling about that. And it’s usually right after he’s done something relatively severe.I mean by the time they’re underground and he starts talking when you think he’s asleep… And that’s one particular area where he wasn’t pretending to be asleep in the performance that
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he did, but Francis and I actually slowed him down and did a performance thing so that he would appear to be sleeping when he sits down, and sort of create this moment where she just sits down, thinks she’s all there on her watch alone, everybody asleep around her, and then he just starts talking.And that just seemed like the right thing to do after pushing Mitchell in the oil. So it was partially on the page, partially in the performance, and partially created in the editing room. Certainly made more effective in the editing room.The Assembly: Philip Seymour Hoffman passed away during the filming with about a week left, and I was wondering how that impacted the editing process. How did you have to work around the footage, or work with the footage to complete the film?Alan Bell: It was a terrible tragedy and everybody sort of dealt with it in different ways. I was really upset that that happened and I didn’t see it coming. Everybody sort of took a few days to figure out okay; we’ve lost this amazing person and performer and after a few days of grieving I had to go through all of the footage, every single shot that we had of him through all of the movies that we shot up to that point, to figure out what was usable and what wasn’t.
And then, Peter Craig and, and Francis, and Nina Jacobson, the three of them sat down and worked out how they were going to proceed. There was only one scene that was missing, and then there were a few places where he needed to be in the audience sprinkled around, where he didn’t particularly have lines. They had to rewrite a scene and they rewrote a scene for Haymitch. It was the letter scene in the room after Katniss kills Coin. And so that scene had to be written. And then I had to go find pieces of Phil that would be usable elsewhere in the movie where we previously had planned to have him.That took me about two or three days, to go through and find everything and then try to figure out… this is a moment for this or for that… I had to go through all the scenes that he was meant to be in, and emotionally what’s he supposed to be doing, and where’s he supposed to be, and put all these things together and show them to Francis so that he and the DP and the effects supervisor can look at it and decide how to shoot those elements, so that we could comp him in.It was sad and it was not a comfortable thing to be doing. On the one hand, I found myself going through a whole range of emotions from being upset and depressed and also kinda feeling angry at him. At the end of the day, it was a terrible tragedy and it was definitely one of the lowest points that I experienced on the movies.
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Even though it’s not like he and I had any kind of a real relationship, outside of me looking at his footage. I met him a few times on set., but so many of the crew members around me were so deeply affected and upset by it, and I was as well, and then having to go through all the footage; it was very odd. It was… it was not comfortable.The Assembly: Now, you’ve had the great fortune to work on some major tentpole films. A lot of younger editors want to work on these projects. You transitioned from (500) Days of Summer slowly into these much larger tentpole films like The Amazing Spider-Man and The Hunger Games series. I’m wondering, from an editing perspective, how do you make that leap? For young editors trying to get into film, it’s one thing going from assistant to editor, but taking these smaller, more intimate dramas like (500) Days of Summer and then jumping to much larger films with much larger budgets is a whole other sort of movement or transition that you have to make as an editor. I’m wondering how you went about doing that?Alan Bell: Well, you grab onto the coattails of a very successful up-and-coming director and you don’t let go (chuckling).The Assembly: (laughing).Alan Bell: In my case, I did (500) Days of Summer with Marc Webb, and he introduced me to Francis Lawrence. And so after (500) Days of Summer I had heard about this movie Water for Elephants, and I knew that Francis Lawrence had come to a couple of the (500) Days of Summer screenings, so I knew that he was friends with Marc Webb. And I asked Marc if he would introduce, just get me a meet-and-greet, with Francis because I had read the script and I had asked my agent to approach them and they were looking for somebody with much more experience than me, I think.I was super excited about the script. I couldn’t get a meeting with Francis without going through Marc, and Marc was kind enough to actually call Francis up and say, “Hey, you know, you don’t have to hire him, just can you meet with him?” And I went and met with Francis and we had a
great meeting, and I ended up getting Water for Elephants that way.So, while I was on Water for Elephants, Marc was vetting editors for Spider-Man which, at that time, I wasn’t going to be available to start because I was on Water for Elephants.So he got Pietro [Scalia] to start the movie knowing that Pietro might have to leave to go do Ridley’s next film, and we worked out a deal where I was able to come on and take over. And then Pietro was actually able to come back towards the end when we were really trying to solve some key problems in the film.So that’s kinda how it worked. It’s really because of my experience with Marc Webb on (500) Days of Summer that got me Spiderman and Water for Elephants, so it’s really about relationships.I mean, as far as I’m concerned, movies like The Hunger Games and (500) Days of Summer - one is an indie film and the other a big tentpole - I don’t really approach them any differently. You have a decidedly much larger amount of material when you’re working on a tentpole [project] and you have these bigger set pieces and there’s a lot more, the moving parts are quite a bit bigger, they’re more to handle.But the approach from an editing standpoint is really the same. You cut the scene together. They’re always shot out of order so you cut the scenes and really work on performance and emotion. Then you work on structure and story. As long as you just approach it that way…there are different aspects in the middle and between you, and how to deal with actions, and when to cut, and when not to cut, and different tricks that you can employ throughout, but the main ideas are the same regardless of whether you’re on a indie film or a tentpole.And I would say… Hollywood pigeonholes you. Once you do a big tentpole, that’s all they think you can do, and when you’re in the indie world that’s all they want you to do. It’s hard to break out, unless you have a director that breaks out.
