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The Editors Cut

Episode 056: Editing Unorthodox with Gesa Jäger and Hansjörg Weißbrich

The Editors Cut - Episode 056

Episode 056: Editing Unorthodox with Gesa Jäger and Hansjörg Weißbrich

This episode is the master series that took place on October 18, 2020 with the editors from the Netflix mini-series UNORTHODOX - Gesa Jäger and Hansjörg Weißbrich.

Unorthodox Poster

Released in spring 2020, Unorthodox became one of the most popular titles on Netflix immediately after its premiere. With millions of views around the globe, this mini-series received rave reviews and eight Primetime Emmy Award nominations, culminating in a win for director Maria Schrader (Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series). This talk focused on the collaboration between the series’ two editors, and their journey in making the project a success.

 

Hansjörg Weißbrich photo

Hansjörg Weißbrich is an award-winning German film editor. After 25 years in the industry, he has worked with numerous German and international directors on more than 50 feature films so far. In addition to his close collaboration with highly acclaimed German director Hans-Christian Schmid (“Requiem“, “Storm“), he also worked with Danish director Bille August (“Night Train to Lisbon“ with Jeremy Irons and “55 Steps“ with Helena Bonham-Carter and Hilary Swank), Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov “Francofonia“, Academy Award-winner Florian Gallenberger (“Quiero Ser“, “Colonia“ with Emma Watson and Daniel Brühl), and Marco Kreuzpaintner (“Trade“ with Kevin Kline, produced by Roland Emmerich). 

His latest works include “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe” by Maria Schrader (Austrian Oscar submission 2017), “The Divine Order” by Petra Volpe (Swiss Oscar submission 2018 and Tribeca winner 2017), “3 Days In Quiberon” by Emily Atef (Berlinale 2018 Competition), “The Aspern Papers” by young French director Julien Landais, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and co-produced by Academy Award winner James Ivory, and Diane Kruger-starrer “The Operative” by Yuval Adler. 

Weißbrich’s documentary work includes “Master Of The Universe” (European Film Award 2014) and social media doc “The Cleaners”, which premiered in Sundance 2018. 

For his work, Weissbrich has received numerous awards, most recently the German Film Award in 2014 for “Two Lives” by Georg Maas, that made the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Film in 2014

Weißbrich is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the European Film Academy and the German Film Academy.

Gesa Jäger Photo

While studying history, Gesa Jäger went through various internship programs, where she discovered her passion for editing and subsequently completed an apprenticeship for film and news editing at the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) in Hamburg. Following a brief period of employment at NDR, she enrolled at the Filmuniversity Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, studying Film Editing and editing several shorts and a feature film. Gesa Jäger graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in September 2013 with the feature film “Love Steaks”, which was not only nominated for the German Film Awards, but also won her the “NRW Schnitt Preis Spielfilm” at film+ festival in Cologne 2014 and the “Award for outstanding achievement in Editing” at New York First Time Fest 2014. 

In 2019, she was awarded the “Filmkunstpreis Sachsen-Anhalt/Special Schnitt” by the Filmkunsttage Sachsen-Anhalt, which also presented an exhibition of her other work. That same year she was awarded the “Bild Kunst Schnitt Preis Dokumentarfilm” at the film+ Festival for her editing of “Dreamaway”, an Egyptian-German co-production. “Unorthodox”, which she edited alongside Hansjörg Weißbrich in the fall 2019, has just won director Maria Schrader a “Primetime Emmy Award” for outstanding directing of a limited series.

This master class was moderated by Sandy Pereira

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The Editor’s Cut – Episode 056 – “Editing Unorthodox with Gesa Jäger and Weißbrich Hansjörg”

Sarah Taylor:

This episode was generously sponsored by Jack’s, a creative house, Annex Pro and Avid.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

In the beginning when I first started editing, I dreamt in loops. So I am very happy that this was only in the beginning because otherwise he would get a little, I don’t know.

Gesa Jäger:

How short were the loops? Like three seconds or three minutes?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Three seconds. [inaudible 00:00:26]

Gesa Jäger:

Oh my God!

Sandy Pereira:

That’s very stressful. So good on you. 

Sarah Taylor:

Hello and welcome to the Editor’s Cut. I’m your host, Sarah Taylor. We would like to point out that the lands on which we have created this podcast and that many of you who may be listening to us from are part of ancestral territory. It is important for all of us to deeply acknowledge that we are on ancestral territory that has long served as a place where indigenous peoples have lived, met and interacted. We honor, respect and recognize these nations that have never relinquished their rights or sovereign authority over the lands and waters on which we stand today. We encourage you to reflect on the history of the land, the rich culture, the many contributions and the concerns that impact indigenous individuals and communities. Land acknowledgements are the start to a deeper action.

Today I bring to you the master series that took place on October 18th, 2020, editing Unorthodox with Gesa Jager and Hansjörg Weißbrich. Released in spring 2020, Unorthodox became one of the most popular titles on Netflix immediately after the premier. With millions of views around the globe, this mini-series received rave reviews and eight primetime Emmy Award nominations, and a win for director Maria Shrader for outstanding director for a limited series. This talk focused on the collaboration between the series’ two highly successful German editors and their journey in making the project a success. This panel was moderated by editor, Sandy Pereira.

[Show Open]

And action!

This is the Editor’s Cut.

A CCE podcast.

Exploring the art- 

Of picture editing.

Sandy Pereira:

Thank you everyone for joining us today for this discussion and welcome, Gesa and Hansjorg.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Hello. 

Gesa Jäger:

Hi.

Sandy Pereira:

Hello. So I guess first, question, how did you come to work on this project? How did you become involved?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Actually, I worked with director Maria Shrader before, especially on Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, which was the Austrian entry for the Oscars that year. And Maria asked me if I would like to do the show with her and was clear from the beginning that we would have more than one editor. So Gesa came on board as a suggestion from the production. I knew Gesa a little bit, but we never worked together. And I’m very happy that we took Gesa on board because it has been a fantastic team.

Sandy Pereira:

And Gesa, so how did you get involved? Did you get the script? Did you know anyone on the production or how did that happen?

Gesa Jäger: 

I didn’t know anyone. I just got call from the production and they told me what the story was about. And I thought, okay, well it’s a strong female character. I could connect to that right away. And then at that point it was not yet official that Maria was going to direct it, but I asked who’s going to direct it. And they said, “It’s not really official yet, but it’s Maria Shrader.” And then I was like, okay, because I loved her. And then I asked, “Okay, this sounds like there’s more than one person editing, who’s going to edit it?” And then she said, Hansjörg Weißbrich. That was kind of my moment when I was like yeah, I know him because Hansjorg has edited most of the German films from the early 2000s that I love. And at some point when I got into editing, I realized that all of the films from that time span that I like are edited by him. So that was my connection and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to work on this project.

Sandy Pereira:

That’s definitely exciting. Yeah. I know having worked with somebody I admired and who hired me as an assistant and being able to mentor under them, it’s like, you have that moment where you’re like, this is life, is this real life, is this is happening. So that’s amazing that you two got to work together. What drew you to the series? You mentioned, Gesa, that it was a strong female character. Did you get to read the script or any of the script ahead of time, an outline, how much information did you get before you actually got to work?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

When Maria asked me at that moment, there were no scripts at all. I think that there was not even a summary or something, but of course there was the book by Deborah Feldman. And I met with Anna Winger, the producer and the showrunner. She gave me the book by Deborah, so I knew basically what it was about. And as Gesa already pointed out, a strong female character, but also the cultural background was something that I was very interested in. When Maria asked me, and we are good friends. I was sure that it was something relevant, emotional, and a story worth telling. So it was a little bit blind date with a script to come, but it– worked out

Sandy Pereira:

It worked out.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

It was interesting because I rarely am in a situation where you don’t have a script and you have to make a decision, but if you can rely on the people involved, you can be pretty sure that something good is coming out of it.

Sandy Pereira:

And did you get a chance to read the book then before you started?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

I was in the middle of another project and I was waiting for the script for the screenplay to come. Then I got episode one and couple of weeks later, episode two and so on.

Sandy Pereira:

And Gesa, did you get a chance to read a script before you started?

Gesa Jäger:

The script, yeah. Also the novel, I think I ordered it the same day they called me because I wanted to know right away what it was about. I still haven’t read it through yet because shortly after, that the scripts came and then I thought, okay, now I’m going to confuse the novel and the scripts. So I stopped reading, but I liked it as far as I got. But knowing what it was about was enough and knowing the people involved was enough. So I didn’t need the script to make my decision. Also, I edited a documentary about a guy leaving this kind of community three or four years ago, so I could connect to the whole theme very, very fast. I wanted to do it right away.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah, so a leap of faith from both of you to work on this, which is pretty cool actually. A testament to the people involved, that’s for sure. So when you did start working, how did you collaborate? How did you split up the work and how long did you work on the project? How long did this take?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

I started editing during shooting and I did a rough cut for all the four episodes. And then Gesa came on board and took over episode two and three. We discussed how to split the work best. And there were several options in the beginning. I think that there was a plan to even get a third editor on board for just three weeks. And we constantly had to switch episodes, Gesa and I preferred to not to switch so much and make it more a plan that splitting episodes as a whole would be better. And finally, we found a solution not to get a third person on board, and I think it was a very good decision.

Gesa Jäger:

You have this kind of Netflix post-production schedule. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked for Netflix, they have a very… quite a strict plan what happens at point to what episode. And that was why we had to switch so much. You have one week for your editor s cut, one week for director’s cut, one week for the show runner’s cut. And then there’s three Netflix cuts. At the end of the week you give the episode to Netflix, then they have one week to send their notes and then you rework the episodes. So I think after the rough cut, every one of us had six to seven weeks per episode.

Sandy Pereira:

Okay. That doesn’t seem like a lot of time.

Gesa Jäger:

It’s not.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

I think it was about 12 weeks during shooting and then 12 weeks for each of us after shooting, 36 weeks. Yeah, editing, which I think is better.

Sandy Pereira:

It’s just, when you have so many people involved, sometimes that just doesn’t feel like enough time, but you did it.  

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

The plan was, when you give one episode to Netflix and wait for their feedback, you continue working on the other episode. So we too also switched between our respective episodes, but that was the basic plan. And we somehow stick to that plan. But of course, there were episodes or scenes that took a little more time or more attention, of course. And somehow we did our own schedule, except for of course, that there were the dates you had.

Sandy Pereira:

You had to hit certain dates, but you could kind of massage what you needed in between.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

There was not so many remarks on one episode, you could steal one or two days for the other one.

Sandy Pereira:

Right, exactly. Do what you have to do. Four episodes, two editors, several timelines, well, two different timelines, more than two different timelines. And then there’s also the story of Moishe and Yanky and her aunt and Bobby back in Brooklyn. There are so many stories and layers at play. How do you manage it all, splitting the work, making sure it’s a cohesive whole? You had assistants who I imagine would’ve helped in sort of trying to manage this. How did you see the bigger picture while you were trying to put this all together?

Gesa Jäger:

Since I started editing, I’ve been using magnetic boards. I don’t know how you work, but we had this great apartment in which we were editing in, which was like a whole space just for us. Hansjorg had his room, I had mine. We had two great assistants, Daniela Schramm Moura and Sandra Böhme. They both had their own rooms. And then we had a big kitchen. And between that, there was a hallway. And in this hallway, there was a big magnetic board. So we chose still frames from every scene. We had printed them and put them on this magnetic board. And so we could take a step away from the puzzle and then get back to the Avid, which always helps me a lot. And in the beginning, I think Hansjorg said he doesn’t need it, but then he was quite happy that it was there.

Sandy Pereira:

You were a convert.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

In fact, I’m used to edit feature films and not series. And I somehow prefer to do it on the Avid and watch it and see if it turns out or not. But of course in this specific case, the stretch was a little longer and it was far more complicated with, as you said, the two different timelines and the three different storylines. It was in fact, most of the time that we spent a lot of time on structuring the show. And we did change a lot in fact and with a help, by the way, of Anna Winger, who was the writer, producer and show runner on film. And she was very open to, sometimes she was the first to say, “This doesn’t work, let’s change it. Or what can we do?” And the magnetic board was very, very helpful because we tried a lot, different orders…

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. Were Maria and Anna in there changing things around as well? Or was it mostly the two of you?

Gesa Jäger:

Sometimes it was Maria and Hansjorg and I was standing behind them being amazed how fast they can think.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Sometimes we had a coffee in the morning, Gesa and I, and we thought, well, how can we solve a specific question? And it was a very open atmosphere.

Sandy Pereira:

It sounds like it. It sounds really ideal, like it was just sort of this hub where you guys could stand around and really look at the big picture. You can’t really do that in the Avid. You could watch it and talk about it, but to actually see it all in one, it’s a handy tool that’s for sure.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah. It makes it easier to put a scene from one episode to another, which didn’t happen very often. I think just once or twice maybe, but that’s easier, just to take it and put it there, seeing at all.

Sandy Pereira:

And even placing flashbacks. If they come in at the wrong time, you really notice it so having something visual sometimes to just play before you actually get in there and do the work was probably really handy with something like this, because it really is layered and complicated. There is one moment, I think it’s in episode one where we’re in a flashback and then that flashback goes to a flashback. So you’ve got these and you would think something like that might not work, but it does. But I know a lot of this sometimes is trial and error. I’m not sure how much was written, but we’ll get to that later. I don’t want to jump ahead of myself. I guess we should start talking about the first episode, which Hansjorg would have been your episode. You cut episode one.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

The moment when Esther finally decides to liberate herself by putting off the wig. She doesn’t undress to take a bath, so she takes that bath fully dressed, which somehow explains the difficulties of course, she will face in the new environment. And then the whole moment is loaded with, of course, with the ritual of the Mikvah that we will see later on in episode two. And the past, you mentioned it, an artsy past of Berlin, especially of course, the capital of Germany. It’s of course a difficult decision to go specifically to Berlin for her. Why would she do that? But of course, she follows her mother. And I specifically like the moment when we see the photo of the grandmother being taken out of the envelope, she lived through that past and she is wearing the wig. And it all reflects the now and the past, and the really complicated decision Estee is taking for herself.

Sandy Pereira:

It’s almost like, this is my religious background, it’s almost like a baptism. She walks in, she takes off the wig. It is like the Mikvah as well, but this sort of baptism and she’s faced with the past and she’s faced with her future. And it’s just this layered moment. Her friend, Dasia, is sitting on the beach watching her. You don’t even really know this character yet, but you really feel. And that’s something that I have to say, and I’m wondering how you arrived there, we start with Estee escaping, the whole series, we start with her escaping essentially, without knowing her, without knowing why she’s escaping, why she’s leaving, why she’s so desperate.

We get a sense, but we don’t really know her yet. And even in this moment, still don’t really know why she needs this escape, because like you said, she’s in Berlin. On the car ride over, she talks about how this is a horrible place for her, this is a place of historical horrors. And yet here she is basically being welcomed in this lake. How in the cutting room were you able to make that moment have such an impact when we’ve only really just begun this series? We’ve only really gotten to know these characters. Was there a lot of discussion? Was this scripted this way, or did you rework the script and the opening to make that work? How did that all land?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Well, I think it has to do with the way the scene builds up. And of course we worked a lot, especially on the beginning of the show, with the escape and how much information do we give the audience and how much do we stick to the lead character? Because originally in the script, it was a little bit more intercut with the action in New York, with Estee missing in New York, with people wondering where she is. We cut that a little down to stick to her and to have her arrive in Berlin a little earlier. And then there’s a funny thing in the script. 

There was a scene in the music academy when she first meets her future friends, they invite her to join her for the lake. And she sneaks into the bathroom and takes her wig off for the first time, like to find out if she would be able to do in public. So she did it for herself, but it felt like giving away the moment. So I suggested to cut that scene out to have the full impact when we see her first without the wig and with the short hair, which is a revelation as well at that moment of the show. So I think these are the questions that build up the emotional impact of the scene as well.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah, definitely. And removing that scene was a wise, I think, very wise choice, because seeing that reveal in the lake really hits you. And if you had teased it beforehand, it definitely wouldn’t have hit the same way. So yeah, great suggestion. One of the things that I noticed the most in the series is this feeling of authenticity. There’s so much detail and so much specificity to this culture and way of life that sometimes it almost feels like a documentary. There are moments that feel so objective, but yet you never feel like you’re not with the characters.

But there are these moments, and the wedding is one of the ones that, the whole ritual leading up to the actual marriage, there’s just this feeling that you’re watching a documentary. I think it’s a combination of the sound, of the way it’s shot, of the location. There’s just so much there that’s going on. And then you have these like ultra tight closeups of her face and her eyes and the back of her head, which just kind of break that up. How did you balance that? Balance the objectivity and the subjectivity so that yes, you’re feeling like you’re watching something very authentic and you’re immersed in it, but to remind everyone this is really Estee’s point of view. How did that play out?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Generally, I think the overall topic for Anna Winger and Maria was to be as authentic as possible. They didn’t want to characterize the cultural environment as bad or something like that. It was clear from the beginning that they are telling Estee’s and how Estee experienced that environment and what brought her to flee the community. They had an advisor on board throughout the whole process, Ellie Rosen, who grew up in an ultra Orthodox community. And he advised the whole shooting, the preparation, the whole shooting and the editing process also in terms of language. He came once or twice to the editing and approved the final editing. So that was very, very important to the producers and to the director.

Sandy Pereira:

Let’s talk about the wedding. And A, how complicated was this wedding to put together and I imagine shoot, but put together in our case? And how were you able to keep it as authentic as possible, but within Estee’s POV? I imagine it got restructured and how you managed to sort of weave that into that second episode.

Gesa Jäger:

Okay. So that’s a lot of questions.

Sandy Pereira:

A lot questions, I’m sorry.

Gesa Jäger:

A lot of things to say. First, there was an immense amount of material. It’s five scenes, five wedding scenes, and they’ve shot at least three of them, I think with two cameras. Hansjorg, do you know? The first two parts and the dancing, at least one of the two dances I shot with two cameras. So there was a lot of material. And I took over Hansjorg’s rough cut, which for these four scenes, I think, or five scenes, was about 40 to 45 minute long. And every episode is 55 minutes long so it had to be shortened a lot, and with  authenticity. Because all of these rituals, which each of them is really important for this kind of ceremony and deciding what part of the ritual you can take away without taking away the essence was hard, but we had Ellie Rosen guiding us through this.

And there’s also this music that’s being sung live by the men in the takes. Like for the first scene, we had to loop it a lot and try to de-synchronize it a little so it sounds like they’re starting and we had to make it a lot longer to have the whole procession a lot longer. So that’s a part that we had to, not to tighten, but to make longer.

And then it was written as one block in the script. We looked it up earlier. Episode two is one of the episodes that got restructured all the way. I think the Mikvah was in the beginning of act two, and the wedding was the whole act three. It was a five act structure. And the wedding was one block. And we very early had the feeling that we couldn’t show it in one because it’s so intense. It’s so emotional. And you get so close to Estee and to Yanky. You have all of these moments where they get really, really close to each other. And if you use that and weave it into the present tense, the present gained so much from this intensity they have in the past. 

So we tried to put it in groups of two. The first one, we just watched where in the end, all this tension and this pressure comes off for a moment, which is a great moment to get back to the present. Most of the time we were just under Estee’s veil. I kind of fell in love with that in the script because we were supposed to only see feet for minutes, only feet and hear the rituals. I kind of liked that, but I still connect to that being under the veil a lot. And I think that you see that wedding kind of being shot with a, is the English word, hand camera.

Sandy Pereira:

A handheld camera?

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah. The camera was moving all the time so it felt a little more documentary. And then we have these very strong closeups seeing Estee under the veil. And I remember that we tried to show her a lot just being under the veil and moving, being close to her even if we can’t see her. And the moment of the revelation of the face gets even stronger. The authenticity part, I feel like I’m a little lost with the authenticity.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Basically, I think it’s a decision taken earlier on costumes, research, shooting. The way that the scenes are shot are really shot in a documentary style. And I think everyone involved knew that the scene wouldn’t be 40 minutes in the end. And that was the funny thing. I remember in the first script I wrote, there was just scenes from a Yiddish wedding to be researched, something like that. And I think that indicates the process. It was very much about research, documentary style for this specific wedding scene. And yeah, they shot it, I think in two days.

Sandy Pereira:

Over two days, wow. Yeah. 

Gesa Jäger:

With immensely long takes. They’ve been dancing and dancing and dancing and they were sweating. It felt very real. 

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah, I could see why. It really comes off like there was a wedding and somebody shot it.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Our DOP is a very famous for his handheld documentary style camera. So I think there’s also an artistic influence in it.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah, it’s beautifully done. And to go back to the subjectivity of it, sometimes it’s the opposite. We see lots of subjective tension happening, and then we break to something wide or objective, and then we get that relief. And I think this is the opposite. We have this long ritual, very real, very authentic, very naturalistic and then we smash to this like ultra closeup, or the veil or something that is very subjective. And so it’s doing the opposite of what our expectations are, which I find really striking in this, because I think that also reflects a lot of what’s going on in Estee’s world. We’re in her community and then we’re outside and we’re in just her sort of her point of view. And anyway, this scene, when I first watched it, I thought, oh my God, that would be the scene that would come in that you would keep saying, I’m going to cut that later. Because that’s what, five, six bins, multi camera. Okay, I’ll get to it. Let me cut all these small scenes first. Was that a little accurate?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Yes. So Gesa said she took over my rough cut. I think it was more like an assembly, because that’s exactly what [inaudible 00:29:42] when I got the material. And there were some more urgent topics or scenes to work with. And as I knew that Gesa would work on the scene or on that episode anyway, it was somehow a little bit like you described

Sandy Pereira:

Procrastinate a little bit on that one because it’s overwhelming, two days. Anything that is that intensive footage wise, you really have to steel yourself for it. And then to rework it over and over again, it’s a lot of work, but it truly pays off because I think that whole arc of the wedding and the relationship with Yanky, it all pays off in the end. So it’s a Testament to a lot of hard work on both your parts. Bravo.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

I like the cut how the wedding ends. I just re-watched it with the shaving, it cuts straight into the shaving and that is a very, very powerful cut I think. And that’s something that Gesa and Maria found out in the editing because originally, episode two would’ve ended with a shaving. So they replaced it earlier.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah, because the shaving of the head is something, we’ve already seen her with a shaved head multiple times. She had a big reveal she had in episode one. So closing the episode with something we’ve already seen multiple times wasn’t that strong, but putting it at the very point where they start getting close to each other and then showing the other side of the coin, was so much stronger. And also ending the episode with being let down by the very person you love in the world, and she hangs up on her is so much stronger as a.