Editing Mockingjay Part 2
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Interview withTim Smith
(Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychological Sciences)
Interviewed byGordon Burkell
THE DIEM PROJECT
INTERVIEW
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The Assembly: How did you get into this area of study?Tim: Well, I went to study psychology and, quite bizarrely, artificial intelligence at university. I think it’s because I was always interested in media and technology, and particularly our relationship with it. So at the time, I was looking for courses and I kind of took both approaches. I wanted to understand the science of investigating human behavior and human mental life. Then I wanted to look at the kind of technical aspects of how you can model that, how you could understand it. Also, part of it was how to get to know how we are using technology and how it’s actually changing us. Part of that interest was also fueled by my passion for cinema
and this kind of wonder I always had about how it seems incredibly powerful to invoke this kind of rich experience in all of its viewers and take us on these big, emotional, and stimulating journeys, through just these flickering lights and sound patterns on a screen. So I'd always been a little, kind of, amateur researcher on film theory and film practice. When I started actually studying psychology, I felt that it would maybe give me some insight into how film worked. But I realized that there was very little science on it. From the psychology side, there was very little research looking at how the movies could actually shape human experience and could take us on these journeys. Whereas when I looked in the film textbooks - editing, introductions, kind of,
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Film 101 - there was a lot of craft knowledge that filmmakers seemed to have about how they could actually create a certain experience in their viewers, and I just realized there was a huge mismatch and I needed to really try and tackle it and do some research on it.The Assembly: Can you elaborate on this disconnect between film and psychology?Tim: It was generally the lack of understanding from the scientific and the academic side, and the apparent understanding from the actual craft side. For instance, if you did a lot of research on vision, and when you look at standard textbooks that are supposed to talk about all of visual psychology, they would maybe have a paragraph on movies, and all it would be talking about is how we perceive motion from a rapid presentation of still images. There was nothing else about how you make sense of the scene represented across editing; or, how camera movements affect the way we look at it; or, how things like interactions between the score and the images can shape an emotional experience. I mean things which are rich and important to film, there was no grasp of those complex aspects in visual psychology.So I wanted as much as possible to look at the ideas that were there, in the mind of the filmmakers, and figure out if we can actually formalize them in a way that we can test, and experiment, and see if their hunches are actually bared out by the data.The Assembly: Why do you think there was such a lack of research into this area previously?Tim: I think a lot of the lack of the research has been due to culture and technology, really. For a long time, the cognitive sciences and investigation into human cognition have been restricted in how we could actually experiment with people because you need to be able to control the factors you think are important. A lot of vision experiments will be, "Let's see how this particular texture, or this particular visual detail may be perceived in different ways when we tell a person to look at it in a different context.” So, you're manipulating something very small, and then you can understand what the effect is. But if you then step up and say, "Okay, we're going to tell a story, and we're
going to do it using different editing techniques and different camera styles,” there are too many variables, and it's quite hard to actually figure out how you do those experiments. And also, most psychologists don't have the production values that even a basic production house would have. They can't create the special effects. They can't shoot the footage at high enough quality, or enough volume, so there's been issues with that.In the last few years I think the cognitive sciences have advanced in that they're starting to embrace a lot of the kind of digital techniques that are available for editing and digital manipulation of images, low-cost kind of film production, so they can start playing around with creating the stimuli themselves. They've also realized that we can use a lot of the same techniques to manipulate film as a way of testing the impact. For example, re-editing a film sequence, changing the score, and changing the framing in a shot. And then we can actually go in and start running those in experiments to see what the effect is.As a science, we're trying to mature to the point that we can actually ask the questions in the way that the filmmakers might be interested in the answers. That's still an ongoing process of how we can do that and how we can communicate back to the filmmakers to kind of help, or maybe to inform some of their decisions. The Assembly: What is the DIEM project?Tim: Well, the DIEM project (the Dynamic Images and Eye Movement project) was a project that was funded by the Leverhulme trust in the UK. It was actually finished about five years ago. It was the first attempt to understand how people were actively watching movies. I put an emphasis on the active, because when you watch someone watch a movie, especially if you're in the cinema and they're kind of in this comfortable seat, and they're sat down, and all the lights around them are controlled so that their attention is focused on the screen, it looks like it's an incredibly passive experience where the movie is just, kind of, shaping what they audience is thinking and feeling. But what we were aware of is the viewer is actively involved in creating the film experience. They have
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to make sense of what's being presented, they have to choose where to look, and they have to choose how to put all the information together to make sense of the narrative. There's so much of the audience that's in the actual film.From the science side, we wanted to understand and we wanted to start documenting that process. The techniques we used were primarily eye tracking, which is a way of using high-speed, infrared cameras to record the movements of a viewer's eye when they're looking at a visual scene. By doing this, it gives us a point which we can project back onto the image so that we can see where their attention is likely to have been focused at that point in time and, as a result of that, likely to be the bits that they're going to see in detail and are going to make it into their long-term memory. So for the DIEM project, we had to devise the techniques for doing that; the ways of replaying it and analyzing it, as well as then starting to apply it to different film and TV footage so we could see how the viewer's gaze behavior was affected by things like camera angles, shot choice, editing patterns, and these kind of details.The Assembly: What tools do you use to acquire the data?Tim: There's a variety of ways you can do it. For the DIEM project, we used the system which is a remote camera that sits under a monitor. In this particular experiment, the participants had their chin on a chin rest while watching the movies on a computer screen. It's not the most authentic of cinema viewing experiences, but it gives us very precise data about where they're looking on the screen. But since then, I've been using a variety of techniques. Some of them are cameras, which are actually integrated into the screen and the viewer can just sit back and relax normally, and doesn't need to be on a chin rest. So, they basically forget that they're being eye-tracked very quickly, and we're still gathering a lot of data about where they're looking. But that's still on a screen.I've also done studies using head-mounted systems, which are just a big pair of goggles that you wear, and they record your gaze directly into a kind of mobile phone. And that can be used
anywhere. So we've done that in IMAX cinemas. We've done it watching TV at home, or on laptops, and we can even do it as people are walking around the street. So, we can get more of a kind of noninvasive measure of how people are using their attention and their eyes to make sense of complex audiovisual scenes, whether it's on a screen, or whether it's even just out in the real world.The Assembly: What kind of footage are you using to acquire the data?Tim: Most of the footage that we actually use in the lab tends to be short films, or short sequences from films, just for the practical reason that we can get through more different types of films, so we can look for more of an effect. We have done these kind of recordings for whole movies, and the data tends to show that within each movie you'll get this kind of waves of interest in the film. Those waves may be actually driven by the story. They may be driven by the kind of formal decisions the filmmakers are making to try to create these patterns. You may think of the classic example, then, the kind of plotting of an actual film that you have the setting of the scene, the laying of the interest at the beginning as you're introducing the characters; and then there'll be some challenge, some kind of upset to the status quo - the protagonist meets somebody that he actually falls in love with, or there's a sudden catastrophe, which means that they then have to go off on a journey to try to fix it.The narrative itself will actually create these peaks in attention, and those peaks in attention can be physically measured in terms of eye movements, in terms of the arousal of the viewer. So, physiologically they may be actually getting a heightened state of emotion in response to that film. But the viewers can only really sustain that for a limited period of time before they'll start to kind of habituate to those, kind of tense, or the intense events that are happening in the movie. So then they'll go for a period where they may seem like they're slightly disinterested, or less moved by the movie. It's then the skill of the storyteller and the filmmaker to bring it back again and sustain it throughout the entire movie. But that's a general, overriding kind of structure. Of course, different
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films all do it in different ways, and different genres and different styles may do it very differently.The Assembly: Did you test any bad films to get an understanding of how an audience reacts to them so you could juxtapose that data to quality films?Tim: [Laughs] Yeah, well, I've tried to look for bad films, 'cause in psychology, in order to understand normal psychology, you find atypicalities, or kind of clinical groups. So, which part of the brain is responsible for speech, and if somebody who's had a stroke, and we know that the stroke is in a certain part of the brain, and then when that doesn't work they can't speak anymore. You're looking for the outlier. You're looking for the divergent state. For a while I was trying to find bad movies, to see how they went wrong, but they're actually surprisingly hard to find in terms of the basic kind of grammar and structure of movies. Even when you find something which is shockingly bad, like, "Plan 9 From Outer Space," or "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," or even “The Room,” which is legendary for how bad it is, in terms of the basic features of how you move from one shot to another, how you frame it, it's still okay. It still fulfills the requirements. What we find as being bad is generally things that are quite hard to, for me, to identify in terms of the low-level kind of visual processing of the film. It's things like characterization, emotional plausibility, plotting, and/or, the production values of sets. They're interesting to find, but they're also quite surprising in that most filmmakers seem to have a general grasp of how to try and tell a story with film.But I think what's interesting is when you find filmmakers who very knowingly push the boundaries of editing and film grammar. I've done a lot of work with films from Lars von Trier - the way that he uses editing to create a sense of a scene will involve violating assumptions of where things are in space, where they are in time, where people are looking, or where they're actually interacting within a scene. A lot of the scenes, dialogue sequences from "Antichrist," are scenes where it's unclear what the flow of the conversation is because you suddenly jump around in time in terms of what people are saying. And the same
happens in "Dancer in the Dark." There's a lot of mobile camera movement, a lot of seemingly ad hoc framing and ad hoc shooting of scenes where you can't easily construct the chronology. So the viewer becomes a lot more actively involved in perceiving the flow of events from one shot to another, because they can't just assume that once Character A is introduced on the left-hand side of the frame, then every time I hear their voice, they're always going to be on the left-hand side of the frame, they're always going to be looking in the same direction, they're always going to look the same and one cut from one person's statement to another implies that those two things follow each other in time, and they are physically next to each other - simple things that we take for granted. And a lot of the classical Hollywood style of film and film editing can be violated; and when you do that, when you do it in a very knowing manner as people like Lars von Trier, or Darren Aronofsky, or Michael Haneke do, it can put the viewer in a much more active state. And they're engaging and trying to figure out, "What are the new rules of this film? How do I make sense of it?" and that is a very different cognitive and physiological state for the viewer to be in, which for some people could be attractive and sometimes maybe not.The Assembly: There seems to be a lot of crossover with the experiments of the early soviet filmmakers like Kuleshow and Eisenstein. Did you look back at this work or use it to help you in your research?Tim: Yeah. I think some of the phenomena that Eisenstein was referring to, and as a result of that, I think Hitchcock picked up on some of his texts and some of the work of Lev Kuleshov and V.I. Pudovkin, who were kind of contemporaries of Eisenstein, was responding to early behavioral psychological work. Work that showed that animals -primates, and even humans - have an automatic response system where sudden shock, certain changes in the sensory stimulation may elicit some physiological change before they become consciously aware of it. So if it's a loud bang, if there's a certain touch that's unexpected, or a certain bright light, or a flash, then we will respond to that in a very automatic way. There's a process
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called the "orienting response," which will ready us to make sense of that sensory stimulus, which kind of primes us for response. And then there's a defensive response which will happen if there's a very sudden and very brutal change, like a loud bang, where we blink and our muscles contract, and it actually defends us physically from the stimulus. There's a very low level in which these kind of very bold sensory stimuli can actually elicit responses and they happen all the time in movies. Of course, if you take an action sequence, for example from a Michael Bay movie, his use of intense camera changes, large movement, explosions, big kind of rumbling sound effects that move you physically to the base and also move around you spatially to try to disorient and energize the viewers, these things, they're trying to communicate to us at a very physiological level. One of the great powers of film is that it can communicate directly to us just using those two sensory modalities. It can't touch us. It can't physically move us, but it can actually change our heart rate. It can make the hairs on the back of our necks stand up. It can change our posture. It can change our eye movements. It can change all these things just by controlling the sensory space. That is one of the basic foundations of film, I think, in terms of changing the view of space.And then on top of that, you have what happens once cognition kicks in, where you start to reason about what you've just been moved by, and what does it mean to you and what does it mean in the context of what you've just seen. So you hear a loud bang. You respond to that physically, and then you start looking around for the source of the explosion, or the gun firing and the target of that. And once you see that information, then it leads to you interpreting it in terms of its narrative importance and what it therefore means based on the characters that are in the scene. So, you've got all these multiple layers that can all be changed, and can all be shaped by the filmmaker.The Assembly: How do action sequences affect the viewer’s focus?