Sandy Pereira:

As an ending, yeah. That image of her getting her head shaved, it’s funny, you would think it would be horrific, but the way she played it. I know you didn’t have a lot of options to cut there, it looks like there’s only a few shots, but you don’t want to cut. You don’t want to cut away from her face because it’s a mixture of letting go, of grief for her hair, but it’s also there’s joy in her face and not what you’re expecting in that moment. And so it’s incredibly powerful.

Gesa Jäger:

It was a shot on the first day of shooting.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

[inaudible 00:32:26] a good wife and have children. Yeah, it’s multi-layered.

Sandy Pereira:

Very multi-layered, yeah. So her hair that she has is a wig normally.

Gesa Jäger:

It’s her real hair that gets shaven off it’s on the first day of shooting.

Sandy Pereira:

Wow. 

Gesa Jäger:

The Mikvah scene is her real hair and then this one is her real hair that gets shaven off. And after that, she always wears a wig when we go to the past.

Sandy Pereira:

Okay. So that’s another wig.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah.

Sandy Pereira:

I didn’t know that. That’s amazing. So she’s started it off with a bang. Good for her. That’s a tough one.

Gesa Jäger:

So everything we see is real, the whole range of emotion is kind of real. And that’s just one shot, shot with two cameras, one from the side and one from the front.

Sandy Pereira:

And then some reactions. And even the reactions, those kids, they’re just fascinated, it’s just so great. I could watch that scene over and over. So we have a question, actually, Travis [inaudible 00:33:28].

Audience Question:

As an editor in Quebec who is somewhat bilingual, I find it difficult to work in my second language, French, when cutting dialogue. How do you overcome the barriers to work considering you are German working in the English language? 

Sandy Pereira:

And also Yiddish in this case, there’s three languages really.

Gesa Jäger:

We have English in school very early on and almost everything I watch, I watch in English. Most of the German TV is dubbed so you hear it in German. But at one point I stopped watching TV and started watching things in the original languages. So I’m very, very used to the rhythm of the English language. So that didn’t feel like a bigger problem to me. Yiddish was another thing, but we had subtitles from a very early point on. And after some time you could even turn that off because you knew what they were saying. And the rhythm is quite close to German. There are even words that are very close to German. So that wasn’t that problematic as I thought. I’ve also edited in Arabic once. That was another thing. So if you are really lost with rhythm, then it’s really hard to edit something, then you need someone by your side who can help you. But in this case, I didn’t feel like it was such a big problem. I don’t know. What do you think Hansjorg?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Same to me I think. English is somehow not the problem. And the Yiddish is very close to a German in fact. As Gesa pointed out, the whole rhythm is similar. So I did films in other languages that were more complicated for me than Yiddish in this case. But of course you have to double check in the end with a native speaker. And in that case, we had Ellie Rosen on our side, went through the whole film with him and that there were tiny little adjustments. In our case, the actors didn’t speak Yiddish either. So I think it’s far more complicated to deliver such a performance in a language they don’t speak.

Sandy Pereira:

 I would’ve thought that they spoke Yiddish. They were very convincing. 

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

They learned it with the help of Ellie. I guess they were somehow familiar, Shira with some Yiddish of course, but they didn’t speak it, they had to learn it.

Sandy Pereira:

Okay. And then I guess you have tools too as editors, you have a translation that you can work with, right? And your assistants, I imagine. Was it your assistants who subtitled the clips for you so you knew what you were? It gets complicated when you’re cutting dialogue. You’re cutting stuff out to make sure that it still makes sense and stuff.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Yeah. In fact, I did the rough cut without subtitles, with the script and the translation, and it helped that Yiddish was so close or familiar to German. Then we had the rough cut subtitled for the first time by my assistant. We also needed to subtitle every delivery, of course, to Netflix. So even if we spoke Yiddish, we would have to subtitle it. That of course is an enormous work for the assistants. All the delivery process for Netflix is quite a bit of work because they have certain specifics. Though both of our assistants [inaudible 00:37:16]

Sandy Pereira:

They had their work cut out for them with this one. But it’s always fun. I’ve cut some stuff as well in other languages and we get sometimes a transliteration if it’s in an alphabet that is not English in my case. And it’s the cutting out dialogue that gets you nervous because you’re like, is it going to make sense after if I cut out these words? If I reverse the conversation and start it here, and it’s always handy to have, like you guys had a consultant who could do that. And so you always have to find someone.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Pretty well. I think during the editing, without a consultant, combining two takes also was not that complicated. But I did do films in Arabic, for example, or in Chinese or Japanese, that really is a problem.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. It gets complicated. Because obviously your English, you’re fluent both of you, but you get into languages you really are not familiar with, it gets really hard. My next question would be, and we’ve talked a bit about this, about how much the script changed. And you talked about how the wedding episode changed a lot, the first episode changed a lot. How different was the final four episodes compared to the first four scripts? How much did it evolve in the edit? Was it like night and day or?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Basically we didn’t cut out so much. The scene I mentioned earlier on was one of two or three scenes, I think, that have been cut out completely.

Sandy Pereira:

Just gone. Wow, that’s it.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Yeah. Other than that, it was more like tightening and shortening and of course restructuring. I never compared the scripts to the final editing, but it changed a lot. But it was like the whole script writing, I think was kind of a process because the whole production took place within one year, from starting the scripts to the final deliveries of the show. You can imagine that there was not so much time [crosstalk 00:39:28] the script before shooting started. So it was a fluid process. And as I mentioned, Anna, the writer and showrunner, was so open and she considered it; I think that kind of process that there is not a script you have to stick to literally, but you have to work with the scenes you shot and put it together. And she also was in the editing of course and we worked together on the restructuring.

Sandy Pereira:

So this really was truly a series that was found in the cutting room in that sense, the way it’s told. And so Gesa, was this somewhere where your board came in handy? Really, if it was this fluid, almost like a documentary in that sense where you’re getting scenes and there was more of a script in the sense, but really there was this freedom to play around. Was it mostly because of the flashback structure or was it just because of all of the storylines and they just all needed to make sense?

Gesa Jäger:

I think it’s all of the storylines, but primarily the flashbacks. Because sometimes I felt like there’s a German expression, [00:40:42]. Hansjorg, do you know the English translation maybe?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

You have plenty of options.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah. That doesn’t sound as beautiful.

Sandy Pereira:

Too many options?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

An abundance of options.

Sandy Pereira:

An abundance of options.

Gesa Jäger:

And you feel like everything is there, it’s just not yet in the right place. And then I felt like Hansjorg was pretty good at making these kinds of connections. Like my episodes, he remembered lines from scenes. I feel like this one picture you have, of course, has to reflect the whole scene when you’re puzzling. And he sometimes remembered like that one sentence and said, okay, but if we stop at this sentence and then go to the past and not have these three more sentences, then the past would be like a magnet connected to the present or so. So the board kind of helped making those connections easier. For me, it’s standing up, going somewhere else, leaving something behind, getting my head free, puzzling, going back and then trying out. It helps me a lot.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. A lot of trial and error with that. And a lot of moving things around.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. Getting up and getting a coffee and just leaving for 10 minutes, coming back, it’s amazing how it’ll just sort of reboot your brain a little bit. Sometimes I find, I don’t know if you guys find this, if I go to sleep, I will dream. Do you ever do this? You dream about the scene because that’s all you can think about. You don’t do it?

Gesa Jäger:

No.

Sandy Pereira:

I do.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

In the very beginning, but somehow I think I decided I stopped that.

Sandy Pereira:

Get out of my head. 

Gesa Jäger:

Good for you.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah, good for you. But the one good thing is sometimes I’ll wake up and I’ll think, I got it. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not, but it’s the ultimate break, that sleep state.

Gesa Jäger:

For me it’s the shower. I don’t know why, but it’s like almost every time I go under the shower that I have an idea. I have never tried that, doing it on purpose.

Sandy Pereira:

But it’s probably the sound of the water, puts you in a meditative state.

Gesa Jäger:

Maybe, I don’t know. It’s the shower and the early hours of sleeping or going to sleep, lying down, not wanting to think, but coming back to something and then having that idea. Happened to me two nights ago, I wrote something down that I needed.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. Hansjörg, you must sleep peacefully. You don’t think about work, you just tune it out, shut it off.

Gesa Jäger:

Hansjorg doesn’t sleep that much.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

It’s right. It’s not related now, but in the beginning when I first started editing, I dreamt in loops. So I am very happy that this was only in the beginning because otherwise you would get a little, I don’t know.

Gesa Jäger:

How short were the loops, like three seconds or three minutes?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

No, no, no, three seconds.

Sandy Pereira:

That’s very stressful. So good on you.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Restructuring the show, sometimes two options were not, which one would be the best. And I think trial and error, or with thinking about what could be best. Sometimes you don’t find the solution which is best for all parts of it, because it’s like a puzzle. And if you take something out here, maybe something is missing, but the part you take out is better at another place. So I think you also have to have the ability to decide in the end which options are the best. And there are always, I think, more than one option and it’s especially difficult if you don’t have an option which is totally the best or everyone agrees that it’s the best. This is another topic in the editing, of course. There are lots of opinions and you have to deal with moderating, not specifically on this show, but in general.

Sandy Pereira:

And in this case, you don’t just have your producer and your director, you also have your broadcaster. So they will have an opinion as well. And sometimes you have to figure out not just make everyone happy, but how to make sure that if they have a valid point, that it gets really addressed in the cut. And that can be difficult. So I have another question. So this is from Alex Shade. 

Audience Question:

Hi everyone. And thank you for hosting this panel. My question is about the choosing of the assistant editors and on top of the language, what other requirements or skills were you looking for? Did they have anything to do with delivering to Netflix and their delivery requirements? So choosing your assistants, were these, I guess people you’d worked before, or how did you come to put your crew together, I guess?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

In my case, I haven’t worked with Sandra before, and it was very short notice to find someone. And Sandra worked for a Netflix project before, and that was something I was looking for because I wanted to rely on someone for all the requirements, because I didn’t really want to get into that. Sandra was a very good choice.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah. I’ve worked with Daniela before on an Amazon Prime series or show. There she was the third assistant and she came later on the project when the workload was getting too big. And she kind of saved our asses a little. And she was really good like making sound design and also has a personality that kind of soothes me in a way. So when I get stressed and I talk to Daniela I always feel better afterwards. So I knew she would be the perfect person for this.

Sandy Pereira:

Very important in the cutting room, to have that calm voice to kind of bring you down. I really would love to talk about the use of ritual in the series and how that was intercut and balanced out through the whole show. But episode three, it’s throughout, but for some reason, episode three just always stands out to me as having all these sort of rituals and counter rituals. It’s not final, but she’s starting to shed a lot of these repressions and a lot of these inhibitions that she’s been taught her whole life. And she has these moments where she feels like nothing bad is happening. I’m doing all these bad things, but nothing bad is happening. 

And this scene, it’s so beautiful especially because it is juxtaposed so starkly with that opening scene and with Yanky. Was that always scripted to be that way? Did this come organically? How did you make that all work? And also that scene in itself with music and everything, if you could talk a little bit about your work there, that would be great.

Gesa Jäger:

So these two scenes are in the place that were written that way. The episode was supposed to start with the ritual and end with the love scene. This is the first time Estee gets touched, like really touched by someone. We tried to reflect that, of course, in the way we edit that scene. I remember that Maria very early on had the idea to weave the club and the sex scene together. And I remember that at first she was not in the editing and I tried that and I worked into the wrong direction. I started the love scene in the club. I kind of let that glide into each other, not having them come home, but people dancing and they start touching. 

And with that, taking away the whole essence of the scene. This moment when she doesn’t know what to do and kind of jumps in his face and then realizes, okay, this is not the way this is supposed to be. And then him showing her in a very subtle way how to get close to someone. And when they were shooting the club scene, there was this real party crowd and Catnapp, she made the music life, the artist, Catnapp. And in one take, there was another version of the same song that Yansis playing the violin to. And it was this very slow version of that song.

And everyone started moving in some kind of wave, there were all these bodies. And the camera captured some of those moments very beautifully. And that was Maria’s idea in the beginning to get Estee and Catnapp together. She’s this version of her in maybe 10 or 15 years. She’s someone Estee could look up two. And then we started to combine these two scenes and put more and more of those women’s bodies into it. And then we had the luxury to get this track of Catnapp. She sent the stems to us. The howling of the wolf separately, it had the beat separately. It had all of those instruments.

Sandy Pereira:

Amazing to have that in the cutting room.

Gesa Jäger:

Yeah. We could decide at what point is the Wolf supposed to howl, at what point does the beat come in. And so we kind of layered that together with the touches and that works so well. I love the scene so much.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah, it’s so sensual. I think because it is this buildup too. And I think there’s a lot about this series where there are these build ups. So they pay off later, but they’re so worth the wait. And this is one of them, especially the way the episode is framed. You couldn’t have two different sex scenes in one episode of television. It’s amazingly done that way. And this brings me to another question which is the music in this series. Music is so central. Obviously, this is Estee;s escape route, is through her music or her trying to come into this music community. But yet it’s very spare the music that you’ve used in the series. It’s a very quiet series. There aren’t any huge musical moments. That moment in the club is probably the biggest musical moment. Was this a discussion beforehand? Was this a discussion in editorial? Was the composer brought in early, late? How did the music conversation come into play? 

Gesa Jäger:

Sorry, Hansjorg, but do you feel also that it’s such a quiet because I don’t feel it’s very quiet. It’s interesting. 

Sandy Pereira:

I feel it’s so quiet.

Gesa Jäger:

I feel like we have quite a lot of music. 

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

I was about to say, we have a lot music that is part of the scene, like it’s played on screen in the scene or source music. So score somehow builds around those.

Sandy Pereira:

Maybe that’s what I’m thinking of, is that there is not a lot of score.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

So if you have that big arch, like the wedding song she sings at the audition in the end, this somehow book ends the film. You have the classical tune by Schubert that is connected to the grandmother also reappearing in the audition at the end. You have all the orchestral work, the music academy, the club music, and that is something you wouldn’t use score, or maybe a score that takes over. But the tracks by Catnapp are so powerful by themselves that that was not really necessary, and no thought of using music there. The composer, Antonio Gambale, came in at the very beginning, even before shooting. They had a pitch with several composers and he got the job.

And we worked with those pictures, four or five tracks. We decided from the very beginning that we wouldn’t use any temp tracks from different soundtracks. Which always for me is ambivalent because somehow, you stick to the first sketches and using them somehow states effect at one point. Sometimes make that experience that when a composer comes in at the very beginning, you don’t have, like what I sometimes do with temp tracks, I take one or two days and just try completely different things. In this case, we stick to what we got from him, and it fitted perfectly. Like the scene in the [inaudible 00:54:22] we saw earlier,  this is one of his first sketches, based on one.

Sandy Pereira:

On one of his first sketches.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

And it works perfectly. It’s very emotional, it’s very powerful. And we decided to use it as a light motif throughout the film. And then of course there are dozens of other parts he composed when he had the editing, of course. But also the main theme is based on one of his first sketches, the title theme, during the opening titles. This was somehow the process. He was involved, he would get the cut, he would adjust the composition. He would try new things and stuff like that, and it was somehow back and forth during the process.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. That’s great. Because sometimes you’re on a show or a feature and the composer doesn’t get hired until late. So you are trying to build tone and mood with other music and it can be really difficult. 

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

And again, gigantic temp tracks.

Sandy Pereira:

Yes. And then they all got thrown out. It can get complicated and people get attached. And so it’s great to have somebody from the beginning and to set this tone and this motif as you have described.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

But it was never, I think, never during the process, a discussion to have more music because you mentioned it. I think it was important for Maria and for Anna that the film doesn’t have an overload of music and keeps also silent moments and pure moments that don’t need emphasis with music because they’re so emotional in itself.

Sandy Pereira:

They play on their own, they really don’t need anything. And then when you have things, like in the wedding you have the men’s chorus singing, they really stand out because it’s not replaced by this overarching sort of composition. Rather, it’s just feels more natural and organic. I guess that’s what I meant by, it just never feels like the music is imposed on the series. We’re into episode four. I was thinking we could talk about Yanky when he cuts his hair, the peyot, when he cuts his peyot. And I think we’ve talked a lot about how some of the most emotional scenes are the result of this buildup, and they just have this payoff.

And this is one because I just love Yanky. And I know Yanky is one of these characters, you just want to shake him. And especially his relationship with his mother and how it imposed on their marriage. There’s so much about Yanky you just want to shake, but he is never drawn as a villain, never portrayed that way. And I know you, like you said, you took great care to make sure that there was never any villainization or anything with this community. It’s more about choices and more about freedom. And Yanky is someone who’s very late to the game. He’s just so slow in catching on.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

[Inaudible 00:57:47]Unfortunately he was too late.

Sandy Pereira:

Too late.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

The two of them coming together.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. And I think it’s what makes the scene so tragic. 

Gesa Jäger:

I need to cry every time.

Sandy Pereira:

Every time. You’ve seen it way more times obviously. I didn’t actually watch it this time because it would’ve made me cry. It’s just so emotional. He finally acknowledges her for her and he just, like you said, Hansjorg, he’s just too late. And in a way, this is his lake scene. Not the shedding, he doesn’t want to shed his culture, his community, but he’s growing. And in a way, this is sort of his lake moment. This is taking off the wig in a way. And do you want to walk us through this and how we got it to this point?

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Interesting because the scene in itself is very simple. It’s shot very simply with shot and reverse shot. And I think the emotional impact is really what builds up to that moment. And the scene reflects the whole show we’ve seen, and the tragic of the two of them. It’s the payoff of brilliant script writing, brilliant directing and especially brilliant acting, I think. And Shira, while she’s so amazing, but also Amit is really, really great. You want them to come together because they could come together under different, or they could have come together under different circumstances. 

And that is, I think yeah, the impact of the scene. Brings her that necklace with the musical notes, which was so sweet because it’s where it all started in episode one with their first conversation about music. She tells him that she likes music and he says yeah, different is good. But then different was not so good. This is all comes together in that scene. Of course it’s about editing. Also quite a simple scene, you have to carefully weigh the moments and the frames, of course, but you wouldn’t be able to work that out if the whole buildup would not work as brilliantly as that.

It’s one of my favorite scenes. And interestingly, we didn’t change so much from my original assembly in this scene because it just worked very well. Of course, we carefully shifted frames, but the overall build up, I think, was pretty much what it is now in the very beginning.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. It really is one of those scenes that without all the pieces that came together before it working, would not have paid off as well as it does. It would always be, I think, an emotional scene, but maybe not as powerful as emotional. I’ve watched it a couple of times now and it just really punches you in the gut. It just really does because it’s just so beautifully done. And again, I think one of the things that I find, all the themes that sort of you visit and the way that the show has been structured around a lot of rituals and a lot of these sacred spaces in this series, when he cuts off his peyot, it really is just this callback to everything that matters. It’s not a simple thing that he’s doing, it’s not an easy thing that he’s doing. He’s doing it in a way that is showing that he’s willing to change, but there’s just so much history and context in what he’s doing.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

You’re right. Cutting off the peyot is somehow getting rid of the wig, of course.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. And one being in episode one and one being at the end of the show, it just frames the whole thing with again, choices, another overarching theme through the whole thing. I have a couple more questions for both of you. One is, how do you feel as editors, as part of telling the story, when you work on something that’s based on a true story with such a weighted historical context, do you feel extra cautious when you are cutting out dialogue, cutting out certain moments like you were saying in the wedding ritual, not cutting out anything that’s going to make it less authentic? Do you feel that there’s almost a greater responsibility when telling a story like this on your shoulders?

Gesa Jäger:

I feel like it’s a much bigger responsibility if you edit the documentary. But still of course it had a lot to do with respect for the rituals and for not cutting out something that might be respectless in a way. It’s just her past that they used for the series and the whole [inaudible 01:03:23] It’s not her personal story so all of this was a lot easier to work on and to cut out.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Deborah was somehow, while she was not directly involved in the process, but she was part of the process. And I think Anna showed her the cut before we locked it. So it was very important to Anna that Deborah was happy with it, and she was. So that is her very personal story. I think the responsibility, more with Anna, with the adaptation and Maria of course, with the directing, but I think the creative group was so much on the same page that there was no danger of being disrespectful to the story. And the other thing I think with the show is respect for the community. This is, of course, something which is sensible, that again was very important for everyone involved. So it was not specifically in the editing or for us as editors to prevent the show being disrespectful, because there was no danger because the show runner and the director were very sensitive.

Sandy Pereira:

Right. So it was always something that was kept in mind by the whole creative team. So my last question is, what did you learn on this series and how did working on this show contribute to your evolution as editors? And what would you take from this experience onto your next experience? What is the thing, or maybe there’s more that is helping you now on your next show?