Tim: Well, I think some of those very obvious effects can become quite tiring, literally so, for viewers. Some of the editing sequences in action movies, for me, feel like they can go on too long. Like the "Transformers" movies, if you have prolonged action sequences of complete metal carnage - you can only stimulate the human body so much before it actually starts to habituate, and it stops responding to the same stimulus in the same way. So, eventually, there'll be a big explosion. There'll be a very rapid, edited sequence; and I won't be moved by it. We have that problem in some really intense film sequences.I think you also have the problem where films have been composed for one mode of presentation. Say they're edited for TV, which we typically view on a smaller device. The devices fill less of our field of vision, which means we can take in more of it at a faster pace. And then if you show it on a larger format, it can become overwhelming because it's almost giving you too much stimulation. So that can cause problems, and we can then almost distance ourselves from the movie because we're not responding to it physically, and it may be harder for us to engage with it cognitively. The Assembly: The physical engagement is really interesting because you see a lot with horror films…Tim: ...and good filmmakers, they'll understand that pattern, and they will know how to create a trajectory, so you have a good, suspenseful horror movie that will build to a crescendo, the big shock; and then there'll be a slow sequence afterward to give our body time to recover before it builds up again. Those big shocks, they have to be used in moderation. But underlying that can be more subtle techniques, as you mention, about using sound bridges, or using the score to gradually change the state of the viewer. Suspenseful scoring of a film sequence can be incredibly powerful. If I take a scene of somebody walking slowly through an office and I score that with just environmental effects, or with suspenseful and a Hitchcock-esque soundtrack, the way that I look at the image, the way that I perceive the content and the way that I interpret how it relates to the character or what's happening in the scene around
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them is going to change because I'm changing the viewer's expectations based on the music which is underscoring it. There are a lot of very subtle, implicit effects that filmmakers can actually manipulate to change the way that we see what's actually in front of us.The Assembly: How does the audience use of multiple screens affect the data?Tim: There hasn't been enough research on that to my knowledge so far. There's been kind of descriptive research of how we have multiple screens on at the same time when we're watching a movie or TV at home and how we're actually possibly interacting both socially around the TV screen and also with the content itself - choosing when to watch it, choosing how to pause it, how to replay it, these kind of things.But in terms of what the actual kind of scientific study at the level, focusing on How are people looking at the image? How are they making sense of it? How are they physiologically responding to it based on the actual way that it's presented? there hasn't been too much of that. I do know some studies which have looked at the effect of screen size and of resolution on the way that we respond to films, as well as some work on 2D versus 3D presentations. There's starting to be some work on high frame rate versus standard frame rate film productions, which are nice experimental designs because you have the option to show the same content in various different ways and then see how people differ in their response to it.But I'd say all that research is still in it's very early stages, and it's something which I think I would like to think the film industry is getting involved in. If they're not, I think they possibly should because [laughs] there's a lot of interest from the filmmakers, from the production studios about how they can use this new technology to tell stories, or how they should use it, or how it's changing the way that the viewers actually experience the stories that they're telling.They can have surprisingly large effects. I think changing the frame rate, people's anecdotal experience of watching a high-frame-rate movie compared to a 25 fps movie, changes the visual
quality, and that can distract. It can change the way we can engage with the content. We need to really understand what's happening, at the very basic level of visual processing. How do we look at it? How are we perceiving the contrast range across the image, etc. These things are shaping the way that the viewers are engaging with it, and it's at quite an explicit level that it seems to be changing than the higher-level kind of cognitive and emotional responses to the content.There was the technology and the availability of these new tools and these new storytelling methods are increasing rapidly for filmmakers. I think we need to make sure that we're actually doing the science behind it, so that we can then figure out what the limits are. Like, how fast can I edit in a highly mobile shot? What's the difference in what details can be picked up when I'm showing it on a tablet versus on a cinema screen? If we can actually document these and investigate them, we can come up with some guidelines, some constraints, or even some formulae which can compute intended outcomes based on the data. There are a lot of ways that the film industry and scientists like myself can work together to try to get at the essence of what we're all interested in - the viewer's experience, and how to create interesting and as rich a viewer experience as possible.The Assembly: How does the change in camera framing, shots, and editing rate affect the viewer’s engagement?Tim: Well, I've done a little bit of work on it for one of the labs. The person who has done probably the most work on this is James E. Cutting at Cornell. He's been doing a wonderful project for the last few years where he's taken a selection of feature films, of Hollywood feature films, in the last 70 years. And he's formalized all of these low-level visual features of the movies, so things like the contrast range in the image, the framing, the shot size, the camera movement, the editing rate. He's able to statistically analyze various ways in which they've changed, and also they may change, the way viewers respond to them. So such things as charting the increasing editing rate over the last 70 years in movies and how that interacts with the
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type of camera shots - whether it's a long shot, or whether it's a close-up, and then whether there's mobility within that.It's the first big project which has tried to take some of the observations that filmmakers had about how they've been changing and their style, how film editors have been changing the way they edit. Then we can actually formalize it. We can see, "Is this as different as we thought it was?" And some of those insights have been about things like the level of camera movement and about the kind of contrast in the images. So, I think, everyone will know, yourself and your readers, that films are a lot darker now. There's an incredible move towards very high-contrast compositions with a lot of dark space in the image.One of the consequences of that, if done well, is that it can clearly pick out the focal features in any frame, as a consequence of the point which is highest luminance compared to the background. That's very important from my perspective when I research gaze, because the human eye wants to settle on the most informative point in any frame. And what's informative is based on all of the visual features sewn together. So, my gaze will be driven by low-level features like color and luminance contrast, as well as motion. And there's a lot of motion which is influencing where people are going to look. We will look at the thing which is most salient, that stands out on those basic features because we assume that that's where something interesting is happening and will subsequently happen. In film, that logic kind of makes sense because the cinematographers will light and will frame a scene to try to ensure that that point which is the clearest to see in the frame is also the one where the narrative and the emotional content is going to come from. Typically, it's a person's face, or it's an object of interest, or it's something interacting with it.You can see when [a cut or scene] doesn't work, because if I'm looking at the eye movement behavior of multiple viewers who are watching a film sequence which doesn't have good contrast, doesn't have clear centering of an object, or clear framing of the shots so that all of the visual
information points towards the main point of interest, what will happen is that the viewers will all look in different places, and they won't get to the same point at the same time. That does happen in some movies. It happens in movies that I make, because I'll go out and make sure that I don't make it as well as a professional cinematographer would. And there's noise in the image, and that means that viewers look in different places.But if I take a Hollywood movie, or a TV program, or anything which is shot to be delivered to the mainstream audience, they will have all of these features pointing together and they all work together. So, it's never just the lighting. It's never just the framing. Everything will work together to try and point you towards this one point.The Assembly: So what was CARPE?Tim: CARPE was a tool we created to visualize this. When we'd gathered the eye movement data of people watching these film and TV clips, we wanted to capture this kind of dynamics of how people watched the movies. And I'd seen through previous studies that when you show multiple people the same video clip, there's a high likelihood that they're all going to look in the same places in time, due to many of the factors I just mentioned. We wanted a good way of representing this, so my colleagues, John Henderson, Parag Mital, and I, created this piece of software which allowed us to put all the gaze data of multiple people onto each frame of the movie and then statistically describe where the center of their interest was. And we did this using a dynamic heat map. A heat map tells us where the tightest concentration of [the audience’s] gaze is on any particular frame, and it can also show us if there's multiple clusters. We put these gaze points on an image, and they may be dispersed all over the place, or they may all be focused in on one point. And the heat map gives us this measure of that variation. So, how does that change depending on shot size? How does it change depending on editing? It allows us to visualize it and then also quantify it, and we can do some analysis on it.The Assembly: How do people access this or take part?