Gesa Jäger:

I have to be careful not to be fangirling again, but of course for me, it was great to see Hansjorg work and to see the way he thinks and what I talked about earlier, the way he connects things to each other. So I think I learned a lot also from taking over his assemblies or his rough cuts for my own edit, to see why and at which point did you choose what take, for example. And then also Maria, she’s really wise concerning editing. And she always says she learns about everything from Hansjorg, so maybe that’s like fangirling again. 

But no, Maria’s also an actress, not only a director. So she knows a lot about acting and about how to edit someone or something in a way that it gets really, really better. And from her, I learned a lot about pacing, about breathing, about when to put a beat and where and why. And I learned a lot what to think about before even starting to edit the scene. I think before this series, I was just looking at the material, starting to work and figuring it out while I was working. And from both of them, Hansjorg and Maria, I think I learned to first use my head and then my gut.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

For me, it was a great experience working with Gesa as well, in a team and parallel that there have not been so many projects for me to work in parallel with someone else. And that is a delicate and sensible situation, I think. Every editor knows that I think, because the tiny little things you can’t really explain, it matches or it doesn’t match. And with Gesa, it was really great. We have a similar approach to things I think, and never ever had the feeling I would do that completely different, and what is she doing there? I was very, very happy that it turned out to be such a great team with Gesa. And I hope we will work on further projects again. 

And the other thing for me was, for me it was the first experience working for Netflix and was the first full experience to work in a series format. Because I mostly edited feature films for cinema, but like 90 minutes or 100 minutes storytelling. Well, both the stretch of the story and working in an environment for Netflix where you really have a tight schedule, you have to deliver and cannot push very much and handle all sorts of other things probably not so much connected to the actual editing, was a great experience I didn’t have before. 

So personally for me, working with Maria again, a great experience and brought us even closer artistically and also as friends. And we are currently continuing our work on Maria’s next film. Having a continuity with the people you work with is very nice because you get to know each other better and you can start on the next film, you can start a step ahead from the last one. So yeah, that was very great. And of course, I was very close to her when she got the Emmy because we were working together.

Sandy Pereira:

That’s exciting.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

And that was a great moment too, of course.

Sandy Pereira:

Yeah. And well deserved. And to grow together like that show to show and keep going, it’s such a great reward for all this hard work. Thank you so much Gesa and Hansjorg for joining us. This was an incredible discussion. I’m so happy that you were able to make it and to take time out of your evening to join us. And thank you to everyone who came and asked questions, and to Pauline and Ali and the CCE team for putting this together. Good evening, goodnight. Thank you everyone. 

Gesa Jäger:

Thank you for having us.

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Thanks for having us.

Sandy Pereira:

This was lovely. Thank you so much. 

Gesa Jäger:

Thank you. 

Weißbrich Hansjörg:

Thank you.

Sarah Taylor:

Thank you so much for joining us today and a big thank you goes to Gesa, Hansjorg and Sandy. A special thanks goes to Jane MacRae and Alison Dowler. This episode was edited by Jason Konoza. The main title sound design was created by Jane Tattersall. Additional ADR recording by Andrea Rusch. Original music created by Chad Blaine and Soundstripe. This episode was mixed and mastered by Tony Bao. The CCE has been supporting Indspire: an organization that provides funding and scholarships for indigenous post-secondary students. We have a permanent portal on our website at cceditors.ca, or you can donate directly to indspire.ca, I-N-D-S-P-I-R-E. The CCE is taking steps to build a more equitable ecosystem within our industry, and we encourage our members to participate in any way they can. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple podcast and tell your friends to tune in. Till next time, I’m your host, Sarah Taylor.

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Edited by

Jason Konoza

Main Title Sound Design by

Jane Tattersall

ADR Recording by

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Episode 037: Altered Carbon Q&A

Episode 037: Altered Carbon Q&A

This episode is sponsored by Jaxx a Creative House and Annex Pro/ Avid.

Geoff Ashenhurst, CCE, Erin Deck, CCE, Stephen Philipson CCE, and Jay Prychidny CCE discuss the creative and technical challenges of putting together the second season of one of the biggest VFX-based series Netflix has ever made.

This panel was moderated by Sarah Taylor.

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The Editor’s Cut – Episode 037 – Altered Carbon (2020 Master Series)

Sarah Taylor:

This episode was generously sponsored by Jackson creative house, Annex Pro, and Avid.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Editor’s Cut. I’m your host, Sarah Taylor. We would like to point out that the lands on which we have created this podcast and that many of you may be listening to us from are part of ancestral territory. It is important for all of us to deeply acknowledge that we are on ancestral territory that as long served as a place where indigenous peoples have lived, met, and interacted. We honour respect and recognize these nations that have never relinquished their rights or sovereign authority over the lands and waters on which we stand today. We encourage you to reflect on the history of the land, the rich culture, the many contributions, and the concerns that impact indigenous individuals and communities. Land acknowledgements are the start to a deeper action.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Before we get to today’s episode, I have a message from the Whistler Film Festival from December 1st to 20th, WFF would deliver its 20th anniversary edition, virtually to a national audience with over 100 films, including 30 features and seven short programs, all taking place over 20 days with film viewing access available until December 31st. WFF’s content summit welcomes establish industry leaders and content creators to our virtual mountain home to discover network and explore the ideas and actions shaping our new reality. From the global pandemic to calls for social change, along with policy changes in the Canadian media landscape, 2020 is a transformative year for the screen-based industry. Here’s your chance to keep your finger on the pulse and get a look at what the future holds. This episode was our first online master series event that took place on April 21st, 2020. It’s a panel discussion and Q&A with the editors of the Netflix hit series Altered Carbon. Geoff Ashenhurst CCE, Erin Deck CCE, Stephen Philipson CCE, and Jay Prychidny, CCE discuss the creative and technical challenges of putting together the second season of one of the biggest visual effects based series Netflix has ever made. This panel was moderated by me.

[show open] Sarah Taylor:

Welcome everybody to the first master series, zoom Q&A, which is Ultra Carbon, which is very exciting.

 

Erin Deck:

Yay.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And thank you all the people joining from around Canada and maybe even around the world, which is very exciting. So my first thing is I want each of you to introduce yourself, let us know kind of a little bit about your career, how you got onto the show and then what episodes you worked on. Let’s start with Jay because he’s in my top corner, top left corner right now.

 

Jay Prychidny:

So, I mean, I just always started as an editor, just out of school. I just started the editing right away. I started in kind of independent, low budget stuff, and that went up to network television and that went up to like on staff at a network. And then that went up to like reality and then went up to scripted.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

What do you mean when you say on-staff at a network?

 

Jay Prychidny:

I was cutting SexTV at CityTV.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

At city, right? Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

It was awesome. [crosstalk 00:03:12] I mean, I don’t think they do shows like that anymore. They don’t like produce things that’ll shows that are that great, like in house.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

But back in the day they did and at CityTV they did so and yeah, for Altered Carbon, they kind of just talked to every editor who had a certain level of credit. Which means credits that are known to American … the Netflix of the American distributor. So they kind of talked to everyone who had credits like that and they hired me for whatever their reasons were. [crosstalk 00:03:50].

 

Sarah Taylor:

And which episodes did you cut for season two?

 

Jay Prychidny:

So I cut episode four and seven.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Erin….

 

Erin Deck:

Hi. I was aan assistant editor for 13 years in Toronto, which was amazing because I got to work with tons and tons of amazing editors. And basically I’m all just luck. I had a friend who got me a job on an awesome show called Ghostly Encounters and that just kind of snowballed and got an agent and went from like Killjoys to stuff like that into, Into The Badlands. And then again, like Jay, I don’t know why they decided to pick me, but I got, I got the interview and then the second interview, and I guess they liked my smile.

 

Sarah Taylor:

I’m sure there was more than that. And which episodes did you edit?

 

Erin Deck:

I cut two and five.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Hey, Steve.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I guess I started sort of from an indie film background, I did indie features and shorts for many years and then started to get excited about series television. And many years ago, I had the very good fortune of doing a show called Hannibal, which kind of got me into one hour series TV, which is where I’ve been for the past eight or nine years. After Hannibal, I, the filmmakers went to LA to do a show called American Gods, which I did a few years ago. And after that, I was sort of unsure whether to be in LA or Toronto.

My family’s here and we weren’t quite ready to make the full move, but I got on a show called 10 days in the Valley, which my agent, I think pitched me for actually, because I could work in LA and Toronto. So I started in LA and moved to Toronto.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And on that show, I was lucky enough to work with somebody called Dieter Ismagil, who I think we’ll probably end up talking about quite a bit. He’s our post producer on the show ..

 

Jay Prychidny:

At Skydance.

 

Stephen Philipson:

That’s right. From a practical standpoint, it was good that I could work in both markets, but we also got along and he’s, he’s very, he’s a good guy. He takes good care of the people who work for him. And so we stayed in touch over the years and, and I got a call from him for the show, well actually almost a year before it started, He asked me if I was available in like February 4th, 2019, and you know how these shows always get pushed or whatever. So I’m like, okay, whatever. But I mean, we actually started on February 4th.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Wow.

 

Jay Prychidny:

It’s smart because he’d be like, are you available? And I’d be like, well,

 

Sarah Taylor: Yeah.

Jay Prychidny:

 

like a year from now. Yeah.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And you did episode one and episode…

 

Stephen Philipson:

Six.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And then Geoff, last but not least.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

All right, so I started out doing commercials and I guess, I would sit on commercials for like a year, year and a half. And then I got lucky because two of the editors left on the same day. Hey, you get a room now you’re an editor now. So I mean, I’d already done it. I’d done a bunch of smaller stuff up to that point. So I had a reel and stuff. So I came out doing commercials and music videos, but it was great because we had a great facility and I was able to cut shorts on the side basically like for five years or something, the probably longer actually I was kind of always doing the short, like evenings, weekends, and then commercials are short turnarounds. So sometimes I’d have a week between commercials or two weeks or whatever. And I just make the most of that time during shorts and then eventually some of those shorts turned out okay. And that led to a bad first independent movie. And then that led to a good first independent movie or I guess second, I don’t, I almost forgot about the first one now, but yeah. So then I didn’t need film for several years and still kind of like dabbling in commercials, which I still do from time to time. And then I got this show season two and three of Penny Dreadful. It was the Showtime series that take five in Toronto. And that was an amazing experience. And I think that was probably the biggest thing that kind of got me on their radar for this. And then I had a couple of interviews and I did up episode three and eight.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And then you also stayed on and did some other stuff at the end, right?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah. They, they … just because there’s so much visual facts in the show. And I think so… Yeah, so they wanted an editor to stay on because as the shots would come in and they’d get further along in their development, it’d be, well, actually it doesn’t really work with this shot that comes after anymore. And so just doing kind of smaller adjustments for the most part. But then there was also a few things where Alison, the showrunner, having like sat with the episode, as creative people like her do, like every time they watch it, they have some new idea. So they had me around for that too.

 

Erin Deck:

So how long did you stay on afterwards?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Till like November… Mid-November I guess. [crosstalk 00:08:54] Because actually it would have been longer. It would have been like a week or two longer, but I had a trip booked and I was like…

 

Jay Prychidny:

Geez, I did whole other series. [crosstalk 00:00:09:02]

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

That’s true.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Well, speaking of like schedule and stuff like that, kind of, what was your post like post team? There’s the four of you are the main editors. And did you each have assistants? Kind of let me know that stuff. And then the schedule of like, how long did you have for each episode? What were your, the length of time that you had with your directors, with the producers, the showrunners, that kind of thing?

 

Erin Deck:

Well, I think for the director’s cut normally it’s four days, but because it was all done remote, I think the directors got six days.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I think I heard somewhere along the line, that’s like a DGA thing. If it’s remote,

 

Erin Deck:

Oh, okay.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

They get more time.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And maybe explain quickly, why were you all are cutting remote? And what was the setup there?

 

Jay Prychidny:

Well, the whole show was shot in Vancouver and season one was posted in a little bit in Vancouver and in LA. And for this season to save more money, I guess their main reason they did all of the post in Canada, and they decided that Toronto had a talent pool that they liked. So out of Canada, they chose to come to Toronto. So all the shooting was in Vancouver, all the executives were in LA and we were in Toronto. So, hardly anyone ever came to Toronto, it was really just the post team, which was 15 of us or have many there were. And yeah, so everything was done remote.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Who was the post team? What was it comprised of?

 

Stephen Philipson:

We each had our own assistant and I mean, our assistants were all busy, full time, cause there’s a lot going on. We had a VFX editor, the VFX editor had their own assistant. We had our post producer, Laurie, and then she had a team of two–

 

Erin Deck:

Katie and Mandy, yeah.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Supervisors.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Then we had our post PA. Yeah. In terms of picture post yes.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And you all work together out of Deluxe?

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah. We had all one little area all together.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Now do each of you work differently with your assistants? Like is there, if you want to walk through how they help you kind of, because I’m sure every editor is a different.

 

Erin Deck:

I to keep mine under the table.

 

Sarah Taylor:

They rub your feet.

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. [crosstalk 00:11:17]

 

Stephen Philipson:

I tried to use my assistant for creative reasons anyways. No, for me, it was more, I think to take some of the sort of temp sound work off my plate and the person that I brought up, I’d like to bring on people who can make a creative contribution and I try to give them scenes to cut, but just the volume of, and the speed of turnover and everything. Even though we were on the show for a long time, I really didn’t get a chance to give a lot of creative work to my assistant, unfortunately, but the sound, I mean, the sound was really her realm.

 

Erin Deck:

And VFX. They handled a lot of the go-between. I tried to give, I had Shelly and she was phenomenal. And one time there was like in episode two there’s this gunfight and there’s like slow-mo and stuff. And the director wanted to see all these variations, of have it all 24, have it all 48, have it all like at all these different speeds. And so I basically was busy cutting other things. And I just gave that to Shelly and I said, use all these shots and this is like the ins and the outs that I want but if you need to adjust that, please do. But so yeah, she did a fantastic job.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

And the holo-ads, right?

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was fantastic at those,

 

Jay Prychidny:

I started as an editor with me being my own assistant not having an assistant. So it really took me a long time. And also in Canadian television, a lot of the time you’ll have one assistant for like multiple editors or something. So I was just kind of used to the idea of doing everything myself. So it’s kind of been a process over the past few years discovering, Oh, there are things that I can like work with an assistant on. So for this series, my assistant was Graham Tucker and he, so he ended up doing probably all of the sound. Maybe there was like one scene or something that was like, Oh, take this one. But he did the sound for all the episodes, and usually I have a lot of notes on the sound too and like really specific stuff. So, but it worked out really well. And the, in my episode was the only one where we didn’t have a sound house working on my episode. But I thought it sounded just as good.

 

Jay Prychidny:

You know, you can hire a post sound house for tons of money or you can hire Graham Tucker.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I’ll do a shout out to my assistant, Mary Juric as well, too. One thing she was great for was she did a lot of the VFX work. I mean, there are just maybe even, I don’t know if there was more on episode one just cause it was sort of a, sort of a pilot in a way, but she really helped out Dale, our VFX editor quite a bit. Like she would do temp keys and stuff like that. So it was great to have that as well. Cause there was quite a huge volume of effects, especially on the first episode I did.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I heard that the Guillermo Del Toro calls Mary, Mrs. X after Mr. X. Cause she’s so good at doing temp VFX. [crosstalk 00:14:27].

 

Stephen Philipson:

Oh really? [crosstalk 00:14:29] Let’s say it’s true.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And how about you, Geoff?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I had Tom Lounsbury who was great. Sort of similar to all you guys like, cause I come from independent film, I’m used to doing a lot of stuff myself, but specifically the fight stuff. Cause Tom did I think one season of Into the Badlands.

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah. Tom did one. Shelly did two.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah. And I remember like first fight sequence in two or three or I needed the first pass on it. I was like, all right I could not have done as good a job with this. Like he was doing stuff, I guess just from that experience, I was like, you just added a lot in my friend. Good job. And I did, I didn’t– like Steve too. Like I love trying to give scenes and stuff, but with the pace of it, it was tough. But there was a few little things that I remember a couple of times I was like, ah, I’m finding this part tricky. Like, can you see if I’m missing something? And then he kind of figured it out. And I was like, all right.

 

Erin Deck:

I did that once with Shelley. I couldn’t, I couldn’t crack a scene. I just had such a hard time with it. And I was spending too much time and I knew I was going down a rabbit hole. So I, I just gave it to Shelly because she’s, she’s an editor on the side or for real,

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

CCE-nominated editor…

 

Erin Deck:

Winner!

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Winner. Pardon me.

 

Erin Deck:

Winner. Yes. I just needed to see the scene from someone else’s perspective. Cause I just couldn’t make it happen. And it was amazing. Cause I, I saw her take an approach at the scene that I think I just wouldn’t have done and it was great. And it helped me kind of then build from that moment. So yeah, she’s, she’s fantastic.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Geoff touched on fights and fight scenes and clearly the show is very fight heavy. So I want to dive into your guys’ process on how you tackle fight scenes and what you ran into, what worked, what didn’t work, what your challenges were. Maybe we’ll go with Steve. Cause he did episode one and there was a big, it was a couple of big fights.

 

Stephen Philipson:

It’s one of the biggest scenes I’ve ever done. We had a fight scene that had, I think in the end it had 120 setups.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Wow.

 

Stephen Philipson:

The slate went through the alphabet twice and two cameras on every set up. And really, I don’t, I mean the challenge on that was really just the volume of material. I mean, I had a good sense of how the fight

 

was supposed to go together from the script. It was quite well planned and they did previous sequences with the stunt people that they sent to us to give us sort of sense of what they were thinking. Although the stunts did change a little bit on set. In that particular… I mean, for me at first, it’s always just a logistical challenge, figuring out how to process all that footage. I mean, some of it, they sort of would do like a 30-second chunk of the action and just shoot that from a bunch of angles.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And then other parts there do specific shots just for, for special things like something getting hit by a bullet on a table or something. So it was really just breaking it down into pieces and then just kind of building it piece by piece and figuring out which section went where. For me it’s, I think it’s sort of a, just a technical challenge laying it out at first, when you have that much footage, it’s just almost a logistical challenge. And then the creative fun for me comes after that first kind of pass where you get everything in place and then you sort of see what you got and then everything fits and then you can play with things a bit. I mean, it’s really quite a well covered fight considering how much Well, I guess, well

covered, obviously there’s a lot of footage, but I mean, all pieces were there, which is very exciting because it’s not always like that.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I think I was missing one reverse that I really needed that we had to cheat in the end. And it was a lot of fun to put together and I can’t remember how long it was probably one or two minutes, but when you got to fight that long it’s like a story. And so, I mean, you have to figure out what is the story of the fight and it’s got pacing and you sort of track the characters’ emotions through the feet. So it’s fun from that standpoint because there’s just so much going on narrative wise and the fight, and it was a good chance to be expressive and to use kind of pace and tone to kind of give a shape to the fight. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. And then the, the fight in the opening scene was quite extensive as well. And same thing. It’s just sort of figuring out the storytelling through the fight. Once you’ve gotten over the hump of just figuring out how to put everything together.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Yeah. And Erin you kind of already touched on there’s lots of different speed changes and the director wanting to see all the different options. So how did that in the end shape into the scene, the fight scenes that you cut?

 

Erin Deck:

I think for me, I liked fight scenes a lot, especially if the stunt team and the director work really well together, the stunt team we had was really great. And normally they’ll just do these tiny little chunks for like the fight and it’s a building block. And so it’s for me, I find fight scenes almost easy to put together. Cause they’ve, if they’ve done them right, they laid them out for you. They will shoot them all in slow motion so that you can adapt them. I usually, my first pass has way too much slow-mo in it. I make it way too. Like, bah bah bah The whole thing. And then I have to, I have to be like this isn’t artsy fighting. This is like for Altered Carbon. So you start to like pull back and you try and figure out what the, what the key elements are that need to be slow-mo because as soon as you put something in slow-mo everyone’s like laser focused into like, why is that in slow motion? So it either has to be like a good kick or a good fly in the air. Or like with that first scene, like the gun being thrown, it’s just playing, I think for me and just kind of feeling like when I, I try not to show my hand too much, I think, as an editor in a fight scene, because the more you try and slow things down, then you’re kind of showing yourself, you’re

 

starting to be like, look at what I’m doing. So I think it’s a balance of trying to make it fun and entertaining and creative, but also cool.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I think this is you, Erin, when you were doing your first fight scene a long time ago, whenever that was, did ask Michelle Conroy for advice?

 

Erin Deck:

When I was cutting Kill Joys. Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I remember she said, this stuck in my head for some reason. And I was doing a fight scene today and it was still in my head, but in my memory, which I may have made up, you asked her, how do you approach a fight scene? And she said “one punch at a time.”

 

Erin Deck:

That sounds like her.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I don’t know why that stuck in my head so much, but it’s like one punch at a time and you just take it punch by punch or whatever move or whatever, move and make that as cool as you can.

 

Erin Deck:

On punch at a time but it is kind of true, right. Because you’re just like, you just start from this pop and just work your way through it. Yeah. No, she’s great.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Geoff, you had the big execution.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah, sequence. Yeah.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Was there anything in there that you ran into that was challenging or changed or I don’t know. Your process for that?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah. I’m trying to remember when I do have the schedule right here, actually, I’m trying to remember how long they shot it for. It was like, at least a week they shot at for, but it was probably longer because I remember that it was like, okay, so they’re going to be shooting it on this set for like multiple days. So I should send MJ the director, like a work in progress cause they’ll have a chance to pick up anything that she might think they’re missing or isn’t happy with.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

 

So I remember I worked pretty furiously to like bang it together and Tom did a great job cause I was like, I couldn’t send it to her without having a sound pass done because I find like the believability of a lot of these strikes in a fight, you don’t buy them. But it’s amazing how once you have the right sound effect in how suddenly your brain will believe it. So yeah, so we sent it to her and I remember she called me, I hadn’t spoken to her at this point. We’d just been emailing prior to that. And she was like, so we sort of like small talk for like a minute or two and she’s like, so let me ask you this, have you done much action before?

 

Sarah Taylor:

Oh no.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

All right, cool.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Oh no.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Then I was like, I just, then I just assured her. No, I was just throwing in this together so you can see like it live, I wouldn’t put this on TV [00:23:05]. She was like okay, okay, great, great, great. But then with the big change after that was that when you watch a sequence, there’s these sort of like kind of stylized, like hazy point of view shots. And I think she did a really like, literally were like Vaseline on the lens, like really old school. Then they also used lens baby a bit too, just because Kovacs is drugged. So they’re just trying to get in his, literally in his point of view, how he’s seeing these characters from his past and like the believability of it. And the more I kind of got into that footage, I was like, okay, this is cool. Like this, this could make, should make the fight kind of stand out from being just another fight sequence, which I think is partially what she was responding to the first time as well, that it was pretty kind of run of the mill fight stuff.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Cause she’d done, there’s a show called Strike Back. It was on Cinemax for, I don’t even know, like six or seven seasons, like quite a long time. They shoot the set in Africa and she directed like a hundred episodes or something. So she’s really good at doing action and like covering everything off quickly and very experienced in it too. But then once I showed her like the next pass with all that point of view stuff cut in, basically when she’d shot everything, then she was like, Oh my God, it’s so fantastic. And she was, I didn’t, I found out later she was showing it to people on the set because remember I was working with Alison she’s, like in the old cut, there was this one shot. I was like, old cut. [crosstalk 00:24:23]

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I found out she was showing people on set. That was a, sort of a bit of a unique process on this one. But it was also the thing I was going to mention earlier was that I didn’t know about this kind of stuff till I’d done some action that the stunt teams usually shoot like a stunt viz or like a basically a previz where they’re in their gym. And they usually put on really bad music and cut it together and they try to act like the character that it makes you laugh. It makes you cry. But sometimes it can be a helpful guide for like how they thought it would fit together. And even too sometimes because they’re shooting it in pieces,

 

you’ll get the stuff and they’ll be like, okay, they’re on this side of the room. And now this shot there of like what happens in between or like they’re shooting that thing two days later on a cable.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

So you’re like, it’s I found it helpful a few times. Cause I was trying to figure out a way to connect A to B. But then I was looking at the stunt vids and be like, okay, they still have to do that shot. All right. Actually I remember in that first temp I sent the first work in progress. I would cut in the stunt viz for parts that we didn’t have yet to show–

 

Erin Deck:

So you were the one who started that. That’s why we all have to follow suit afterwards. No. That was actually really helpful. Cutting in like the previz of the section that either wasn’t shot or was shot poorly. If we had the previz, you could like slug that in to the middle of the fight and you could send that to the director and be like, this is what we need

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah it was helpful. Having that stunt vids.

 

Jay Prychidny:

… it is, I did episode seven, which had a bunch of fights and there was one fight that was in the construct virtual world and it kept going from place to place and… Just the way it was shot, it was very complicated. So, having the stunt visit was actually great because oftentimes you can piece it together, how the fight’s supposed to go together. But I looked at that stunt there’s a lot cuz I was like I didn’t know how the footage was supposed to go together at all. I didn’t know what they had in mind for a bunch of those shots. So that was actually really helpful.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I found… In my case, I’m jealous of you guys now because my stunt visits, I mean, they are good reference, but they were changed quite a bit on set I found.

 

Jay Prychidny:

They were changed, but I still got a lot of good information. I don’t know.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah, it was interesting in episode seven, also there was like a real push and pull with the director on another one of the fight scenes because the director really wanted to do the whole fight in one shot. That just always make me crazy because you can’t really edit anything. So I wonder what am I doing?

 

Jay Prychidny:

I don’t know. It’s such a funny thing with directors sometimes. They really just love the idea of doing something in a single take.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst: Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Which is great if it works, but I think usually it doesn’t work. I mean, I don’t fully understand… I understand if it’s Children Of Men and you have like, an entire war going on in one shot and then you are like, “Oh”, like that’s impressive but it’s not-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I don’t really understand the idea of doing like a fight… I’m not sure if the audience enjoys it more or if the audience even notices, anyway, long story short, like the shot was great like really but It’s still like 80% there and it’s like there’s no reason why you have to put up with only 80%, right? So, the producers decided to shoot a lot of… And it was the last block. So the producers decided to shoot a bunch of extra footage for that fight, in the event that it didn’t work, which thank goodness, they did, because we ended up using all of it. Actually that was fun because then I was like, really involved in the discussions on what they would shoot to make this one-shot work.

 

Erin Deck:

Oh, that’s cool.

 

Jay Prychidny:

So, in the end, I mean, there are still long sections that all play out, but in certain parts you have to cut away because if it’s not all in the shot, if it’s not all understandable from the shot and you don’t really understand what’s going on, you can’t just leave it like that.

 

Sarah Taylor:

So, what were the things that you were… When you were in the process of cutting from the one scene, the one-shot that you’re compelled to say, “You need to get this.” What were you looking for? Or how did you decide that?

 

Jay Prychidny:

It’s like when you don’t, like I’m so particular about really fully understanding, all the time, what’s going on. I hate the feeling of just a blur of stuff and you don’t really… Like there’s stuff happening and you’re like, “Yeah, sure.” But I hate that feeling. I always want to know precisely what’s happening. It’s just whenever I got confused, I put on my, kind of, audience dumb hat. I’m like, “I don’t understand this, I don’t understand that, what’s happening there. What’s going on there.” And for those moments, then I feel like I want a shot so I can understand this.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

And I think in those one take things as much as they try, there’s often times where the camera and the actors aren’t quite lined up.

 

Jay Prychidny: Yeah.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

So there ends up being unnatural pauses sometimes because the actors are waiting for the camera to turn around on them or to deliver a line. It just gets weird sometimes because it’s just all serving this complex technical part and it forces the actors not perform how they would instinctually let’s say, because they’re just overly cognizant of the technical parts of it. I think too, it’s more effective and justified I guess, when there’s actually a dramatic motivation for the character to be with them, for like the whole shot, like in the Battle Of The Bastards in Game of Thrones, I’m sure a lot of people have seen that, if not all of you guys. It’s not a one shot scene, but there’s a long shot with John when the horses are going around him and he’s totally isolated and it was just… I remember being really impressed with it because you just really felt like you were there with him and the peril of it was just overwhelming, but just a normal fight, it just becomes a bit indulgent and awful.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah, like single shots are impressive when there’s something like really impressive happening.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

For me, it’s a lot of directors seem to think that the single shot in itself is impressive and it’s like no, no, no, no.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I just can’t help thinking of 1917, because I saw that recently and I mean, there’s so much work in that movie to think about how to use the camera movement for storytelling. Every beat is so well-planned. I think it’s probably really hard to have that level of attention to detail that you need to be able to rehearse and plan on a TV schedule.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah

 

Stephen Philipson:

Because if you’re going to do it in one shot, you’re really at the mercy of just the vision of the director, in terms of knowing exactly how the story is going to come across to the audience.

 

Jay Prychidny:

And I think the scene still feels… Like the one in seven, I think it still feels cool and unique because even though it’s not all in one shot, there are long stretches that are still in one shot. So, I think that’s still in and of itself cool, to me anyway, it feels cool that way, because you do feel like you are with him more. Just getting in some additional shots in there, I don’t think it really takes away from that feeling for an audience, but people have different ideas about that.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Well, that’s the big… People have different ideas about everything.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Of course.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Especially, you know things that the directors have shot and then when you get to the showrunner producer scenario of what you have to adjust and change, and then what finally gets to the end, with the audience. Was there big differences between what you got from director’s cut, to what the final episode was?

 

Stephen Philipson:

I can take that one because we had the first, I think it’s six or seven minutes of episode 201 and this was a bit of an issue of… I think we’ll probably talk about this a little bit later, but just the fact that Alison wasn’t in Vancouver, this is the Showrunner Allison Schapker.

 

Stephen Philipson:

So we did the first cut of the very first fight scene in the bar in Episode 201. She just reacted very negatively to a couple of things. One, I think the art direction wasn’t really what she was thinking, like it sort of had the wrong feel and look, visually. And she was very concerned because it was the very first thing the audience was going to see and so basically she threw the entire thing 4out and we reshot the whole thing. I mean, I give her kudos for having… The wherewithal… Anyway to just go to Netflix and say, “Look, this is not the way I want it”. And it’s not just the editing or the performances or whatever. It’s really, it’s like the look and feel and what we can achieve with the footage. And also the way the fight was originally shot.

 

Stephen Philipson:

It was very much from the point of view of the different Kovacs fighting in the bar. Whereas in reality, it’s…. Really Trepp’s point of view… Like that’s important at that point because we’re with Trepp, as we’re wondering who is the real Kovacs and I mean, I just didn’t have that originally. So yeah, there was this one scene that I worked on for weeks and weeks, lots of back and forth to see if we could make it work and then after a couple of weeks they threw out the entire thing and I mean, because I ended up actually working on Episode 201 pretty much chipping away at it, the entire time I was on the show, it was very much like a pilot for Season Two, like it was really the first thing you would see of the season that would really establish the new season, how it’s going to look and feel.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And also there’s a lot of attention to Kovacs performance to make sure that that was right, like it followed properly from Joel Kinnaman’s performance. So I was working on that scene, I think the entire time I was on the show, I mean, it was great to have that much time to work on one scene, but of course then they reshot it and it was even bigger than it was originally and so I got a massive amount of footage to deal with and then we had to cut it in the end very quickly at the end of the show.

 

Sarah Taylor:

 

Right.

 

Stephen Philipson:

But I’m really glad that they pulled the trigger on re-shooting. There was a lot of back and forth over whether or not it was a good idea, but it really is dramatically better in the final show and just, the cinematography is great. It’s the original director who came back to shoot it, so it wasn’t anything against the director. I think it was just with the craziness of Alison needing to be in the writers room and on top of everything that… The art direction got through to the set without her really… Well, I don’t know, I mean, I wasn’t there, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but she… I don’t think she saw everything, until it was too late.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Someone screwed up.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

That was it.

 

Erin Deck:

I think probably what happens with a lot of those like first… And because it was like a pilot that you were cutting, in that first scene. But I find that what happens with a lot of those first scenes is that, they always get reshot.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah.

 

Erin Deck:

Because, I think they’re scared to put as much money and as much effort and as much time as they need to, into that first scene. And so they just treat it like how they’re going to treat all the other scenes and then when they realize, and they watch it and they’re like, “Oh, well that’s not an amazing first scene for the beginning of a season. And then they’re like, “Oh, okay. So we do have to go back and spend the money”. I think that happens a lot.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah. The original scene, like it was great. It was very well done. It was a very complicated fight, there was lots of cool stuntwork.

 

Erin Deck:

I thought you did a really good job on that first version. Stephen Philipson:

 

Oh, well, no one’s seen it, so, but no, that’s a very good point. I think it wasn’t unique and special in the way that it could be. I think they planned to reshoot the whole thing in two days, which was very quick, but they really planned it properly and it had a lot of time to plan it. And so even though it was quite rushed to put together, I mean, it was quite spectacular too because they… I think everyone was comfortable with the scene and it was comfortable working together as well too. I think originally the scene was one of the first things that was shot. So I mean, by the time they reshot it, everyone had had a chance to work together for a few months and it really does look a lot more polished and a lot more spectacular.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I find like every movie I’ve done, the stuff shot on the first two days is problematic up until the end, like without fail. And the smart ones end up scheduling like the most banal stuff for the first day or two. But then even then that stuff is still… It still has to be good, right?

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

So, there’s always challenges for sure.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Well, there is always… There’s that period, I mean, the actors don’t quite know their characters yet. They may not be used to working with… They haven’t sort of developed the chemistry maybe with the other actors as well, too. So that always takes a little bit of time. I know Anthony Mackie, the first little while that he was shooting and we were really trying to figure out, should he just sort of ape Joel Kinnaman, or it should be more this way or that way. So there was a lot of working on the tone of his performance.

 

Erin Deck:

Oh, yeah, he also had to like… I think, figure out exactly how much to give of him because he’s such… Everyone loves him and he gave us tons of stuff to work with, but too much, then you start not liking the character.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

That was the biggest challenge in my episode, it was scaling back Poe, cuz I think he knows that he was one of the favorite characters from the first Season too, and really embraced like the comic relief aspects of the character and I was really surprised when she saw the directors cut… Like how put off she was and all these moments, she’s like, “There’s no tension in his storyline”. I’m like, “It’s a good point”, right?

 

Sarah Taylor:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

He treated a lot of things very cavalierly.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yes.

 

Jay Prychidny:

So those are generally the notes were trying to make it seem like, he’s having a conflict.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Or he’s emotionally invested and it’s like, you look at the footage and it’s like, uuh.

 

Jay Prychidny:

There was a lot of trickery from my part, for sure, in that way.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Well just to go back to what I can’t remember who said it earlier, just the fact that… Oh, I think it was you Geoff, you said that he sort of saw himself as comic relief and there… I mean, I found there was times where he maybe had a bit of a caricatured element to it or a cartoony element, but in the end, he ended up being a character with quite a lot of depth.

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Oh, yeah.

 

Stephen Philipson:

So it wasn’t always appropriate for him to be sort of cartoony and he might’ve not have seen himself that way at the beginning, but that’s something that we did have to kind of bring out over the course of the edit. I think he’s one of the characters that people really attach to and like, and…

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Any press I ever read on the show that he was always a standout for the writer.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I mean, Alison the showrunner was very specific, like, very specific about what she wanted out of performances and directing and all those kinds of things. So, I think a lot of our challenges on the show were around that, where Alison’s expectations of things didn’t match up to the reality of what was on the screen, performance, point of view, like we’re talking about now and with some of the directing as

 

well, which was the original question back 20 minutes ago, was about the director, but there was– A lot of sequences changed dramatically in my episode. Like you wouldn’t even know if it was the same footage necessarily because the sequence has just changed so much to try to get closer back to what Alison was expecting to see or try something entirely different.

 

Jay Prychidny:

In episode four, there’s that whole sequence of them going into the decaying stack and the director shot that all as one-takes and it was kind of like a theatrical performance with single takes and then in the final cut, it’s all just a whole barrage of editing different shots, different all kinds of footage and stuff. So there was one example where the director’s vision is just completely gone. Even in my first cut in my editors cut of that episode, I put one edit in that scene, one edit and the director was like appalled-

 

Sarah Taylor:

Oh no.

 

Jay Prychidny:

… that I put any edit at all. You look at the final episode, it’s probably 300 edits. I don’t know.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I remember because Jay, had an overlap. So he started our show a bit late and they asked me to just sort of throw his scenes together in case the producers ever needed to see something in a pinch to be like, “Do we have the scene?” Like that kind of thing. So, I guess Graham helped out as well actually with that. But I remember when I came to that stuff, I actually called her. I’m like, “So what did you have in mind for this scene?” Like, “How is this going to work?”, because there’s like a green screen and weird places and-

 

Stephen Philipson:

I think that I find,… I don’t know if you guys find this in series television because the editors are often a part of the tone meeting and I like to be just to get a sense of what’s in the showrunners head, but I mean, you go to the tone meeting and it’s like the showrunner and the director and all the department heads and the showrunners like, “This is how I see it. I want to see this, this, this, this, this, and this”.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And then I guess the show runner goes off to the writer’s room and starts worrying about storytelling and getting scripts out in time and then everyone else goes to the set and things evolve and change and some showrunners… I’ve worked with a lot who sort of liked the writing process and are more sort of in that zone and so when they see the scene again, I mean, I’m the first person who sees it. I’m like looking at my notes from the tone meeting and looking at the footage and going, “Yeah, that’s not matching up or whatever”, but you put it together as best you can and then you show it to the show runner and they’re like, “Well, that’s not matching up with what I’ve put out in the tone meeting”. So I find that happen sometimes.

 

Erin Deck: Yeah

 

Stephen Philipson:

And I’m sure it’s probably just… Especially in a shooting, like there’s just so much going on. It must be really, really hard for showrunners to really be able to manage every single element through the whole process.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I’ve embraced Erin’s… I don’t know. It’s not really a trick, but when we listen in on the tone meetings, Erin would start recording them on her phone …

 

Stephen Philipson:

To have as evidence later, to be able to…

 

Erin Deck:

I can’t actually take full credit for that-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Just take it.

 

Erin Deck:

… because I learned that from… Yeah, from Paul Day, because when we were on Badlands and we were working remote with the directors, he would just like hit record on his phone when the director was like giving notes over the phone and I was like, “Oh, that’s handy”. So I started doing it at the tone meetings, but it was helpful with Alison because she was very, very specific in how she wanted the tone and everything to be. So, yeah, because there was a lot of times I would get scenes that did not match what she wanted.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I mean, it is always super helpful to be in… To know the tone meeting but It was stressful after listening to the tone meeting, yeah, yeah. And then the footage comes in and you… No, no, no, and you’re just like putting things together and you know, it’s wrong.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Oh, no.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

It’s true. It does induce some anxiety, but it also, at least gives you a chance. Like, so when you… I found on 208, when I got to the producers cut, it was like, “I know what you’re going to say and yeah, its all we have. We don’t have the shot you are looking for”, and I’d already been able to start thinking about trying to… How to solve some of these issues and like the director was happy with it, but I knew that she wouldn’t be so I’d start getting ahead of it a bit. I found that to be, sort of, helpful and even putting the

 

scene together for myself when the director did get stuff right. I would assemble the scene and then I would go back and listen to it after I’d put it together.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

So for myself then I’d be like, “Okay, you missed this” beat like, “What happened?” And then I’d go back and dig things out that way. So I found it constructive that way. Because, I guess to be fair, like more often than not the scenes were in pretty good shape, but they certainly there were challenges we encountered, I think we can all attest to that.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yes.

 

Stephen Philipson:

So, variation on the theme. So I think both the directors I worked with, I really enjoyed working with and I thought they did, like, they did a really good job just gathering the material that we needed on set. But one of the, one of them, like I put together, my editor’s cut and I really enjoyed it. And I thought there was some cool stuff and he really liked it and we worked on it.

 

Stephen Philipson:

But then over the course of the six days, we sort of worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. And it kind of started to get over baked, if that makes any sense. It’s like we worked on it too much to the point where people had a negative reaction to it at the producers cut stage. I kept saying, “No like this”, I think we’ve got some really good material here. I think the director did a really, really great job and I had to just help people realize that it was going to be very good show that maybe we just tightened up, like over-tightened things a little bit and then I had Alison say, close to the end of the project. She said, “You know, we were all really worried about the directing, but I think the director actually did a really great job”. And I just said, “Yeah, I mean, it was hard because I felt like we had the moments, but we just sort of… I think, I don’t know, we lost sight of them or something.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Well, I’m sure as you said, there’s the challenges and hard scenes. What were your favorite scenes to edit? And maybe they were your hard scenes, but ended up being your favorite scenes.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I think from myself, my favorite was just… And this is… Maybe I’m not quite answering the question, but for me from the beginning right up to the re-sleeving sequence was just for me a lot of fun because that’s the first thing of season two that the audience sees. And we were able to just do a lot of fun stuff. It’s just a lot of very expressive sort of dreamlike stuff when Anthony Mackie’s in the tank, but then sort of, the way that shifts very quickly to a very frenetic thing as he sort of wakes up and realizes that he’s underwater and doesn’t know where he is. So we got to sort of shift from a dream-like feel to a more frenetic action feel and we’re sort of bringing in flashbacks and images from everywhere. So we were able to be very expressive with the cutting and I enjoyed that because I think that was where we were sort of finding how season two was going to be.

 

Stephen Philipson:

 

And I really enjoy that sort of process of trying to figure out what the show is going to feel like and I mean, that’s kind of the biggest challenge as well, too, in the sense that we reshot six minutes of it. So having to process all that footage twice, but I’m just really proud of the way it sort of flows from the very first time the spotlight comes on to when you, sort of, meet Anthony Mackie in the re-sleeving tank and comes out and he’s, we sort of get into the story. So that’s a very long sequence, but it’s really where… For myself, where I really feel like I had a lot of input into the storytelling of it and how it would sort of lead the audience through all that and we’re just able to do some really fun cinematic stuff with it.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Yeah, it was really, it was good.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Thanks.

 

Sarah Taylor:

It got me to watch the series. So that was nice.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Thank you, mission accomplished. I suppose.

 

Jay Prychidny:

You know, really the scenes that come to mind are like the really simple scenes, as an editor, I approach everything from a standpoint of emotion and it’s like everything… It’s always about… For me, what is the emotion that I’m trying to convey and how do I generate that feeling in the viewer as well? So really the scenes that I like the most are where I feel like there’s a really clear emotion I want to convey and I feel like I’ve done it successfully.

 

Jay Prychidny:

So when they first pitched this season to me, when they told me what it was about… Was about this kind of love story and I really liked that idea of the love story of this woman who looks like the woman you loved, but she’s not the same woman. And what does that mean? And I think, I mean, in scifi I like scifi the best when it’s telling something emotional that we understand in an offbeat way, in like a context that we don’t understand, but that we connect to it based on the same emotion, whatever it is, and so this idea of seeing someone, Quell and her not being Quell, I think that’s like a real life thing can happen in crazy other ways, right?