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Tim: All the gaze data, the videos, and CARPE are available as part of the project. With that, anybody can download it and start visualizing and looking at the data. They can also start to kind of code and analyze it in any way they're interested. So, there's only limited questions that I or my colleagues can ask about it. We looked at things like shot length and camera movements and shot sizes, but if someone had a particular question about how does, let's say, titling interact with your gaze when you're watching a movie, or how does a particular mise en scene work in a scene, then they could take the video footage and they could recode it, and they could look for moments that they were particularly interested in. The data's already there, and it was very time-consuming and very expensive to gather this, so we're just happy to put it out there and for people to analyze it.If there are people who are more technically savvy and want to actually get their hands dirty themselves with gathering their own data on their own footage, then there now are low-cost eye trackers available, where you can basically buy a lower-grade version of what we used for this study and plug it into your MAC or your Windows machine and gather your own gaze data. So, let's say you're a filmmaker. You're trying to decide on which is the best way to actually edit the sequence, and you want to get something more concrete than test screening, or people's opinions on it. You can buy one of these eye trackers and there's one which is only $99, so that's a huge difference from the $30,000 that we paid for ours [laughs].And you can put it on different versions of your movie. You can gather the eye movement data. You can then visualize it through CARPE, and you can start to actually test your hypotheses, say, "This one worked better because I used more close shots." "Did this one allow them to see where the bomb was hidden in this shot at a particular angle?" You know, you'll see. The gaze will tell you if they're actually looking there. So, hopefully, the techniques that we've created through the DIEM project, the software that we've put out there and combined with these new lower eye trackers and experimental techniques can
mean that more people are able to actually do the studies and, hopefully, inform their filmmaking.The Assembly: What’s your other research?Tim: My research has got lots of different aspects to it. In terms of the film work, we're looking at various aspects, including how do we actually learn to watch movies. We assume that there are these conventions, that the viewers know how certain shots relate to each other. But do they understand a shot reverse shot or an over-the-shoulder shot, or the way that an establishing shot relates to kind of interior shots because they learned that language? Or is it actually just a consequence of the way that we're seeing the real world expressed through film? So that's what the question is about - do we actually have to learn to see movies? And one way we're looking at that is actually looking at the way that babies watch movies. Using similar eye tracking techniques we can show young infants movie sequences composed specifically for them and that have all different editing conventions in them. And we can start to see are they responding to it in the way that we'd expect an adult to respond once they know how the two shots relate? Simple techniques like giving the viewer an impression of an entire scene, by showing parts of a scene; giving them an impression of an entire event sequence by showing them bits of the events that are connected together with directional continuity, or match action cuts. And these are things that we take for granted as adults, but some of my collaborators have shown that if you take such sequences and you show them to adults who've never been exposed to movies, they will fail to understand a lot of them, which suggests that we actually need to learn, we need to become literate in film viewing. So, we're devising techniques where we can actually do these studies, and we can see how babies learn to watch movies.
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Written ByJonny Elwyn
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ARTICLE
How to Get An Agent
One of the most mysterious and misunderstood aspects of a film editor’s career progression seems to be the idea of ‘getting an agent’. Most editors' initial understanding (and my own!) of the world of agents, why you need one and what they can do for you, reminds me of the phrase:
“I’m like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.” – The Joker, The Dark KnightIn this article I hope to shed some light on this topic, and to help editors who are looking to get an agent understand what to expect, how to approach an agent successfully, and what to do with them, when you sign with one.
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I was fortunate enough to interview a Top UK Agent, a Working Editor signed to an agent, and an (ex) Agent’s Assistant in the process of researching this article. I offered them all anonym-ity, in exchange for candid answers to delicate questions. I’m very grateful to them for their time, enthusiasm, and expertise.
MYTH BUSTING WITH A FEW HARD FACTSYou need to have an established reel, and it probably helps if you already have a contact that has worked with, or is represented by that agent already, in order to prove your worth to be taken on. – Agent’s AssistantThe first misunderstanding, that agents are at pains to put right, is that it’s easy to get an agent. You won’t get one right out of film school, or after editing some really creative corporate videos. You need to have already built an established career and be aspiring to progress to bigger and better projects. Therefore, in order to stand any chance of being represented by a credible agent, you will need to have a few things already going for you. You will need at least a handful of relevant credits within your chosen spectrum of post-production and these credits will need to be creatively interesting.
For example, if you want to be a broadcast TV editor working on a high-end drama series, you will need to show broadcast TV credits in which you actually edited the show and it wasn’t boring, day-time TV material. The same goes for features or commercials or music videos.If you’re interested in their credits, then you meet
them, but sometimes it just doesn’t work because you can sense that’s just not going to happen… if you get someone coming in who’s just done TV… and they say they want to do feature films. And you can see that, realistically, unless a director they’ve worked with in TV moves onto features, it’s not going to happen. That’s how most peo-ple move onto features – it’s the directors they’ve been working with making the move, and they follow-ing them. – Top AgentThis leads us on to myth number two – An Agent will get you work.Many editors believe: if I can just get an agent, then I’ll get more work. An agent alone will not get you work. It is your CV, experience, and personality that will persuade
a prospective employer that you are the right per-son for the job. That’s what will get you the work. The agent can simply put that CV into new, and harder to reach hands.It’s about trust and mutual respect, and the moment you start to think, “What are they doing for their 10 percent?” you shouldn’t be there. It should be unquestioned. The moment people start noticing that they’re paying commission, it can start to turn sour. A lot of work goes on be-hind the scenes that the clients don’t see, or hear about. There are a lot of discussions, between us and producers, that they’re not party to, because they shouldn’t be party to [it]. – Top AgentIf you have already built an established career, formed a network of working relationships, and acquired credits to your name, what do you need an agent for? Won’t they just be taking a cut of your hard earned cash for nothing?
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Often the level of production that you might want to get to work at will only be using agents to hire the main roles. Agents then can be the relational gatekeepers into a new world.Also, a good agent will be seeking to build your career by getting you scripts to read, introducing you to directors and producers, and will also sell you far better than you could ever sell yourself. Having someone else say how great you are is always preferable to saying it yourself.When you have an agent, in your initial meeting with the director it will just be about the creative, and nothing financial will come into it. And it’s much better for us to be saying, “This client can’t do it for less than this money,” but I’m not sure that having an agent always gets you more money, interestingly. [The producers] might not want us to see that they occasionally pay someone more. But what we can do, is really be making sure they’re getting a fair rate. – Top AgentHOW TO APPROACH AN AGENT SUCCESSFULLYIf you’ve accumulated a few decent credits and are looking to get an agent, what is the best way of approaching one?A really good agent-client relationship will hope-fully last for decades, and, not all agents are cre-ated equal. This means it’s important to shift your mindset from, “I need to get an agent, any agent,” to, “I need to find the right person, with whom to build a strong and lasting working relationship.”Do your research into which agents would logically want to represent you, based on their
ADVICE FOR GETTING YOURSELF INTO A GOOD POSITION TO GET AN AGENT
If you’ve read this far and are already feeling a little disheartened that you don’t yet have what you need to persuade an agent to take you on, then fear not. There are plenty of things you can do to change that.CVs Matter – Work hard to get those vital credits and create opportunities for yourself that you might not otherwise get, by working for free if you have to. Be selective though, and weigh up the benefit of a quality credit that might pay off in the future, versus the investment of time and work. For example, Eddie Hamilton cut three feature films for free, while editing commercials two days a week to earn money, in order to build his feature film CV. His most recent project? Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.Be Nice – Recommendations from producers you’ve worked with can be a huge help to getting you ‘in’ with an agent, as producers are the people your agent deals with most often and will trust their opinion. Also seeing a consistency of working relationships reinforces that people must enjoy working with you time and time again.Meet More People – If a friend of yours in the industry catches a break, then they might suddenly be in a position to help you out too. Getting to know pro-ducers, directors, and other editors who are creative, ambitious and hardworking is crucial for your current career pros-pects, as well as your future ones.
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existing clients, and the entire agency’s wider roster. If they already have lots of established comedy editors on their list, and you also want to get into editing comedies, it might be tough to differentiate yourself within that crowd. Similarly, if they have lots of production designers and cinematographers on their books, but no other editors, they might not be best placed to represent you, as an editor.On a practical note, send one or two targeted emails to specific agents within an agency. If the agent you’ve approached doesn’t feel you’re right for their list, but believes you show promise, they may well put you in touch with another agent in the same agency. Don’t BCC the entire office – they do all work together you know.Also, according to the Working Editor I interviewed, be prepared for a few rejections along the way, as not every agent has room on their books for another client, or maybe not at this time. Be persistent.
A WORD OF WARNING FROM AN EX-AGENT’S ASSISTANTI would imagine, a lot of people if they want an agent, they’re excited when they get an agent, they sign on and it’s great. But I would want to start some negotiations and have a loose conversation around various scenarios and how the agent would handle them to understand if the relationship is mutually beneficial. – Agent’s AssistantSometimes the inside scoop on what goes on behind closed doors can be illuminating. In talking with someone who used to be an agent’s assistant, they had this advice to share when thinking about picking an agent to represent you.1. Ask practical questions.
You want to be really clear up-front about how the relationship will work on a practical level. For example, will the agent want to take a per-centage of the work you do with previous contacts, who the agent played no part in (Some do, some don’t)? What happens on projects that you’re essentially doing for free? Will they want a percentage of your expenses?
2. Try to discern who else is on their books (if it’s not listed online) and figure out how much time they’re likely to have for you, relative to their other clients. You are more likely to get more of your agent’s time and attention if they only represent a few editors, rather than hundreds.
3. Youneedtofeelconfidentthatthe agent is engaged with you, and your career, and will conduct themselves in a way you feel comfortable with. It all comes down to “do I trust this person?”
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How to Get An Agent
I wish I’d taken her on a lot earlier because agents are brilliant at helping you choose the right jobs, helping your career. She’s gotten me a lot of scripts lately, and I wish I’d taken her on sooner.
– Working EditorMy mental image of a good agent is pretty much Jerry Maguire. A long suffering, dedicated and loyal friend, who will stick with you through good and bad, and ultimately celebrate victory by your side. In the real world, a relationship with an agent might not be that intimate, but they should be someone who can level with you when you need to hear the truth, fight battles behind closed doors on your behalf, that you will never know about, and do their best to help you build your dream career, over the long haul.A good day at the office is getting people on a job that they really want to do, or getting them a meeting for a film they’ve been really keen to meet on. It’s putting the pieces of the jigsaw together. – Top AgentA good agent-client relationship is one of constant contact and dialogue. So when an editor hears on the grapevine of a project they’d really like to get on, they can turn to their agent to try to get them into a productive conversation with a director or producer. Creating those introductions can lead to career making opportunities.The Top Agent that I spoke with did however quash the notion that having an agent automatically
means that you will get more money out of a negotiation. But on the flip-side, if you don’t have an agent having the ‘pay cheque chat’ on your behalf, then you’ll have to perform some kind of split personality move, in which as an editor,
you’re all about the creative qualities of the job and then split-hairs as your
own representation about the price of overtime.