 

Jay Prychidny:

So, people changing, people not seeming the same, relationships changing, this ephemeral thing in human relationships that we don’t really understand fully, intellectually. So I was really excited that episode four, my first episode was the one where Quell and Kovacs were coming back together in a real strong way with real [midi 00:50:16] scenes between them and I thought they both did a good job and performance, and I just really love the vibe of those scenes and Quell’s kind of loss and confusion and all of the emotions going on there. So those really, I enjoyed the moment and they’re really so simple, really like a lot of them, a lot of them are just two actors across from each other, but I think I did add something to it as well. That wasn’t necessarily, just wasn’t right there.

 

Sarah Taylor:

You mentioned that you… We paste things a bit slower than what they were shot as, and stuff like that, like you added extra emotion.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. I mean, because generally in these types of shows, like you have to just keep the pace going, going, going, and producers really start to get anxious, if things slow down too much. I always feel like I’m trying to get away with something by like playing something slowly. But when there’s moments like this, like I’m talking about with Quell, it’s like you have to play those slowly, I think for them to work and be effective. So for me, it’s often about like picking your moments and like trying to sneak them in whether people don’t know, like you are not only fast, fast, fast, slooooow, and then fast, fast, again. So they  hopefully  don’t  notice  things  are  slowing  down,  but  yeah,  with  some  of  those  Quell   scenes. because normally everything’s faster than they shot it with a bunch of those scenes, it was

slower than they shot it, that dangerous stare.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Yeah.

 

Stephen Philipson:

You liked it. I know.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I always find producers are really worried, especially in the streaming age that people feel like it’s moving too slowly. They’re going to click and change to another show…

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah, you find when it’s compelling. If you-

 

Stephen Philipson:

Well, exactly. If it’s emotional If the viewer is engaged with these emotions, and you’ve successfully

drawn them into that emotion, if somebody is responding emotionally to something, they’re not going to want to change. So I just find it’s less the speed of what things are moving at, but more just-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah, exactly.

 

Jay Prychidny:

It’s engagement. It’s not about speed. It’s about engagement, and you always want engagement to be super high. As we know, sometimes things can be cut really fast, and your engagement is at an all time low, because it’s just boring.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I find that on films a lot too. There’s often notes to tighten up at the beginning. The beginning is gotta to be faster, and you’re like, “No.” It’s like, “It can’t be too fast.” I gave a friend note recently and I was like,

 

“You guys have overcut the beginning. It’s just… It moves too fast to get absorbed by the characters. If you can’t… You can’t get absorbed by the story. It’s just… You got to slow down, give people a chance to connect with it.”

 

Stephen Philipson:

It is tricky though, because when you’re working on an indie feature, which I’ve been doing less and less of now, you got to believe on some level, that the people are going to… They’re trapped in a theater, so they’re not… It’ll not a lot to get them to actually get up and walk out of the theater. But I guess now the problem we face is that anyone can just leave the narrative space that you’re creating quickly and easily at any time, which is a little too bad. I think it does change the way we tell stories a little bit, that we do have to be engaging in a different way at the beginning, but I agree with you Geoff. If you go too far in that direction of just being… You have to trick people to stay engaged by, I don’t know, just throwing more stuff at them. It might be masking a deeper problem.

 

Sarah Taylor:

I’m assuming that they’re… Well, maybe not problems, but lots of visual effects, and a lot of amazing visual effects in the series. What did you receive in the edit suite? Did you get pre-viz…

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

No,

 

Erin Deck:

No.

 

Sarah Taylor:

It didn’t work for you, and also I know that you mentioned scenes that were left, maybe 10 seconds ended up being much longer, when the visual effects came back. So, what happened with the workflow of the visual effects?

 

Erin Deck:

For me, the way that I started it, Shelly and I, I really considered her a complete equal partner when it came to the visual effects. And she knew the script, and she knew the visual effects inside and out, and we would get a scene that there were supposed to be VFX and things were just not adding up, and I had no idea. And her and I would talk it through and she would give ideas and I would give ideas, and we would start to kind of build it that way, obviously with, including the director, and that in the conversation. But I found at least to start, I really relied on Shelly’s input, and her just true knowledge of VFX. And we would just start building it together to see how it would work, and then I would take it from there and get the director involved. If I was running into any complications-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

But you should have pre-viz. At a show like this, at the end, because when we circled… because I was around to the end, of her saying, Alison. If we are lucky enough to do this again, we should really try to do more previews. She’s like, “Oh, don’t get me started. Everything’s going to be previews next time.”

 

Sarah Taylor:

 

So what would you do then if you didn’t have anything? You and your assistants would create-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

You have to guess sometimes. You’re like, “Remember that thing in 2008, there was… It was a full CG,” and I’m like, “I don’t know, five seconds, I could see that working.” And then sometimes the VFX… because we ended up switching VFX supervisors part way through, which ended up being a really good thing in the end, I think, because everyone was really comfortable and he was based in LA, and all these kinds of things that made it work. But remember sometimes he’d be like, “Yeah, you’ve ball-parked it pretty… It feels pretty good.” But then there was a couple of times when it was the opposite. It needed to be longer or shorter.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I remember one time Dale’s like, “So they made this shot, the exact same length as the slug you put in.” And I was like, “Oh, that slug I just timed out, how long it would take someone to read everything on screen.” Like I never thought… So we adjusted that to make… I was like, “Make the shot as long as you need to you for it to be cool.”

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah. I forgot to mention though, Dale, was a huge part in helping figure out-

 

Jay Prychidny:

He was the VFX editor.

 

Erin Deck:

What we had the ability to do… because I think a lot of times… because we didn’t know what exactly… how far we could take it. Us as editors we’re like, “We want to take it as far as we could.” And Dale would help us figure out what actually can happen and what we can do, and he was a huge part of the process of figuring out the VFX and keeping it organized, and also… Because we would want to add more VFX in. I always… I like VFX, and so I would… And you can only get-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

You don’t have to pay for them though.

 

Erin Deck:

Four for this scene or two for this scene, and I had cut in like seven. So Dale would be like, “Okay. Well, let’s figure this out. How we can work it together.” So, yeah.

 

Stephen Philipson:

For me he ended up being really sort of a go between our post and the VFX producers who are in Vancouver, I think. Figure things out with Dale and then he would talk to them, and then they would talk to him, and [it sort of became a collaboration that way.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. He was really… He had a lot of skills in a lot of areas. It’s, I think, gave–

 

Stephen Philipson:

Diplomacy.

 

Jay Prychidny:

–him way more work, because people kept giving him work. He had so much to do, and… I remember he’d be on the phone with the producers, actually designing shots, for… Not for temp, but for the design that will be going forward. And I was like, “Dale, that’s not your job. The vendor is supposed to be designing these shots, not you.” And he’s like, “Oh, well no. I’ll do it.” But, he was way overworked, but that’s because people… And, like I asked, why are they having you design these shots as opposed to the vendor? And they were like, “Well, it’s just easier for them to communicate with me, than the vendor of your visual effects.” So I was like, “That’s a huge vote of confidence,” and they’re not even in the room with them, but they felt… The producers are is so confident working with him that they were like, “Just have Dale design the shots, and then give them to the vendor, just say this is what we want.”

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

But another thing with him, because he was, he has a background, he was a visual effects producer at a company called Core in Toronto, for quite a while. He worked on Splice, I think. And I remember there’d be things where I’d asked Dale. I’d be like, “So if we were to do this, then… It’s not fully 3D. Could we cheat it in 2D?” And, he would always know like, “Well, you could do it up till here, but after that, then they’d have to do 3D, or this background element, they’d have to render…” I’m like, “Okay,” Just the feasibility of things, just so you’re not pitching shots that will make the producers hang up on you, kind of thing. It was awesome for that too. And all the work flow. Once they laid out the workflow, it was like, “Thank God we have this guy.”

 

Erin Deck:

Oh, I know.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

The tracking everything, I was like, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have known where to start with that stuff.”

 

Sarah Taylor:

Were there any scenes that you were blown away by when you watch them, when everything was finished?

 

Jay Prychidny:

Oh yeah. I thought the visual effects in this were fantastic.

 

Erin Deck:

All the visual effects?

 

Stephen Philipson: Yeah, they were great.

 

Jay Prychidny:

 

And, it’s often so much better than I imagine, which usually it’s the opposite. Usually you’re disappointed and I was never disappointed with anything.

 

Erin Deck:

Big Danica, in episode one-

 

Stephen Philipson:

Oh yeah.

 

Erin Deck:

In a square?

 

Sarah Taylor:

That one was great.

 

Erin Deck:

She looked awesome.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I was going to talk about that actually, because it’s a very… This is a point where Dale’s expertise, and him as a go between, between set and myself was very useful, because that scene… Again, we were chipping away at it for a long time, because they shot Danica a lot later. And so we had to prepare the scene as if she was there, pick all our angles, and just try to cheat them with… We cut her out of some of the concept art and just pasted in floating Danica wherever she needed to be. We figured out when to be on her close and went wide. We had to imagine it in our minds, but I was, I don’t know, I was excited about… It’s like animation.

 

Stephen Philipson:

You plan out everything before the animation is done. And then they’ve had to shoot the elements of Danica, but that became a bit of a problem, because they hired somebody with an array of 64 cameras. So what they were to do is they were going to shoot Danica with 64 cameras all around her, and they were just going to shoot her whole performance, and then just basically convert her into a 3D version of her doing the speech, and then put the 3D Danica wherever, and then fill in all the details, but there was a lot of anxiety. I was very anxious, because I was trying to figure out how we could get some temporary version of Danica, so that I could cut her performance and they were just like, “Oh, you can’t.” I’m like, “I feel like we’re going to need to choose takes and decide, which is better and if the performances…”

 

Stephen Philipson:

And they’re like, “Well, no, because all you’re going to get is you’re going to get 64 wide angle shots of Danica that are going to be totally useless. They’re just going to be a bulging cheek or a pan.” I really felt very anxious about that process, and tried to explain that to everyone, and they tried to ease our worries. And we were promised that we could have one shot that would be wider, that I could at least choose takes, so they did that, and so I chose all the takes. But then what they ended up doing, because there was a lot of anxiety over whether or not this huge array of cameras would actually work, they also just shot the actor against green screen, but putting her in exactly the right angle, with exactly the right

 

lens perspective and lens dynamics as the shots that I had picked originally, as they shot all those conventionally.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And then I put together two versions. I put together a version where we just did a temporary key of her and slapped her into the scene. And again, working with Dale, to figure out how that would look in 3D. If it was going to be passable or if they were going to have to cheat it too much, or if they could take these cut out Danica’s and give them volume. And then I did a version where it was one shot from the 3D camera array that I just put in a little box, so that we could see her performance.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And I think I… I don’t think they had made the decision before I ended the show. Geoff, you might know a little bit more about that. I think I just left those two versions and then moved on. But in the end the 64 camera array just failed. It didn’t work. They couldn’t do it for whatever reason, that’s… We ended up just using the 2D greenscreen versions of her, but I thought it worked out quite well. I think working with Dale and working with the VFX artist, the… We could cheat enough volumetric, and shifting perspective from the 2D green screenshots that it looked like a 3D Danica in square in the end. And I was very pleased with it. I think… I thought it had come together well. And it was as gratifying in the sense that it was the vision that I had, or how I imagined it, is how it wound up, after all that back and forth with the whole thing, which was cool.

 

Sarah Taylor:

I want to touch on the sound design thing for this… For the first three episodes you mentioned, the director’s cuts got extra sound work on them. So maybe just talk about why that happened and what was going on there.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Again, I think with 201 being the pilot, they really… This had its ups and downs, but they really wanted the director’s cut to… Or the first cut that they give to Skydance and all the execs, to really feel polished and have the signature sounds so that everyone would be comfortable with how it looked. So what we did is, we did the director’s cut. We gave it to the sound people.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

It was this company called OCD. That’s an LA based company. They did season one. I think they won some stuff for it, and they really wanted them… I think what you’re saying, Steve is part of it, but also I think for a bit of the passing the button to Sounddogs in Toronto. They wanted to see the security, for lack of a better term of knowing that the groundwork would be laid by these guys, so that the Sounddogs would have the elements and get a sense of how… There’d be some continuity with season one.

 

Stephen Philipson:

What was exciting about it for me was the chance to collaborate with sound people before locking, because, we can get into the technical challenges of it in a minute, but creatively, it was great.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

 

Yeah. They were good. They did a lot of cool stuff.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah, and it really helped me-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

The stuff that we would not have done totally.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Totally. Oh, for sure.

 

Erin Deck:

See, and I-

 

Erin Deck:

For me, I don’t… I just wasn’t that blown away by it. They are amazing and they did some really great stuff, but I don’t know. I was actually… I didn’t have any creative input with them, because we gave them one cut, while we were still cutting, and they did all the sound to that one cut. And then we got it back like a week after. We had still been cutting, so we… I say we, but Shelly had to fit it all into what we were working with. And, there was a lot of stuff that we took forward and we really liked, but they just gave a blanket sound design, and not for even the whole show, just for specific parts, because I think they were really focused on one. And so two didn’t get us much, but they still gave great stuff back.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah. It’s… Well, what I will say… I know I would… I think we did get a bit of back and forth, which I really enjoyed, but it… I think for me the most, where it really helped, was in the first six minutes that I was talking about earlier, because I think some of the… It’s funny, I watched the show a few days ago, and it really sounds exactly the same. I remember remarking. I’m like, “Wow, this sounds exactly like the temp score.” But, I think they must have just used the same elements in the mix. But I think that was very helpful for me, because we were trying to sell a very dreamlike tone off the top. And, if the sound had been wrong and they’d watched it, it might’ve felt too slow or too ethereal or too weird or whatever, but the sound became very much a part of that particular sequence.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And I think that helps sell it a lot, more so than what I’m used to, which is… It’s more of a passing the baton scenario, where you do your temp sound and then they redo everything. But that was one area where I thought it actually, did help us creatively to have that ahead of time. But then for the rest of the show, it was more of just a technical pain in the butt, of having to carry all these sound elements and edit with all these tracks of audio.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. It’s definitely… They do that on movies, larger movies and whatnot, where they do the sound mix early, and then editors are carrying those elements for a long time, which is just interesting. I’ve never done it. I was the only editor who didn’t do it on this show, which I was kind of grateful for really, because it’s always… I’ve encountered this on another show as well, where producers just kind of say,

 

“Oh, we’ll give it to the sound team and they’ll do it, and then they’ll send it back and then it’ll sound great.”

 

Jay Prychidny:

It’s like, “Well, but that’s actually not.” It’s usually more complicated than that. You’re not just giving everything to sound house, to do their thing, and then they send it back. There’s a lot more back and forth. There’s a lot of creative decisions that have to get made. Someone has to take a lead on the creative of a show, whoever that person is going to be, someone who’s going to take responsibility and carry all these things through.

 

Jay Prychidny:

So I would have found it really frustrating in this scenario because I would have been like, “Okay, I have a lot of ideas here, and I don’t want to just take what they’re giving me, and I don’t know why I should have to do that, but anyway.”

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

But in this case, we had, at least for my episode, we had already temped it all. And I remember actually when we showed them the… When we were spotting it, I don’t think Alison was on. I think it was just James, but when we got to the big circle fight, and we watched a bunch of it, then we paused it, and it got… The sound I got from OCD was like, “All right. So we can just move on from this section, what’s next?”

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Tom had did such a great job temping it already. But there was other parts where… We have libraries of sound effects, but there’s oftentimes where it’s like, “Well, I don’t have that futuristic car sound or whatever, that gun sound.” I don’t know. So I did find it to be pretty useful and cool. I enjoyed it, the process that way.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. For sure, if it… If the process works, it’s great. But yeah, there’s just so many ways for it to go wrong.

 

Sarah Taylor:

My last question, before we open it up. There was a big shift from season one to season two, with the amount of nudity and sex. And I know that Jay had some specific notes about sex scenes and stuff. So I don’t know if you wanted to talk a little bit about why that happened, or what was the trouble there?

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah, totally the two seasons are quite different, and that was one of the things that I was really excited about. The new thing that I was excited about was to work on an extreme television show, because television shows often feel very watered down, because they’re for television, but like Altered Carbon season one was for Netflix, and it was like intense. A lot of nudity, a lot of risque stuff. And-

 

Sarah Taylor:

A lot of swearing and drugs.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Violence, and that nude fight with Raylene in season one. That was… I was stunned by that scene, as a scene, not just for a TV show, for anything. I thought it was incredible. So… But I do know that I had one of the only sex scenes in the series, in episode four, in season two. And interestingly, it wasn’t even really written in the script as a sex scene, it was… In the script, it’s basically they fall out of frame.

 

Jay Prychidny:

And then it was in a tone meeting where the director was like, “Okay, well it says, they fall out frame or whatever, but there’s not a lot of sex in the show, and this could be a big sex scene.” And in the tone meeting they were like, “Oh yeah. I guess that’s true. Yeah.” So they shot tons of footage on it. The scene is quite long, even as it is in the final cut. It’s quite a long scene, but it got a lot of notes in terms of removing frames, of nudity. And there was… I found that really strange, because I thought this was what we wanted. We wanted the big sex scene, but apparently, and Alison explained to me on that front that, Netflix said the nudity was a barrier for audience members in season one. So whatever their metrics are that determine these things, they found that, I don’t know, people were shutting off, or I don’t know, when people were nude.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

And the violence too. The violence was also flagged as a barrier as well.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah, exactly. So it was an effort on season two to tone that stuff down, which I don’t know-

 

Erin Deck:

A little disappointing, because we toned it down, I think by 98%. I was quite surprised, because… I agree with you Jay, it would have been fun to work on an extreme show, but yeah, it was the PG version.

 

Jay Prychidny:

But didn’t someone say season two was really successful?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

My understanding is that it’s been more successful than season one.

 

Jay Prychidny:

So maybe they know what we’re talking about.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Let’s try opening it up to the audience.

 

Audience Question:

I actually have a question, so not necessarily about the show itself, but the process. I know you guys all briefly explained how you got onto the show, but I’m really curious about the interview process. How you prepare yourself for one of these kinds of higher profile shows, and what do you think you do well in the interview? I know you all said again that you’re not sure what essentially got you the job from the

 

interviews, but still, there must be something that perhaps you’re confident about going in . And sorry, and a second question on top of that is, how did the second interview differ from the first?

 

Jay Prychidny:

I want to tell my story around this. It’s quite funny and maybe it’s useful too, I don’t know. But it was funny, because I really didn’t think I was going to do this show, because I had another show that I was going to do instead, which was a really big show. Usually when I get offered interviews, I take them, whether I can do this show or not, just because I like meeting with people and whatever. Anyway, so I went into the interview, just hardly even prepared at all. I didn’t know that I wanted to do this show, even if I was available, I was like, “I don’t even know if I want to do this show.” So I went into it just very casual in that way. And I think maybe that had something to do with it, I don’t know.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Didn’t you play hard to get as well, Jay, didn’t you-

 

Jay Prychidny:

Oh, I did, because [crosstalk 01:13:59] “Oh, I can’t do it. No, it’s not going to work out.” I don’t know, that seemed to make them want me more. I don’t know, because I kept saying like, “Oh no, I can’t. My current show,” I was on Snowpiercer season one at the time, so I was like, “Oh, that’s going long. That’s going like a month long, and so I can’t do this show.” And they’re like, “No, we’ll get someone else to cut your dailies for you.” And I’m like, “No, that’s stupid. No, I can’t do the show. I’m busy.” But they just… I don’t know, they kept wanting me to do this show. But anyway, the point is, I think in the interview… So it was just very casual, and I connected with the… So we did two interviews.

 

Jay Prychidny:

We did one with the producer, James Middleton, and then we did another one with Middleton and the show runner, and it was just very cool just, because I wanted to meet him. I wanted to talk to him. That’s all I really wanted out of the interview, was just meet him, and talk to him about his experience and the kind of shows he does, and that’s… So he asked questions about my shows, and it was just a really interesting conversation, just about the business and different… “What’s your experience with this, and what’s your experience with this, and how do you deal with this, and how do you deal with that?” And, “Oh, interesting.” For me, it wasn’t even really about Altered Carbon, because I didn’t even really think I liked the show that much, but when they did just tell me what season two was about, I was like, “Oh, that’s actually kind of interesting.” So they did hook me a little bit in the interview.”

 

Erin Deck:

That’s so funny Jay, because I was such a massive fan of the first season. I watched it as soon as it came out, and I loved it. And so when I got the interview with James, I was so excited. I Googled James, I Googled Alison. Adam and I started rewatching Altered Carbon season one again, just because we could, because we both loved it. And I also found out that James was the producer on the remake of Terminators, Genisys in Terminator is my favorite franchise. So I buttered him up in the first interview being like, “I loved… I love your Terminator movies.” And he was like, “Even Genisys?” And I was like, “Yes.”

 

Jay Prychidny:

 

Here’s two extremely different approaches.

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah. It’s funny. I knew with James that I had to sell myself. I knew that I had to really show that he wanted me, but then when I got the second interview with Alison almost instantly, I realized I just needed to show that they would want to… Like to work with me. I’d gotten the second interview, so it wasn’t about my talent. It wasn’t about how well I knew the show. I understood that it was making Alison like me. And it was easy because she’s very easy to get along with and interview with, so that was my approach or what happened with me.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Mine was similar, I guess. I did… I find it useful sometimes to do a bit of research on the genre, so you can sort of speak intelligently, and have some… Potentially some insights and references, and if you get into that conversation, at least you’re prepared for that.