The clients who are with us, value the fact that we are scrupulously straightforward, and scrupulously honest, and we don’t play games. And so producers know they can trust us, because if we say to a producer
“he does have another offer on the
table,” they know we’re not kidding, and when
we say, “We’re seriously considering it because your
offer is rubbish,” they know we do not play games. – Top Agent
I also asked everyone I interviewed about the question of ethics and the resounding conclusion was that a good agent won’t play games with you, or with the producers they’re talking to on your behalf. In a relationship that’s all about trust, if they can lie for you, they can lie to you.I’ll leave you with this final thought, given to me by the Top Agent, who has worked in the industry for decades, and that I think sums up the process of career progression pretty well. “This is a crazy industry, with more luck and breaks than strategy and deservedness.”
WHAT AN AGENT CAN DO FOR YOU
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Memory in the Moment
Memory in the Moment: An interview with Christopher Donaldson, editor of Remember
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Memory in the Moment
Remembering can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. This is the idea that drives Atom Egoyan’s newest film, the aptly-named Remember, which follows Zev (Christopher Plummer), a man with dementia, as he travels up and down North America to deliver retribution to the Nazi who killed his and his friend’s (Martin Landau) family at Auschwitz
during World War II. It’s a character-driven story couched in the tried-and-true conventions of a classical thriller. Egoyan, however, is not interested in a genre exercise, but in Zev’s battle with his withering mental state, along with the regret and anger that’s bottled up in his surviving memories. Remember is a poignant drama, lifted to success by its professional, emotionally polished performances and the confident direction and editing style. Recently, Art of the Guillotine took the opportunity to sit down with the film’s editor, Christopher Donaldson, who’s also responsible for cutting other Canadian favourites like Take This Waltz and Stage Fright. Chris contributes many insightful points regarding Atom’s involvement in the editing room, cutting a movie where every scene features an acting legend, and bringing to life the film’s longest and most important dialogue scene…Art Of The Guillotine: Watching Remember, my first impression was, “This is Memento Meets Away From Her," in the sense that you have an
Interview withChristopher Donaldson
Interviewed byParker Mott
PARKER MOTT’S WEBSITE
PARKER MOTT’S TWITTER
INTERVIEW
CHRISTOPHER’S IMDB
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unreliable narrator, whose lack of reliability comes from its fractured memory. How do you edit a film that centres on a character like that?Christopher Donaldson: Well, the story has to work on two levels: one, it is completely in the moment and you [the editor] must be entirely true to the moment – and to Christopher [Plummer] who is playing Zev. But then you must also have an eye to where the story ends up, that the logic is there all the way through as well. Primarily, Christopher’s performance is what guided us, getting his performance on screen directly as possible. The Assembly: Right, and he’s in basically every scene if you take away the moments where Martin Landau’s character relays instructions at the retirement facility. Christopher Donaldson: Right. The Assembly: How do you edit movies that are very episodic, like Remember? I mean, Zev travels to Idaho, crosses the border into Canada, heads down to Reno – and the story is thus structured around a series of one-on-one interactions. How do you maintain the pace without succumbing to repetition?Christopher Donaldson: Well, maintaining forward momentum is obviously super important, and Atom [Egoyan] shot a number of scripted scenes with Martin, but he also shot a few bits of things that we could use when we felt we needed more of him. Because for the entire conceit to work, you have to keep his character alive. Primarily though, we realized that the heart of the film was these four big confrontations with the Rudys – and getting to those as quickly as possible is what made it most enjoyable for the audience. But it was also about how we parse out information, especially with what’s in the letter. We built scenes and montages of the letter in, I think, two or three different incidences where you got to hear the letter and gained more information into the journey. So that was the hardest part: making sure we were moving forward and also making sure that people had enough information – but not too much information.The Assembly: And where are your gears turning
in this process, creatively?Christopher Donaldson: Well, uh, it’s hard to point to specifics. Once you’re in the room with the director, it becomes a creature unto its own. The scene where Zev comes to the hotel with the fountain, that was just a regular dialogue scene. I wanted to keep that dreamy, musical thing continuing from the travelling montage and up to the fountain and arriving at the clothing store. I had the instinct to turn that into a jump cut sequence, where the sync audio is mixed low and you’re looking at Zev as we jump through his experience, as opposed to cutting to the woman he’s talking to. But, you know, it’s an instinct and you do your first pass, but then fine tune it with your director. The Assembly: Were you cutting in sequence?CD: Well, I got the dailies every day. Some directors have no interest in cutting while they’re shooting, but Atom is not one of those directors, which is great. So I would send an assembly of the scene as soon as I had it done, Atom would look at it and send me notes, and so we had a great feedback loop all through the shoot. Also, Christopher doesn’t like to do a lot of takes; he doesn’t need to do a lot of takes. The Assembly: How many takes typically did he do for one camera setup?Christopher Donaldson: Not much more than three. I wouldn’t be surprised if 50 percent, at least, of what’s in the movie is the first take. Christopher is very prepared; I mean, he’s in every scene and he never blew a line. With him, there’s no method-y angst. He doesn’t feel the need to pick at it over and over. Atom is the same way, and he’s very specific in his shooting, and so we weren’t generating huge amounts of footage, which made it easier to constantly fine tune scenes while we were still shooting.The Assembly: Can you talk about the pivotal sequence in the middle of the film between Christopher Plummer and Dean Norris, who plays an Idaho deputy. That whole conversation is overlaid with explosions and sirens coming from a nearby quarry. It added a psychological layer, as if the quarry blasts were blitzkrieg bombings. Can
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you talk about bringing this particular sequence to life?Christopher Donaldson: Well certainly, the beginning goes back to the location scout, just putting the location right at the edge of a quarry. I can’t remember what it was in the original script, if it was something that specific. It was “isolated”, that’s my memory of it. When we shot the scene of Zev arriving in the taxi, you could hear the siren from the quarry on the track. When I heard that siren, I was like, “Oh my god, that sounds exactly like an air raid siren.” So, we just mimicked the actual location siren in the post sound.We knew there were going to be explosions on the soundtrack. We didn’t want too many, but we wanted to keep a constant reminder and tension-builder in those scenes. In the following day, when Zev wakes up and it’s a much more expressionistic sequence, all those sound elements had to be used to dramatic effect. We had to make sure they were well-established in the realistic world. Steve Munro, our sound designer, brought in the aspect of having the house shake a bit, you know, the sounds of dishes rattling and so forth. It was important to build, in the edit, that sense of this man (Norris) who was alone and isolated, who feels close to Zev because he misses his father – and, ultimately, his sense of betrayal and that betrayal becoming rage. Obviously, Dean Norris is fantastic at rage. The performances were a joy to cut and that scene came together very quickly.The Assembly: Were the quarry sounds recorded on set, or were they created in post?Christopher Donaldson: No, we found the exact same sound in the sound effect library. To me, it’s instantly recognizable as an air raid siren. But it was entirely recreated.The Assembly: Were you on set often?Christopher Donaldson: No, they shot mostly in Sudbury. I went to set when they were shooting the Zev and Dean Norris scene, because it was shot in Toronto. The rest was on location.The Assembly: Now, Atom has his editor, Susan Shipton. What circumstances led to you coming on as the picture editor for Remember?