 

Jay Prychidny:

That’s true. I made some SciFi references, and they were very impressed. I talked about Solaris, when they talked about the plot of season two and they were like, “Oh yes, Solaris.” I find that often helps in interviews, being able to pull out the right reference movie at the right time, and for everyone to go, “Oh.” Then, I don’t know. That’s worked for me in a bunch of interviews.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah. But they for sure can backfire if it’s wrong. Well, there’s that, or if you’re just trying to make it seem like you’re smart, and you’re just pulling out a reference that’s not… Not really naturally related to what you were just talking about.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yes, don’t do that.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Although, I will say Erin too what… It didn’t happen to me on this, but I’m pretty sure I lost a job one time because I had watched some stuff that the showrunner had done before and I remember him being like, “Yeah, you know it was pretty good. I only watched the first couple episodes. I’ve haven’t had time to watch,” and he’s like, “It’s terrible. I hate that show.” I’m like, “All right.” I’m like, “No, this character.” He’s, “Yeah. That show is the worst.” I’m like, “All right, nice to meet you. Take care. Good luck with the show.”

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

But the other thing that I did find that is helpful in this one, and I’ve sort of adapted, moving forward to is, listening to … If you can find any interviews that those people have done. I remember I found a podcast that Alison was on. It was a writer’s podcast. It was her and four other writers. It was kind of like this, a round table discussion. But I found it was just sort of helpful just to make me feel more comfortable. I kind of knew her more just by having listened to her talking to people. So for me at least I find that helps in interviews. Just be a bit more comfortable because you’re walking in cold. It just helps me be… I feel like I know the person a little bit.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I only had one interview. I’m not sure why I think because I had a bit of an in with Dieter originally.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I only ended up having one, but I guess in terms of my preparation, I didn’t know the show very well, but I did watch the show and really tried to feel … tried to figure out how, well, I figured out what they were looking for and then sort of figure out how my approach and my background could help them. I always try to fit attention onto what they want in an interview for better or worse, rather than just try to sell myself. But I think they appreciated that. If you sort of try approach it as you’re trying to figure out what they want, and then once you do sort of say, well, here’s what I can offer. Here’s how I can help you achieve that or whatever. That’s sort of my general approach. But I think, and this is really … I really enjoyed working, well working with both James and Alison, but James, he was the type of person that you could just sort of chat with. Alison as well.

 

Stephen Philipson:

And yeah, so my memory of the interview is really kind of figuring out is this sort of someone I can work with and thankfully I guess they thought I was someone they could work with. We worked out really well.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah. I think you’re right, Erin. Once you get to that point, like the second interview, it’s like, is this a human that I want to hang out and make something with? Yeah?

 

Stephen Philipson:

Yeah.

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

[inaudible 01:20:31] that kind of vibe with. It’s really that … Your work has been judged already then it’s just about your personality.

 

Jay Prychidny:

I think it’s so much about credits, kind of to an insane degree. A lot of the time, I think.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Anonymous asked, did Anthony Mackie

 

Sarah Taylor:

[crosstalk 01:20:50] his catchy phrase “Cut the check in the dailies”

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. Whenever Anthony Mackie would do a performance, he thought was-

 

Erin Deck:

Was done.

 

Jay Prychidny:

-was satisfactory. Go, “Cut the check.”

 

Erin Deck:

Yeah. And sometimes he would do it after the first take.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I don’t remember ever getting “Cut the check.”

 

Erin Deck:

You never got “Cut the check”?

 

Stephen Philipson:

No. Maybe he just hated his performance in my episodes. [laughter] I hope he still got paid.

 

Jay Prychidny:

They only pay him when he says “Cut the check.”

 

Audience Question:

My question is … Well, I’m assuming the show was edited on Avid. And I’m curious to know from everybody, what do you think is the current status of the enemy world in the film industry. Do you think Adobe will be doing a big push for Premier Pro and Resolve becoming free software and being so powerful, do you think it’s changing? Or do you think the other entities are getting … More shows have been cut on something like the Premiere Pro or Resolve? What do you see happening in that regard and how does that affect the work of an assistant editor?

 

Erin Deck:

I’ve done a feature on Premiere and I’ve done a TV series on Premiere and I didn’t like it.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

What series is it?

 

Erin Deck:

It was for Apple TV. One of their new shows it’s called Ghostly Writers, no Ghost Writer. I think it was a remake of an older kid show called Ghost Writer. And we cut it on Premiere. So I’m not … I didn’t mind because I map my keyboard so I can easily jump between Avid and Final Cut and Premiere. But I’m not a fan of Premiere Pro, I like Avid. At least I like the smoothness. I know it. I know how to use it. The problem with Premiere Pro that we had on the feature was it’s a much harder workflow for the assistant editors, especially when it comes to locking. It’s not as seamless as it is with Avid. There’s a lot more challenges that kind of come up. I don’t know about Final Cut Pro. I haven’t worked on that since 7 died.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I mean, I’ve gotten very used to Avid and I’ve loved using it. I mean, at the end of the day, they’re just tools. So I mean, I tried to adapt to whatever I’m working with, but I think, just to go back to our conversation earlier about sound, I wonder if something that I would find very useful that I keep thinking is going to happen is that some of the tools allow for more collaboration. Like if there’s a way that OCD could have worked in our timelines and if the sound could have gone more seamlessly back and forth between the two timelines, maybe that would have really helped our process there. I believe DaVinci Resolve, which I’ve never used, but I think it has more collaboration sort of tools that can allow VFX people and sound people to work in your timeline, which kind of freaks me out a little bit because I don’t want someone else working in my world.

 

Stephen Philipson:

But at the same time, I think that would have helped us like better integration between sound and picture. Because talking to the OCD people, they were building all these soundscapes of hundreds of tracks and they just have to sort of bounce them down to one track that we would just have to kind of try to wedge in where we needed and if there were any sync elements that got really complicated. So I would think, hopefully I know DaVinci Resolve from what I understand, they are moving more towards this, but more kind of tools to allow easier transfer of material between timelines. I don’t know if that’s anything that anyone in the industry is thinking about, but I feel like it would be very useful.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I can’t see it moving away from Avid anytime soon though. I don’t know. I think part of it’s the producers and the vendors are just more comfortable with it. Because there’s a longer track record using them of reliability. And also the editors that are working on it are more familiar with it, which doesn’t say Premiere won’t potentially in five years or whatever, take a market share. But I think it’ll take a little while.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. And at the moment, I’m not aware of really anything that doesn’t cut on Avid really. Like everything is on Avid-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Pretty much yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

-in terms of the present moment. That’s why I was surprised. Erin said she did a show on Premiere. Like I’ve never heard of a show editing on anything other than Avid.

 

Erin Deck:

So it was with Sinking Ship. And so they do live action kind of, but also animated. And I think in reality, so I think that that’s where Premiere was a bit more feasible for them. And that’s what they stuck with in this. The show was their first DGC big show. So they stuck with Premiere Pro because I think they used mostly in-house editors. And I was the only one who came from the DGC.

 

Sarah Taylor:

 

Okay. We have a question from Scott and he said, what are the differences between cutting Canadian TV and the bigger American shows?

 

Jay Prychidny:

My experience with American shows is the cut is often kind of viewed much more like a next draft kind of thing. The director’s cut. The experiences on American shows is there’s a lot more money to reshoot like Steve was talking about. That would never happen on a Canadian show. It’s not like, “Oh, we don’t like the set. Let’s reshoot it.” Like …

 

Stephen Philipson:

It’s like no second part to that sentence. “Oh well.”

 

Jay Prychidny:

I mean, Erin and I worked on Into the Badlands, which is still my just mind-boggling experience of the amount that things would be reshot. The thing that just personally appalled is they opened season three with like a … They wanted to do like a Game of Thrones style opening battle to open season three. And so they shot it for a week or whatever it was. And then the showrunner saw it and he was like, “Oh, this isn’t really from my perspective of any of our characters. Let’s just cut it.” And we did end up repurposing parts of it in later parts of the season at a later date. But for a while they had shot this huge battle scene with a hundreds of extras or whatever it was for a week. And then it’s like … let’s get rid of it. And like why are … What are you talking about. You’re not even going to like explore… like using it a different way or trying to get one of our characters into the scene or something to save this battle.

They’re just like “ahh cut it.” That would never happen in a Canadian show in a million years.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

And there wasn’t a season four either though. Was there?

 

Erin Deck:

No.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

No.

 

Jay Prychidny:

And all the American shows that I’ve worked on, there’s something like that. Where just money is being burned at an alarming rate, to me. And it’s not even my money. I’m still upset by that.

 

Sarah Taylor:

It’s the Canadian in you.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Exactly. I’m used to like, “No. Let’s just take a piece of this and sell them this. [crosstalk 01:28:12] We can text you guys everything and then you’ll love it. And they’re like “Throw it out.”

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I think the schedules are definitely longer too in American TV.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Yeah.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Yeah. Like-

 

Stephen Philipson:

Working on a slightly lower budget American show or I just finished … I mean, I love the show. It’s a great show. It’s called the Bold Type on Freeform. But I’m finding it more like we’re not throwing stuff out. But it’s sticking to a very tight schedule, but … Maybe because it’s a Network show, I don’t know. I mean the nice-

 

Jay Prychidny:

It’s an American-Canadian show?

 

Stephen Philipson:

It is shot in Canada. But, no, I think because it’s for … It’s like a network show and I think maybe just the funding is different. I mean, I don’t think it gets the big audience that a show like Altered Carbon would. And so it has more of that Canadian sort of mentality of like, okay, we just have only these pieces, how are we going to put them together? Which I kind of enjoy in a sense. It’s like trying to make … Whenever you have something where you don’t have the pieces, inevitably you come up with some great solution because you’re really trying to make these pieces work. And so you sort of come up with stuff you might not have otherwise, which I enjoy.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I really, from starting out in indie features in Canada, that was really … I mean, that’s what you do. Trying to make something out of nothing, which I think serves, you well. Or it’s served me well in my editing career. Because you’re always kind of trying to see how you can make things better than what they are. But yeah, it was nice on Altered Carbon. And where you got all the bells and whistles and we had time to work through everything. And so when we finally locked picture, I sort of felt like we really had the time to really try every different possibility and make sure we had the best possible product that we had, which is great. I mean, that’s a real luxury for sure.

 

Jay Prychidny:

You know, from the beginning of shooting to a director’s cut on like Orphan Black would be

two-and-a-half weeks to have your director’s cut. And on this showed to a director’s cut would have been what? Six weeks? Seven weeks?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

It was like 20 days of shooting.

 

Jay Prychidny:

And then … Yeah. If you were the second and the block, you had even more time. So that’s four weeks for a shooting-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Sorry [crosstalk 00:01:30:17].

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

– and the five weeks to your editors cut. Maybe you’re sitting around for a week. So it could be seven weeks or more to get to a director’s cut on this show. As opposed to two-and-a-half, I know from black.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I mean there’s times obviously where we were very rushed, if there was sort of a timely factor, visual effects factor or whatever, something we had to deal with. But at the end of the day, I think we really had the time to really work through everything properly, which was great.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

An even just keeping me on until the end. I know there’s things. I’m so glad we kind of figured this out. Because the dust settled and she had time to kind of marinate on it and come up with a new idea.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Is that a normal thing that happens where there’s one person that’s left?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I think apparently on like bigger sort of Cable shows like this [inaudible 01:31:04] affects every shows. I’ve been told at least it’s more common. And then definitely on studio features, the editor stays on. Remember when I found that out, when I met Julian Clark after District 9 and we were at a party and I was like, “Whoa. Whoa. You, they paid you to go to the mix? You stayed on to the mix?” He was like, “Yeah.” Like “What/” Yeah. So-

 

Stephen Philipson:

Oh my God. And American Gods, season one was cut in the US. And so with American editors. So I talked to Dieter, I’m like, he’s like, “When are you available for 10 Days in the Valley?” I’m like, “Well the picture locks on March 21” or whatever it was. “So I could start March 22nd.” And then when March 22nd came around, all the other editors on the show, they were like done. But they’re like, “Okay, we’re on the show for another month.” So they’d come in every day for a couple hours and just drink wine because they kept them on. They got an effects shot or whatever. They could cut it in, but really they were just doing nothing for like months. I was like, okay. I wasn’t expecting that. And people… the producer said to me…Yeah, exactly. She’s like, “Oh, you want to leave early?” I’m like, “No.”

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

[Laughing] You want to leave early! Stephen Philipson:

 

Anyways. I think they see it as in Canada, you got a bit of a bump from an equipment rental, which they don’t get in the US. From what I understand, they see a couple of extra weeks at the end of the show as like a little sort of pay bump. Because oftentimes the rates don’t … In TV the rate is what it is, but they’ll give you a few extra weeks at the end.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Oh, I see.

 

Stephen Philipson:

As a way of, just bumping up your pay a little bit.

 

Audience Question:

Thanks for doing this guys. It’s really good. I was just wondering if you could expand a bit more on what the notes were like coming from Netflix. And if they sort of evolved over time. Like if they were fewer or greater.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Netflix loved this show. They were so happy all the time, pretty much. For me, I don’t know. That was my experience.

 

Erin Deck:

I think for me, if I can remember, right, Netflix actually was very reasonable. I mean, they had some things that they would stick to, but I think they really let Alison guide the ship and really took kind of note from her. And I don’t know what happened between them and calls, but they would send, I think … What did they get? Three kicks at the can? Netflix. They got three rounds. Is that right?

 

Jay Prychidny:

I don’t know [crosstalk 01:33:30]

 

Stephen Philipson:

Thanks. So I have to believe it or not. I actually have a folder here on my computer for the show. And I have two text documents with notes or week apart.

 

Erin Deck:

Oh, nice. That’s amazing.

 

Sarah Taylor:

And what were the notes?

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

And there’s not a lot of notes actually. Some are the typical like, “Can we have the sound effect be a bit sharper?” Like, “Yes.”

 

Jay Prychidny:

 

The more challenging part on the show is definitely pleasing the show producers. Definitely.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I got to meet a lot of the people from Netflix. Because I went to the mix in Los Angeles because I happened to be in LA at the time. And they were very excited about the show. And it was … I mean, at the mix, they didn’t have a lot to say, but I really felt like they were backing Alison and her vision. They were excited about it. And they’re very encouraging, which was cool. I know I’m on episode one, the “pilot,” I dealt a lot with Skydance. I had a lot of back and forth with them. They had a lot of notes before it went to Netflix. And so there was quite a bit of back and forth with Skydance. Because I think they wanted, I don’t … I mean, I don’t know if they were trying to sell Netflix on it. Probably not, but I mean, they really wanted it to sort of have their stamp, which was cool. I thought we ended up in a good place, but yeah, for me it was Skydance. They were the people who were more note heavy.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I’m just looking at that, my last episode, the finale. And yeah, there’s not a lot of notes either to answer your question. I would say it’s probably about the same as two or three of the … Between my two episodes, at least the notes … There wasn’t a lot, but the volume didn’t really change much.

 

Sarah Taylor:

One more question from me. What are you working on now or what’s coming out soon for, for you?

 

Erin Deck:

I’m doing actually from about two weeks after finishing Altered Carbon, I started on another Netflix show. A drama. Well, a mother-daughter comedy drama. And I’m still on it. Yeah. And I think they’re hoping –called “Ginny and Georgia.” And I think they’re hoping for it to come out September, October. But yeah, no, I’ve been on that for almost nine months now.

 

Stephen Philipson:

I went back to a show that I did right before Altered Carbon called the Bold Type, which is on Freeform, which is very sadly, it’s not easily accessible in Canada. I think it’s on ABC Spark, but it’s a very, very different show than an Altered Carbon. It’s-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

Way more sex. Way more violent. [laughter]

 

Stephen Philipson:

But. Yeah, no, it’s a dialogue driven character based show about three young women. And it’s … I mean, there’s no effects, no fight scenes, which I kind of miss. But what I love about the show is it really is all about just the relationship between these characters and their friendship and their foibles and their ups and downs. And you just really get to love the characters, which is what I love about working on the show. It’s funny. Basically there’s no sort of all the things we usually like to do as editors like figure out pace or use a wide shot and then use a close-up to suggest this feeling or whatever. Like that’s all out the window. They just care about the dialogue. I mean, I could be on a shot of nothing as long as the dialogue was right. So it’s a very different show from that standpoint, but it’s exciting to sort of use a different muscle. And again, I really love the characters. So, yeah. Look out for it.

 

Jay Prychidny:

Most of my life is consumed by the show Snowpiercer. Doing season one and now I’m doing season two and it’s been such a difficult show and so long. I did Snowpiercer forever and then I did Altered Carbon for two months. Just two episodes, two months. Then I did another show even faster after Altered carbon, The Alien sequel, which is like, less than two months, I did two episodes in and out. And then back on Snowpiercer right. And it takes forever …I’m going crazy. But-

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

You’re stuck on that train, Jay.

 

Erin Deck:

He just keeps going around and around.

 

Jay Prychidny:

[crosstalk 01:37:43] The Apocalyptic Wasteland. It’s all too close to life. But season one is coming out on Netflix next month. So please check it out. Because I have put so much of my life into this. And I wanted it to be worth something.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Everybody watch it.

 

Geoff Ashenhurst:

I managed to squeak in, with some difficulty and some long hours of low budget. Drama, a feature called Jasmine Road that was shot in Alberta. It’s about a Syrian refugee family that kind of ends up in cowboy country in Southern Alberta. So that was really fun. It’s just like a change of pace. It’s like a realist social drama and yeah. That was a really fun experience. But now I’m on a Sci-Fi show season one called Silver. That’s the working title I’m working on the producers cut for episode three of eight, no nine, I think.

Nine episodes. It films in Budapest and yeah. Who knows when we’ll get back to that, but I’ll probably be working for another three weeks or something.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Well, thank you, Jay and Erin and Steve and Geoff for joining us tonight. It was really fun to learn about all of the workings of Altered Carbon and your careers and your processes. I enjoyed it. It looks like the audience enjoyed it. Everybody is saying thank you. Thank you. Great Q&A. Yes. Thank you. And thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you so much.

 

Erin Deck: Thanks, Guys.

Jay Prychidny: Thank you.

Stephen Philipson: Take care, everyone.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Bye.

 

Stephen Philipson:

Bye.

 

Erin Deck:

Bye.

 

Sarah Taylor:

Thank you so much for joining us today. And a big thanks goes to our panelists and all the people that joined us live online. A special thanks goes to Jane MacRae. The main title sound design was created by Jane Tattersall. Additional ADR recording by Andrea Rusch. Original music provided by Chad Blain. This episode was mixed and mastered by Tony Bao. The CCE has been supporting Indspire – an organization that provides funding and scholarships to Indigenous post secondary students. We have a permanent portal on our website at cceditors.ca or you can donate directly at indspire.ca. The CCE is taking steps to build a more equitable ecosystem within our industry and we encourage our members to participate in any way they can.

 

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends to tune in. ‘Til next time I’m your host Sarah Taylor.

 

[Outtro]

The CCE is a non-profit organization with the goal of bettering the art and science of picture editing. If you wish to become a CCE member please visit our website www.cceditors.ca. Join our great community of Canadian editors for more related info.

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Credits

A special thanks goes to the following people for helping to create EditCon 2020

Jane MacRae

Maureen Grant

Blackmagic Design

the CCE board

Hosted, Produced and Edited by

Sarah Taylor

Mixed and Mastered by

Tony Bao

Original Music by

Chad Blain

Categories
The Editors Cut

Episode 022: Interview with Pia Di Ciaula, CCE, ACE

Episode 022: Interview with Pia Di Ciaula, CCE, ACE

Episode 022: Interview with Pia Di Ciaula, CCE, ACE

In this episode Sarah Taylor sits down with award winning editor Pia Di Ciaula, CCE, ACE.

This episode was generously sponsored by Post City Picture and Sound

Pia is originally from Toronto and is now based in the UK. She is a BAFTA and CCE award winning editor best known for editing Tyrannosaur, The Crown and A Very English Scandal.

Listen Here

Subscribe Wherever You Get Your Podcasts

What do you want to hear on The Editors Cut?

Please send along any topics you would like us to cover or editors you would love to hear from:

Credits

A special thanks goes to

Jane MacRae

Pia Di Ciaula, CCE, ACE

Hosted and Produced by

Sarah Taylor

Main Title Sound Design by

Jane Tattersall

ADR Recording by

Andrea Rusch

Mixed and Mastered by

Tony Bao

Original Music by

Chad Blain

Sponsor Narration by

Paul Winestock

Sponsored by

Post City Picture and Sound

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The Editors Cut

Episode 031: Edit Chats with Daria Ellerman, CCE

Episode 031: Edit Chats with Daria Ellerman, CCE

Episode 031: Edit Chats with Daria Ellerman, CCE

This episode is the master class with Daria Ellerman, CCE, that took place on March 10, 2020 at Finalé in Vancouver.

This episode is sponsored by Finalé a Picture Shop Company, The Vancouver Post Alliance, IATSE 891, Annex Pro, AVID and Integral Artists.

Master Class Podcast Episode with Daria Ellerman CCE

Daria has over 25 years experience working in television and films. Some of her most recent credits include the new hit series on Netflix, Virgin River, the ABC series Take Two for which she won a 2019 Leo Award and the feature film Meditation Park.

This master class was moderated by Kirk Hay.

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The Editor’s Cut – Episode 031 – “Q&A with Daria Ellerman, CCE” (Master Series)

Sarah Taylor

This episode was generously sponsored by Finale — A picture shop company, the Vancouver post alliance, IATSE 891, Annex Pro, Avid and Integral Artists. Hello and welcome to The Editor’s Cut. I’m your host Sarah Taylor. This episode is part of our Master Series and was the Master Class with Daria Ellerman, CCE that took place on March 10th 2020 at Finale in Vancouver. Daria has over 25 years of experience working in television and films. Some of her most recent credits include the new hit series on Netflix “Virgin River” which I’ve binge-watched-the ABC series “Take Two” for which she won the 2019 Leo Award and the feature film “Meditation Park.” This Master Series was moderated by Kirk Hay.

Kirk Hay

I met Daria in 2012 on a kids show when I was assisting and it was there that Daria gave me the opportunity to cut. So I started cutting in 2012 on the kids show. Then we did two seasons of that then another kids show, all multi cam stuff. Then I left to do some other things animation and some MOWs and then we reconnected on season one Virgin River last year and this year I got to cut two episodes once again with the support of Daria. So that was great. It was really really helped me knowing that I could always lean on Daria if there was a an issue of course there was lots of issues as there always are. So yes so we’ve known each other for a while actually when I sat down to think about this a little bit about Daria two decades of experience editing television series, MOWs, documentaries, feature films. Her credits include the feature film Meditation Park which opened the 2017 Vancouver International Film Festival and Birdwatcher. Several MOWs and hundreds of hours of episodic television. Daria’s versatility comes from the variety of projects she has been involved in from comedy to drama across genres and 140 episodes of sitcom that include a live audience. Daria has been nominated for nine Leo awards, a Southampton International Film Festival award, a Gemini Award, and a CCE award as a picture editor, and won Leo Awards for her work on television series Take Two and The Collector and she currently just wrapped the Netflix series Virgin River. Now the special thing about the sitcom things is in front of a live audience is just to interject a little bit into that is the pressure in which you have to turn around a cut for the audience on Friday and they only shoot was it Thursday-Friday? Thursday Friday. So I don’t know if you’re talking a little bit about that later but that was that was something else. She’s a master of art and it gives me great pleasure to introduce Daria.

Daria Ellerman

Thank you. And I can’t believe how many people here I know, how many people here assisted me, how many people are now my fellow colleagues, those editors, and I can’t believe you guys want to hear me talk but anyways we’re going to talk and I just wanted to tell you what I thought I would do. I’m gonna show a clip the first episode of Virgin River Season 1 Episode 1 and I wanted to talk about… I want to of talk about it from the perspective of the three ways that a story gets written, any story any movie or television series it’s the script, it’s written in production, and it’s written in post-production, and I wanted to sort of should show you the clip and then explain the different areas where there was impacts on the script by both production and post-production, and also the way that we would edit this particular scene as the fact that it’s the first episode of a new series. And I’ve I’ve done I think I counted them up I might have written it down… I’ve done ten or twelve episode ones of a season one, and I’ve done two pilots that were… one was a backdoor pilot which was a movie of the week for Sabrina the Teenage Witch the half hour sitcom, which went on to be completely retooled and nothing that we did was used. And then another pilot that was an action kind of tween thing… teen thing that got rejigged and we used part of the pilot but it became a new thing so that’s a more conventional pilot style. You know we don’t really do pilots so much anymore, particularly I don’t still think it’s a Netflix or streaming thing really. We just sort of launch in and so there are some considerations about when you’re doing Episode 1 season one and I was sort of aware that this was more knowledgeable audience and I thought that might be a more interesting way look at this clip. So we could play the first clip I think.

[Clip Plays]

[Clip Audio]

Daria Ellerman

How do you like watching that again Kirk?

Kirk Hay

It was the song again and again and again.

Daria Ellerman

So the reason I wanted to… the reason I wanted to talk about the three ways that the script is written is because it took me a while to start thinking about how production is impacted by so many different things and how we would you know gather in the bullpen and complain about the way something was shot. Then once the director came in you might find out like like in the season just recently that there was a truck mount on a car and then there was an accident and then the truck mount was off the car. So we only had one camera on this particular scene when it and it was like Oh this is such an ugly angle. Right. So you just you just you just wonder like who who shot this why were they doing this. And I think it’s important for us as editors to kind of realize that that the impact that production has on what is scripted that we just kind of have to deal with it and stop going out in the bullpen and complaining. Well I guess we’ll never do that but… and I’ve also been in meetings where you know there’s a script that has it like lots of many small scenes and I’ve seen a production manager directly address the writer it’s like OK so you’ve got 12/8 of the pages here at twelve different locations. You can have six. You know? And so then the writer has to go back because they don’t we can’t afford to go to twelve locations so they have to somehow figure out how to either make. Two locations out of one location or you know like it’s like the writer was never expecting that they would be have to go back and rewrite something just because the money’s you know there isn’t enough money allocated for that many locations so the writer starts with this idealized thing. Then even once prep starts they have to start immediately. The thing becomes un-idealized and then as production goes then it becomes further impacted. And then when we’re in post we choose to sometimes change the script. So in the case of this show, the first three shots that we saw which were an overhead shot, a drive by, and a drone at dusk, never existed in the production of that episode as scripted. It started at night with the woods with the car driving in. So production shot what was scripted but as we were editing episode one of course episode two… well one and two shot together so episode 3 and 4 are shooting, and there’s editing going on and we also were supplied with a bank of drone shots beautiful beauty shots that we were using as transitions. And so you know we’re sitting around and realizing that there’s not there’s not really much of an opening here. And we we wanted a few things; we wanted more time to establish our song because it was the first episode of a new season we’re trying to create interest. We wanted you to listen to that song because we were trying to suggest something with the lyrics of the world keeps moving on… whether you know not literally but we wanted… we wanted that to resonate. And we also thought about things like… and this was a collaboration between the showrunner and the executive producer that was in post and myself and our post producer and Kirk and you know how can we do this. And so we decide well you know what, we have all these beautiful drone shots. We should probably start the episode with a drone shot because that’s going to be a visual motif. It’s gonna give us time. And while we’re while we’re getting this drone shot you know, Gary can you get us a couple more shots right? And then we were all because of the what the drone could shoot where the location we were at. The only shot we could get from the drone was from behind the car and it comes up and it’s a beautiful shot. But that’s not the shot we all have in our minds when we wanted to we wanted this great this epic drone shot just one shot. You know Gary might be able to get us some other shots but so production impacted us in the limitations of the drone. We at post impacted the writer’s script by deciding we wanted more of an opening. We wanted to try and draw the audience in and we had to remove something coming up later. So we wanted to emphasize the smallness of a of a car in a wild world. And we wanted to establish the world of our show so that when the drone comes up that is the world of our show Squamish is in for Northern California. And also we wanted to maybe suggest that this has been a long journey so if we shot that at dusk then we would dip to black and then we would come up into the episode per script which was that this car drives through the forest. And so… so something else that we think of when we’re when we’re editing is our shot selection so the kind of shots we were trying to select for the beginning were with that idea of this is a lonely road or in the forest first it’s dusk, now it’s night. So that the first time we come to the shot of someone in the car there is no question that this is our main character. We’re not being coy about it at all. We’re not like shooting from behind or from the side or we’re like the first thing that we decide to do after trying to establish this opening is to just show you this person. This is the person that you need to be interested in. This is the person whose story we’re telling right now, whose point of view this scene is from. And in terms of shot selection as well the director had done a nice little tilt down. So we saw the phone and and it wasn’t and it wasn’t really inserting and we really liked that and then we did a little VFX where we replaced it so that we could do the no service thing. And that was just mainly just that the director she was so awesome. She just like kind of just did this thing and then we’re like oh but we could like make a sound and put something on the screen and then we recorded some ADR of her going “oh great.” And again you know just trying to emphasize that she is a fish out of water because you might get from her appearance and from her fancy car that perhaps she’s not a person who regularly travels these roads or lives in this area. Anyways that took a long time to get there. It took a lot of cuts and it took a lot of thought and a lot of discussions and a lot of meetings and then and then to have… you know our director or second unit director go out and survey and come back with the news about well this is the only shot I can get you. But at the end of the day we felt that we had accomplished that anyways. So then the next section is is the the stalking semi which we were trying to to show that she was rattled and I guess it would be unfamiliar for her to maybe deal with a semi on a dirt road like that. And and then she skids which takes us into the flashback. So in the script the semi honks and goes by her. And then a bear suddenly rears up in front of her. And roars and that she slams on the brakes and hits her head on the dash. So like I like to call this like “look ma no bear!” So… Kirk like tried… we tried we like ordered up… we shot a bear.

 

Kirk Hay

There was a bear.

 

Daria Ellerman

There was a bear. We shot a bear but we shot the bear in December. What are bears doing in December? This bear was so sleepy and all the bear could do is turn its head and open its mouth and like we put the growl in, like we tried speeding it up, we ordered up a green screen bear, we tried we didn’t have a plate. We had the bear… what was wrong with the bear shot?

 

Kirk Hay

The only shot they did was a POV over her shoulder. A POV or like over the shoulder through the window. And then they had to have a wire an electric wire run around the bear because it was a huge grizzly.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. It was like a fence.

 

Kirk Hay

And then the trainer was there like with its biscuits going like… and the bear was literally going like “my mouth so dry,” like it opened its mouth. It was like that. So the roar was like [blah.] So that was a problem. And then the way they shot it was because they didn’t want to run over the bear. The car just goes like this.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. That’s right the car just slowed down.

 

Kirk Hay

We had we had to try and speed up the car get rid of the fence, get rid of the trainer, anger up the bear. And there was no plate no clean plate no anything.

 

Daria Ellerman

And a strange light too a strange light because they did do a B-camera on the actual just bear. And he was kind of like in this little halo of light. Yeah. And so then we like had come up with this version the best we thought we could do. And then the big kahuna show runner who happened to be on set a lot in season one not so much in season two. She came in the room she sat down we played her the sequence and she said “get rid of the bear.” We agonized over this!

 

Kirk Hay

And we got rid of the shot we got green screen animals to give us a bear. They were like “hey Kirk you know after effects” I’m like No no… “you do now.” I mean they’re comping the whole thing up. So we did our due diligence. I mean we covered that every… I was I thought they were gonna like come and glue hair on me and be like “All right Kirk out to the road you go.” But we tried it all.

 

Daria Ellerman

But that that was just mind blowing actually because it was so obvious but you know you well it’s not my practice any ways to cut out anything before it before the showrunner’s seen it. I mean even when directors make lifts I’m kind of like oh okay because generally on television series, not on features, you know that the showrunner is gonna want to see everything that was in the script unless like there’s like a phone call in a discussion and an agreement like okay I I really do want to see it that way. So I don’t think… there was never… the option of removing the bear was never an option we thought… even the Post Producer then.

 

Kirk Hay

Then the question was What do we do when the bear’s gone?

 

Daria Ellerman

Right. So so I said I’ll make the skid happen out of the semi which you know when you have like a nice shaky when you have nice shaky shots like that nice little skid sound a little music sting it would just it you know it wasn’t that hard. And in retrospect it feels cleaner than to have had first a semi menace her and then a bear. Like I mean that might have been a bit much but I think that that what the writer was trying to do was really show the danger of the wilderness area that they were in and the unexpectedness of a bear she would probably never expect this, this woman from L.A.. So it felt like it was really super important to have the bear.

 

Kirk Hay

A lot of money was spent on that bear too.

 

Daria Ellerman

A lot of money was spent on that bear but it was yeah it was yeah man it was hilarious. And the interesting thing was that I mean the showrunner also happened to have written the first episode and she was not at all precious about the bear. She was like “get rid of the bear!” right. So yeah first episode first season flashback. So we have a flashback because it’s a conventional way that we are going to reveal backstory about characters right. It’s kind of a trope… it’s very accepted and also putting it right in the opening is saying to the audience this is how we’re gonna this how we’re gonna do this, right? That’s why that flashback is there and it’s also to make you wonder who this woman is, to put her in a hospital setting so maybe you think that she works in a hospital and then to create this kind of eye contact between her and the doctors so that you maybe think oh is this person important. And that flashback was a lot longer and it got truncated just to make it a lot cleaner. And I think that’s better better than exchanging a lot of dialogue that wasn’t really gonna build on what is there. And we thankfully cut to it because I think it was scripted with the flash of light and somehow a flash of light was gonna come through that… I don’t know what was going to… anyways once we got rid of the bear we had to rethink that and I personally always prefer a cut to a flashback. We did pre lap some of the audio going in because there was just some concern about making it really clear to people that we were transitioning into a flashback. And I think did we have a little sound there?

 

Kirk Hay

Flashback whooshes were had, lots of them were sampled and gone through and I just think they didn’t like that idea. No it was really like a double hat on that thing….

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah a hat on a hat. Yeah yeah that’s our showrunner’s favorite saying “hat on a hat” and I’m glad and I’m glad because I think we even auditioned a white flash which is like please say no please say no. And then we come out of the flashback and we we are meeting a new character and as the as the episode went on we were continually meeting new characters because it’s the first episode but in that scene we were we were trying to be wide whenever we could just to emphasize the remoteness and you know remind us that we’re in the woods and see her you know assuming that her cell phone is gonna work even though we had the insert where she said she had no service right. She should have known her cell phone was….

 

Kirk Hay

You always check it still.

 

Daria Ellerman

You do right. And then we cut to the main title card which was not scripted and that’s a thing that I’ve noticed you know recently and I’ve been on shows where I’ve like you know when I’ve had an opportunity to speak to the showrunner and they’re not scripting them where the main title card goes like “Hey guys want a script that?” you know and some people are like “yes!” because they they realize that that might affect how the director might direct if they knew that we were cutting to a main title card and like there’s so many shows now that that you know just slammed the graphic on top of footage for a scene. But this the these scripts never had the main title card scripted or where we were gonna place it. So it got placed in several areas. This was I think the earliest it got placed. We had it placed later I think. And then even later. And then we came back to here but it’s just I noticed that’s always an interesting… it’s a thing because in this case it helped us. There was a time cut you know the scene that came after that they’re in the truck and they’re driving. It also helped us emphasize that she had a decision to make right there. Like is she going to get in the car with this guy. I mean she’s really have any choice. Like what is she going to do. Sit in her car and wait for the bear to get her? Oh right. She doesn’t know there’s a bear.

 

Kirk Hay

There was a ripple effect of that too cause didn’t doesn’t Doc say there’s bears out here she goes “there’s bears out here?” Yeah but the title thing also goes back to the Netflix all knowing all seeing they know that if a title last longer than I think it’s 10 seconds then you have to follow certain format because people will skip past it. So if you have a title they want you to have it this long or that long nothing in between. Because I know that people are gonna… so that played a part in….

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. How long?

 

Kirk Hay

Seven and a half seconds.

 

Daria Ellerman

Right. So we’re doing it under the ten seconds so that we don’t get the skip.

 

Kirk Hay

Yeah yeah yeah.

 

Daria Ellerman

And there was talk of a main title as well. And for some reason I’m under the impression that Netflix would rather not do a main title and I’m not 100 percent certain why that is. But I think some productions insist and they they do a main title. Like I did another show where they went out to a place in London England and did a beautiful main title and Netflix was OK with it but but also then I think that’s where that skip thing comes in. So when you… oh no but you can’t skip it unless it’s at the beginning. Like when you’re watching them when you’re bingeing. Right. Right. Anyways there’s we’re having, it’s funny because that’s the thing when you work on Netflix show there’s a lot of these discussions about the Netflix rules and things of where you. Yeah.

 

Kirk Hay

And they change ever so slightly every season.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. If it’s not scripted I I like to see if they will but I don’t think we’re ever gonna script them on Virgin River. We’re just going to plunk them in and then continue to move them from cut to cut. Right.

 

Kirk Hay

And then when the director comes in you can say “it would be great if you shot a specific shot for the main title” and they always go “that’s a great idea!”.

 

Daria Ellerman

That’s true!

 

Kirk Hay

And then that next block you’re “like where is it?”.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. And then in season one we had that same card on every episode and in season two we have a different shot for every episode which is kind of nice actually. Yeah. Does anybody have anything specific about that clip that we were talking about or anything that I said that was confusing or Kirk said was confusing?

 

Audience Question

The opening music did you have that well beforehand or did you get that later?

 

Daria Ellerman

That’s a great question actually because um…no. So before we had the extended opening we did want something in there and we tried… we tried a number of things and we tried to go a number of ways because Netflix… and this is not a Netflix symposium here but… it was Netflix kind of digs the idea of of a of a cover or something recognizable that’s affordable or they’re all about having you know a source cue at the beginning and at the end of an episode that costs a little bit more than you know that kind of library stuff that you might put in other scenes. And we really didn’t have enough time. The way that it was shot before we before we were like into the bear which is now into the crash and so I think the most recent thing I think I probably had temp score in there when we decided to get rid of the bear. And then when we decided to get rid of the bear is when we had the conversation about extending the beginning and then we started auditioning a lot of songs and we had an executive producer in post that season and… who was really into finding music and she knew this song and she came in one Monday morning is like “this is the song that we should use.” And so we started using this song, everybody in production really liked it. And so then we did start in a little bit of black and try and make our shot lengths so that we could establish the lyrics that we wanted to. And we did even edit I think for like we edited a verse so that we could get lyrics that we wanted before we crashed into score for the semi thing. But a lot of times we do have a song. It might be scripted or it might have been sent to us and we find something that we like, or sometimes our showrunner will be like I really love this song, and we will work with it from the beginning, but and this goes to episode one of the season one is, that first of all you’re going to redo the temp score 10 times anyways and any songs that you’re gonna use, like you’re going to you’re gonna burn through 100 source cues before you land on the three or four ones that you’re gonna feature in the episode. It’s just everybody knows what they don’t like. They just don’t know how to tell you what they want, and they might not even know what it is until they hear it anyways. And in this one it was… we all kind of liked the vibe of it, but the world keeps moving on was really very important and it’s important to the story because you know this character is is coming out of a lot of it, she’s leaving L.A. for a new start in the small town and leaving behind a lot of personal bullshit right. And we we really thought that song would really help us establish that and we were hoping that it would draw you in and keep you interested because as a viewer of streaming services, it’s not lost on me how quickly I’ll give up on something. Nope, next! You know. And so when you’re editing something for a streaming service you’re like Oh my God how can we not have people do that how can we keep people interested? So I think that we hoped that the song would do that. We hoped that having a little bit of action and a flashback to make you think… then a grumpy old man, and then a main title might be enough for you to go “OK I’ll see what’s… see what’s happening next.”.

 

Kirk Hay

Yeah there’s a lot of information crammed into that opening. With the introduction of the main character, a flashback, the crash. It’s quite busy as far as that goes.

 

Audience Question

How long can you go before the opening title?

 

Daria Ellerman

It was like 2:30-3:00 or something.

 

Kirk Hay

Some of the shows were like “How about here?” “How about there?” But never passed like five minutes. There were some that were late. I think it’s like 3:30 or something around there.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah it almost is like… it seems that we do like to do a teaser type thing but it’s not scripted that way and sometimes it’s like I said… Why don’t you… it’s easier to just script it as a teaser but you know.

 

Audience Question

Was the flashback scripted?

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. It was longer and we cut we cut it down and I think that this episode didn’t end up being super long the way you know like a lot of first episodes on streaming services are beyond what we’re used to seeing the 43 minutes of broadcast hour. I think this one was forty eight minutes or so seven minutes yeah. So it wasn’t it wasn’t super long and our goal was to keep people interested. So cutting down scenes.

 

Kirk Hay

I feel bad for the bear. He probably got all his friends around like “all right I’m in the show. Wait a minute. Where’d I go?”.

 

Daria Ellerman

Shooting a bear in December!

 

Audience Question

Once you decided to cut the bear, did they pick anything up for the car crash?

 

Daria Ellerman

There was talk of doing an insert on the wheel and stuff and actually I was I was really not encouraging that because they also thought while at the same time we can get the wheel in the ditch because it could be as the doc character says well your car’s in a ditch and basically you see two cars parked there whatever your car’s not drivable. That’s all that really matters. And I thought well where it first well where am I going to… how am I going to make this wheel insert work for the skid without it without it kind of just looking stuck in like I preferred it to flow out of out of the the pass-by of the semi. The idea that she just skidded over to the shoulder so sound can help us there. We had a nice shaky POVs we were inside the car and then we… you know it’s I think faster is better. So while yes they were thinking about that and then it just got… it was at the bottom of the list and then it just dropped off, thank goodness.

 

Audience Question

Is it something dark this show, or just… because I was startled a little bit by the song?

 

Sarah Taylor

Yeah. No it’s not. It’s not necessarily but as as I’ve watched this clip a few times recently I’m like yeah man. First of all like it’s night. It was it was just night and it’s dark and then the whole opening takes place at night until like I don’t know 10 minutes in or something.

 

Kirk Hay

It’s funny though it does get there’s a bit comedy… as soon as you come back from that main title, there’s a bit of a comedic beat and then even more of a comedic beat and then an even more so it does start like that. And then yeah it’s streaming on Netflix right now.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah I just didn’t really want to play so much so that we could just sort of talk a really a little bit about. But yeah you’re right. Like it does.

 

Kirk Hay

That’s capturing the audience again too.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah yeah.

 

Kirk Hay

Getting them interested. See. What’s going on here. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Daria Ellerman

And then when we do lighten up. Like I’m always a fan of any moments that you can… where you can lighten up is is always fun.

 

Audience Question

I’m also curious when you locked that music, did you find you’re shifting some edits or is it perfect?

 

Daria Ellerman

No I because I felt it was perfect [laughs]. Plus I edited the song roughly and the music editor or maybe Kirk edited the song.

 

Kirk Hay

Well I had a crack at it.

 

Daria Ellerman

We all you, know but anyways we had a rough edit of the song when we locked. If anything, yeah I actually did adjust the black at the beginning of the show because when I first laid that song it and we didn’t have the the three shots at the opening I had like 15 seconds of black so I could play my song so I only start now and a few seconds black.

 

Audience Question

So going back to the how tough it can be doing the first episode of the new series, how many versions of that opening do you think you did?

 

Daria Ellerman

Good question.

 

Kirk Hay

That project was about a terabyte….

 

Daria Ellerman

The iterations of the Bear were like 15 or 20….