Christopher Donaldson: The project came together very quickly and it was not a project that Atom had originated. His editor, Susan Shipton, was already on another show and was also planning to shoot a feature of her own in the coming months, and so Susan and Atom decided to take a one-film break. I had worked with [producer] Robert Lantos previously on The Right Kind of Wrong, and I knew Atom and he had seen some cuts of Take This Waltz. My understanding is that Robert recommended me and Atom was happy to go forwards. This was an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – to edit an Atom Egoyan film.The Assembly: Had you seen most of his movies?Christopher Donaldson: Oh yeah, yeah. I certainly was a fan. Back in the early ‘90s, when I was in university, on some level Atom was the face of the Canadian film industry along with David Cronenberg. He was a real filmmaker. The Assembly: Was he with you a lot in the editing room?Christopher Donaldson: He’s definitely in the suite. During the shoot, we did a lot of feedback over the Internet, a lot of back and forth. By the time he arrived in the editing suite, we’d sort of gone through the movie already, so we were able to focus very intensely on the details. We talked a lot about the music…The Assembly: Canada’s own Mychael Danna did the score…?Christopher Donaldson: Yes, he did. Atom and I worked a lot on creating a musical palette for the movie. We created a tone that Mychael took way beyond what we had been able to articulate in the edit. So, Atom is definitely in the suite, but he’s not over your shoulder and by that I mean he doesn’t neurotically pick at the movie. He has a vision for where he thinks it should go, a vision he’s open to discussing and improving. He’s made a lot of films, so he knows what he likes and what he wants. The Assembly: Also, you mentioned Robert Lantos. Can you talk a little bit about him and his company, Serendipity Point Films, and your relationship with them?
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Christopher Donaldson: Robert built an empire with Alliance and he was one of the prime architects of the Canadian film industry itself. However, in the world of contemporary film corporations, you know, they are giant companies answering to share holders. But Robert really loves movies and he has believes in the medium. He found the script [to Remember], he brought in Atom, and it was a passionate project for him. Remember was a labor of love for him. The Assembly: Can you talk more about the key moments in the film where you chose to break the continuity and rely heavily on jump cuts to propel scenes forward?Christopher Donaldson: Well, it’s a thriller, but with actors in their 80s. You have to create a cinematic language that is consistent with their age and physicality. Early on, I started experimenting with jump cuts to move characters through rooms more quickly, but it also spoke to Zev’s fragmented mental state, and was able to heighten tension. Early on in the movie, when Zev is sneaking out of his nursing home, we’re moving him along in real time because his slow “get-a-way” speed adds to the tension, but there’s a jump cut in the middle, because the audience doesn’t really want to watch him make his way down the entire hallway. Another example is when Zev is going downstairs to Rudy Kurlander #1’s (Bruno Ganz) house.
There’s something quite tense about how Christopher is handling the task; he could fall. There’s an element of his frailty in watching him walk down the stairs that is quite tense, but you can’t watch him walk down all the stairs. So it was a matter of finding a cinematic language that does all these things, that allows you to experience the physical frailty and slowness of characters this age, while holding true to the pace of a conventional thriller. The Assembly: Lastly, Atom’s use of subjectivity in the film reminded me a lot of Alfred Hitchcock. You have Christopher looking and then we cut to what he’s looking at, and much of the suspense is built from Zev’s subtle observations. Christopher Donaldson: The use of subjectivity – and this film is entirely one man’s subjective experience –was essential. Atom has said in a number of interviews that Zev is entirely on the surface; Christopher’s performance is so amazing because he has no subtext to play, which is so much of what acting is. Zev only understands what is happening to him in the moment and so we experience the world that way, too. Scenes like where Zev plays the piano in the nursing home, the scene in the hotel lobby I mentioned before, or instances where he sees things in the journey that remind him of being a survivor, they are all moments where Zev is trying to process his environment to remind himself of who he is. And processing these clues along with him is how we connect to Zev, and, ultimately, how the film spins its web and keeps you guessing as it moves to its conclusion. And, sure, Hitchcock is a great reference. We wanted to create a classic thriller, and who better than Hitchcock for that?
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Credits
Authors Gordon Burkell Parker Mott Jonny Elwyn
Interviewees Alan Edward Bell Tim Smith Christopher Donaldson
Interviewers Gordon Burkell
Images Parker’s Article images (Parker Mott) Movie Stills Database Movie Posters Database Max Griboedov/ Shutterstock air009/Shutterstock Andrey_Kuzmin/ Shutterstock
Gordon Burkell Chris KimVictoria BasovaRichard MunroGordon BurkellKatrina Pruss
Founder & EditorLead Developer & Layout
Editorial & Marketing DirectorAotg.com Lead Developer
Director of Advertising.pdf Layout & Design
Credits
Thank YouArt of the Guillotine Inc. would like to thank the American Cinema Editors, Australian Screen Editors, Canadian Cinema Editors, Great Britain Film and Television Editors, Sociedad Argentina de Editores
Audiovisuales, and Les Monteurs Associés, Jonny Elwyn, Parker Mott, Alan Edward Bell, Alberto Ponce, SAE, Andrew C. Evans GBFTE, Alan Miller, The Aotg.com Staff, and all the photographers,
coders, advertisers, writers, and artists involved.
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