 

Kirk Hay

There was original bear, there was new bear. And then there was a truck crash and then there was in the truck crash we were trying to figure out how to do that. There were sound… there was stuff was just sound design like working on trying to get that wheel from the gravel to the dirt and her and Mel who is the main character there… her stuff.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah it is my experience with every opening of this episode one season one just even though like we were so let’s say we did a 20 versions before we were happy. We touched that scene every time we looked at the bloody show in some way. And then when the episode was not long but longer than we wanted it to be, we went in to this like the flashback and into the subsequent scenes in the beginning and we did line lifts. So that came later in the process. Like everything sort of stayed. It’s that crazy thing where you think OK everything’s good right. OK well let’s just look at it one more time and it’s like oh….

 

Kirk Hay

And you can’t say no.

 

Daria Ellerman

You can’t say no of course not. I love making changes. Yeah. And certainly like I said the music that’s the main thing about an episode one season one thing is that like I said we were all temp score then we were all sound design then we had a song and then we didn’t have a song and then we blah…blah…and then we you know and and the music that’s in there. I think the composer did a redo. So what so then the composer sent music and then we gave notes on the music that he sent so he redid it before it even went to Netflix. Which is just you know luckily we had a composer who was so into providing us with score. Like wanted Netflix to hear it with his score which you don’t always have because the most frustrating thing is to continually replace temp that is never gonna be it’s never gonna be what what’s going to air. So and then it was great because then we had notes and he adjusted his score and then they probably had notes but I think it was a lot… it was by the time it went to Netflix it was pretty much what it is right there, I think.

 

Kirk Hay

I like getting tracks back from the composer for first track and you look at it in the end this is version 13, you’re like “version 13?” This is the first time we’ve heard this! So you know they’re on their end, doing the same thing. We did that this year to the composer tweaked some score or some source music that we had.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah. We also like to use a lot of source in this show. But then sometimes we like to transition our score to our source. So it’s so hard if you don’t have something that’s in the right key or with the right vibe and so then we would just ask our composer to give us something and it really really helped. Really helps. And you know it’s that old thing like “everybody’s a filmmaker. Don’t worry about it if it’s rough.” But no… people can not respond to the show if it isn’t completely scored and sound effected and V effected and sometimes even color timed. I mean we do some stuff in Avid but I mean sometimes we’d even have to get something a shot sent out if we thought it was too dark we’d have to to get it color corrected and cut it back in just to avoid having your broadcaster and your executives tune out of the show. You want them to see everything and hear everything. I have another clip that I just wanted to contrast with that. It’s a little comedy, kids show comedy, and mainly because man, cutting comedy’s the best. It’s so fun. When we worked on the multi cam sitcom we were laughing every day. Oh and sometimes we were like really really belly laughing. So we worked together and I was the editor for five seasons… Well three Mr. Young and three Some Assembly Required… six seasons of multi camera which was four cameras simultaneously. The idea of multi cam which is the basis of all sitcoms from our childhood, and which was credited with Desi Arnaz developing it for the Lucy show. I’m not sure if that’s really how it started. I think people were doing more than one camera but… is that when they shoot the sitcoms in Los Angeles, the idea is is that you set up the cameras so that you don’t have to do very many takes. So you’re trying to get a pass of four cameras that are all cutable. And if everything’s working you don’t even… you do a safety take but you don’t really need more than two takes. And they were shot in front of a live audience. What that meant was they did one day of pre shooting of sequences that might might be difficult to do in front of an audience because it would require a cut to make the comedy work, or there’d be a gag that would that would have to be cut around in Hollywood they would they would pre shoot for two or three days and then shoot in front of the audience. On these kids shows we would shoot like more than half the show on one day and then the next day we would shoot a half a day for a little bit more and then we would have an audience come in and we would shoot like probably a third of the show in front of the audience so we would pre shoot two thirds and we would shoot a third of the show in front of the audience and it was such a cool experience because I started to get called down to set which is a place that we just don’t really get called to. And the thing is our offices were upstairs in this building and they were shooting downstairs and the thing about a sitcom or a multi cam experience is that you don’t go outside. Everything’s in a studio right and they start calling me down to set and asking me like if the cameras were gonna cut and I’ll never forget like the first time I got called down to set and I looked over at this monitor that’s a quad split monitor and my eyes just flicked around and I said to the director who had worked with before, “I don’t think this is going to work.” I think we better if I had that and all of a sudden they’re they’re signaling OK they’re on the radio to the cameraman to change the shot. It was just like “Holy crap I hope this works” you know? But like I don’t even know where that came from. And so then there I was going up and down the stairs like on a regular basis which was super fun and then I would attend the live shows and do the same thing, like watch the cameras. And there was just this energy of… there’s people in the audience and then there’s these kids who are into the fact that there’s people in the audience. And we had adults as well… and and everybody’s game kind of comes up a bit when there’s an audience, and then they’re all the writers are down there and they’re checking off whether or not the jokes work and they’re huddling and rewriting the jokes and I’m just watching them shoot. And in my mind I know what… I know what I have to do on Monday when I have to come in and have the show ready. But like Kirk was saying… it was definitely grueling, and one of the hardest jobs I ever did but it was so fun because with the help of my assistants of which I had Warren, Dione, Kirk, Jon who would help me with the assembling because we would have to assemble all of the footage that was shot on the Thursday. We would have that material like within… I would have it within half an hour of it being… each scene being shot.

 

Kirk Hay

This show was also technically new to Vancouver. I don’t think anyone had ever done it where they recorded directly into the Avids. And when they yelled cut and the DIT downstairs pressed stop that MXF file was available. So as soon as they yelled cut it would be available but of course you waited till the scene was done and then you can organize it bring it upstairs. So there was a whole workflow issue that Daria was working through on the fly while she was learning multicam, while she had to cut Thursday’s footage, Friday morning’s footage, so, she’d cut til noon and then that was it. But you’d get footage til noon. And then the audience loaded in at 3:00 and they started at 4:00. So you had two thirds of a show to put together. Lots of slapstick comedy which meant resets to cut, remove, put stunt in, put the gag in, green screen… we had a VFX team that would do viz effects on the fly as well. Daria would pass it off to me I’d get it ready I’d send it down the hall they’d give it back, sound effected and all that stuff. So Daria is doing all that stuff. And then at the end of that, running downstairs and staying there till 10:00, 9:00 at night.

 

Daria Ellerman

It was fun. It was fun. So what we would do is we would play for the audience the scenes that we had assembled and then we would stop and they would perform a scene and that would be recorded for me to cut on Monday. Then we would play a bit more of the episode so the idea was that the audience saw the whole episode with these little breaks where a scene was performed live in front of them. It was something else but it was great because I had to rely on my assistants to to help me assemble. And then there was too many episodes for me to do because they start they would also do episodes without an audience some weeks. And so those then became the assistants’ episodes and then people got moved up to Editor and then we are hiring more assistants. So it was a really great experience for all of us and for me because it was just so different. You know like I was kind of like at a point in my career where I’d been just doing a lot a lot of episodic and it was like it would be nice to do something different and love to laugh. You know that was that was the main thing. So that was a really unique experience that I don’t know will ever happen again except the rumor at the Netflix mixer… is that Netflix is getting in the multi cam game. So who knows maybe they will do something here.

 

Kirk Hay

You get to learn to map your keyboard. Camera one two three.

 

Daria Ellerman

Exactly. Yep yep. And I mean it’s the form itself is the writers who write on it love it. The producers who produce it love it. It’s a thing like sure you know it’s kids and fart jokes and I mean I’ve got an eight year old boy inside me somewhere because I find all that stuff hilarious. And so the love of the forum also kind of infects you like you’re just like… you know it’s hugely collaborative that way. You know everybody is interested in everybody’s else’s opinion on how to make it better. So I hope it comes and I hope that you get the opportunity to work on something like that. We’re not going to show you anything from that because I… I didn’t even think about that but I did think it would be nice to contrast Virgin River with some comedy because we don’t get to do as much comedy here as I think any of us would like. Right. And I’ve done some single cam comedy as well and this clip I’ll show you in a bit is a single cam kids show right? And we do that here. And the main difference between the single cam comedy and the multi cam form is there’s no laugh track. So yes we did have a laugh track and we edited the laugh track. You guys edited the laugh track. And that was one thing where a lot of people who were quite cynical about it were like “Oh yeah. But it’s got a laugh track” but we didn’t have a lot of music, like the laughter was kind of our music. We had like stings a little stings in and out of scenes but it’s quite different that way. But I think that in terms of any comedy whether you have a laugh track or not you have to hold for laughs. You have to… in your head when you’re editing, I mean you have to be fast pace in your setups but you’ve got to let the the punchline land and you’ve got to give it a beat. And so when you’re editing with a laugh track it’s very easy to do because you’re putting a laugh under it. So people can’t jump it like I find sometimes in single camera comedy, sometimes the other actors don’t let the… like there’s a way to gracefully let a laugh land as a performer, as well so that it doesn’t feel like it’s staging.

 

Kirk Hay

Remember they would laugh on stage… that the video village crew would laugh. So the actors knew OK.

 

Daria Ellerman

Oh yeah. That’s the thing about multi cameras that anybody who is on the stage floor watching whether it’s a rehearsal or actual live shooting. You have to laugh. And so you develop your multi cam laugh where… because if you don’t laugh, no but the actors are like “whoa oh what’s wrong with it.” And sometimes you’re laughing at the same joke over and over and you do have to keep laughing.

 

Kirk Hay

Those poor live audiences would be like take 7 they’d be like what’s happening here?

 

Daria Ellerman

Oh yeah yeah yeah and we’d be down at the village going hahaha! You have to right? A little bit about comedy it’s all about timing: acting plus pacing. A lot of people say comedy lives in the wide shot, not necessarily. In sitcom, yeah. You know we did, we did have a lot of gags that were wide because they were visually were that. Single cam, not always but there’s just something about the looser angles in comedy with the body language and especially if you’re including lots of people in the gag you know it’s not… you tend not to use so many close ups. You tend to have fewer reactions and that’s not a hard and fast rule but the thing about comedy is it’s important to get the setup out so that the punchline lands and if you’re cutting away during a setup, there’s a possibility that people aren’t going to hear the setup. And of course sometimes part of the setup will include people’s reactions, if something is gross you might do it. But you would pace it in such a way that you’re very clear with your setup because if you’re not clear with you setup, you don’t have a punch line. So that’s why there tends to be definitely fewer reactions. And we used to… the way that they described it in multi cam is that we give the laugh to the person who has the punch line. So the person who has the punch line, we stayed on them and gave them the laugh. In single camera comedy, we might cut away to other characters as a way of creating that space for the people at home who are hopefully laughing. Not if they were watching police academy the one hour series which I worked on… and the other thing that is super cool and I wish we had this scene, Kirk, I wish we had this episode… is genre. So a lot of comedy and particularly kids comedy I’ve worked on adult comedy too but particularly kids comedy, they like to like turn genre on its side. So we had this amazing episode of Some Assembly Required that was Whiplash. It was fantastic. From the music to like the kind of music that we used and the way that we quick cut it. And it was just, it was hilarious, and it was hilarious because it was recognizably supposed to be the movie Whiplash. You know they quote some of the lines that you know they shot some low angles. They really went to town on it and it’s really… I find that happens a lot in kids comedy and it’s interesting because they kind of take a serious adult genre and they kid-ify it and that kind of makes it funny. So this little clip which is the second clip, we’ll look at that and then just chat little bit about it.

 

[Clip Plays]

[Clip Audio]

 

Daria Ellerman

That’s a cute episode because the girls end up busting the boys club. So they were like trying to work with the gangster genre. You know the panning camera and the quick cuts and the framing of the of the girls with it with him on the seat like he’s kind of trapped, and you know it’s paced up for the whole kind of interrogation… sort of the girls are the hard boiled detectives, the boy’s kind of like the dumb blonde so they’re kind of inverting that. The ladle is like you know and you have to know the series, the ladle is threatening the the boy’s hairdo. And it’s like when we watched it we just recently watched Uncut Gems and it was like the ladles the equivalent of Adam Sandler like being hung out the window like you know they’re trying to… and it’s… that’s I thought that was an example of how genre really influences comedy when you sort of turn it a little bit sideways. Yeah. And that’s really all I have to say about that. I just wanted to kind of have a nice little contrast to the other clip. I’ll just say something before we go into Q and A. So it was very kind of Erin to say earlier that she was grateful that I was mentoring her, Kirk and John, both on the sitcom were able to edit and were amazingly helpful to me, and I look around the room at people that have been, you know, working with me or in the same team as me and I just think it’s really important that we mentor everybody that we work with. You’re not gonna get ahead by keeping things to yourself and not sharing what you know and not sharing information and not collaborating and not being honest with your, you know, colleagues if they want you to look at something and lifting everybody up and supporting everybody, wanting everybody to succeed, being happy for your colleagues who have success even if they beat you out of a job you wanted. Way to go. That’s that’s my… I just I really realized that I had had some really amazing mentors in my life and I think early on I thought, it’s you know it’s really important to do that and to, and I can remember coming up as an assistant and talking about the jobs that were out there and do you know about this you know about that. And some people were like [mmm]. And I’d be like “oh OK” like you know if you were gonna beat me out for a job you’re gonna beat me out for a job just because… You know me, keeping that information from you doesn’t mean that you’re not going to find it out somewhere else. I just really I just feel like it’s really important to pay it forward and to, and to you know mentor within our communities and to support each other. And thank you all for coming to support me in this event.

 

Kirk Hay

Yeah, I’ll add do that. I mean in that crazy schedule of the multi cam world, you still found time to come and watch my cuts, give me notes. Be honest about it which is probably one of the most important things. Without just saying “oh that was terrible. Anyway good luck.” So that’s good. But also you know you mentor. I don’t know if you know even, but just through work ethic in the way you deal with one of the best things I try to learn from you is navigating the tricky waters of not editing, but politics that happened inside an edit suite. Daria is a master, she’ll be like “This is how you cut this,” and someone will walk in and be like “I don’t care about that.” Just the way she talks to people and she interacts with directors and producers, because I mean editing, putting together stuff getting the timing right is one thing and the whole second part it’s a totally different part of it is… is time management, finishing the cut. Listening to a song 78 times and still going “yeah. OK” so so you know just being around and listening to that and learning that due diligence is such a huge part of editorial. Watching you cut that first scene of that first season every single way you could cut it. Daria did it. Every aspect… even if you said well what about this. Nope doesn’t work. So when somebody came in and you always had an answer for them. So that was… I always thought that that was very important and instilled in me that oh that’s what you got to do. Yeah sit down you got to make sure that all your angles are covered and you have to be able to tell, especially on Virgin River where the show runner is the writer and the creator. You better know exactly what it is and why you did it that way.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah well I think because I had a unique situation in my life where my husband and I decided that he would stay home with our child, meant that I had to work and because I had to work meant that I really needed to never burn a bridge. And that really fueled my work ethic and it… and I kind of never turned down anything. I basically finished a job and then said “Yes please” to the next one. And so I I feel like I was thrust into this situation where I really had to work but what it did do was that the stakes were high for me. So I had to conduct myself in a way that I could not be a prima donna. I could not say “oh no we don’t have that shot.” when we did, even though I didn’t want to use it you know I could not risk the possibility that I would get a reputation as somebody that would be difficult to work with and I think that did motivate my work ethic and it just became part of how I, how I attack everything that I do. And also I really do love the job. Like I love doing it and I think if you don’t love editing you should not be in a little edit suite for all those hours a day.

 

Kirk Hay

Producers Cut 27.

 

Daria Ellerman

Yeah you know.

 

Kirk Hay

Yeah if you can find yourself a Daria stick to them, because those things pop up that they don’t teach you that you know you can’t go on YouTube and be like only see… white flashbacks….

 

Daria Ellerman

Oh well you know what I feel bad about how technology affected the assistants’ time so that… people don’t really have a lot of time to come and sit in your room. When I started out like you know there was time in my day and I would ask my editors if I could sit in the back and I would just physically watch them handle dailies because that’s kind of the first thing that you need to… that’s the advice that I gave you was like Do not stop. Like if you are hung up just keep going because otherwise it’ll be five o’clock and you’ve got four more scenes to do and you’ve still been like wanking over one cut and I learned that from watching other editors kind of just how they managed dailies because you really have to get those dailies done every day in scripted right and, I mean you know unscripted has a different workflow but you really have to get it done. You can’t save anything for the next day because there’s a whole lot more coming in. And then you also need to see if there’s problems. So you do need to to deal with it. But yeah. Soldier through!

 

Audience Question

It seems like I mean you’ve been working for a very long time. You’ve got quite a breadth of kind of different genres different styles of shows. Did you ever find yourself at a point being, not necessarily typecast, but having difficulty finding or getting work in different genres you wanted to move to?

 

Daria Ellerman

I got hired on Samurai Girl the pilot and I was in the parking lot at Lionsgate like an hour before my interview and I watched four boy editors go in and out and then I went in and then I got the job and I couldn’t believe it because it was an action-heavy thing and I don’t really know how that happened. And I actually asked the producer later who was actually the amazing Frank Spotnitz and I’m like “Why did you guys choose me like I saw these guys” and they’re like “You know what you just seem nice.” And that was just like “what?” Like that you know if you work so hard to like think… I was worried about that at that point and then I got that show and I thought “oh I get it like really it has a lot to do with how you vibe with the with the show runners, with the people that you’re gonna be working with right.” I do think that maybe Post Supers do a little typecasting because I do a lot of drama. I’ve done a lot of drama. I love drama. I look at my PVR and I’m like you know I look at what I watch and I realize like you know I can do that, and I can do that very well. And I think I used to do a lot of sci fi because that’s all we had. And now I don’t really hear from the sci fi Post Supers and Post Producers and I don’t know if that’s typecasting because there’s also a lot of people have their people you know we’ve been rolling with Sally on and off for like a while and you do… what happens is that you roll with the same Post Producer or Super and then you get into a schedule where you’re not available when other things start up. So the other thing I did was I did get an agent finally. And the reason I did that is because I thought that she might be able to open up some possibilities for me with with post producers or supers that I hadn’t worked with more recently or may be but I still find for anybody who’s thinking about getting an agent, 90 percent of the work I get the phone call first. And I phone her right. That’s just that’s just how it goes. Especially once you’ve accumulated something of a career you know it’s like “oh hi.” Eight years later like it’s like “Oh great. You do remember me” you know. Yes. So you get you do get the repeat business but those show runners tend to do the same kinds of shows. So when I did do that that year I also happened to, the following year decide to do Meditation Park because I really really wanted to do a feature. It was an insulting amount of money. Like it just is a Telefilm micro budget and not all of us can afford to work for you know a very low weekly for several months. But I felt like I was in a position OK I can do this now. So I think in a way I’m able to make that versatility happen a bit more for me because I’m on one side of me I’m saying no to work that doesn’t meet what I think is a decent rate because I feel like there’s too much of that going on. For the right project, I would be a little bit more flexible about my rate and that that’s why I did that movie and it was great. It was great to do a movie. It was great to see it on the big screen at VIFF, you know like that was super cool for sure but it was hard work and not very well paid.

 

Audience Question

Can you give us a rundown of when you open up a bin for the first time. Do you start a scene from the top of the scene or do you kind of find your way through…

 

Daria Ellerman

Sure I glance at the script to refresh myself. Like what’s the scene about. Sometimes when I’m being very diligent I’ll flip to my facing pages and see if the director has any favorite takes. And then if they do sometimes I’ll put a little star beside the group. So what I do is I have a bin, I just want the groups. And even before multi cam I worked that way, but since multi cam it’s like I don’t want… if I don’t have to look at single takes, I’m very comfortable watching two, three, four, six cameras at the same time. And also I’m very conscious of my keystrokes so I’m you know I don’t really want to use the mouse, the track ball any more than I have to. So I kind of then maybe star the takes it the director wants but I don’t want to be too influenced by that because I’m amazed at how many times a director will say “make sure you tell the editor. I love this take.” Then they come in they’re like oh I should use that take. So it’s like you know I’ve just sort of over the years realized like I should do what I want. So what I’ll do is then I’ll look at the tiles based on the lined script. So even though my bin is going to be in alphanumeric order. If I look and I see that there’s an L slate that’s just lined for a little bit that clearly is an opening shot or whatever. I’m gonna look at that first I’m going to see what it is. I’m going to maybe pick a piece and then I’m going to just work my way across the lined script and I go beat by beat. So I go methodically beat by beat through every tile that pertains to that. And then as I get into the dialogue I will start looking at each group and I’ll always be auditioning for the first line but I’ll usually listen, I might listen three lines in and take what I like. And then I’ll go to the other side do the same thing, take what I like and then start covering up you know what other… maybe if I’ve left two lines from another take but I find something else I like. I just start roughly building in sections then I go back and I start crafting the opening because by the time I’ve… you know typically a script is going to like, have a description and then it’s going to have some dialogue. So I’ll go like a third of the page or so and I’ll sort of craft a bit of an opening and I’ll start working on the dialogue and at the same time I’m looking at reactions. I’m maybe not putting reactions in yet, I’ll build all the dialogue and all the action and I will go to the end of the scene in these sections. So when I go back to revise the section I’m not really fine cutting at that point I’m just saying yeah I like that performance I like that and I’m noting to myself a reaction that I maybe want to layer in. Sometimes I will layer reactions in, and I use… when I’m building I use a video track above the dialogue and I layer in some reactions but I keep the little viewing monitor on V1 but I might layer reactions on V2 to remind myself like I kind of like this reaction, it might work here and I then just continue to build the scene in these chunks all the way to the end. And depending on where I am and in the episode or the movie… and I always work within the cuts… I don’t build scenes in isolation and put them in a bin and then string them together later. I always work within one cut and if there’s something if I have the A side of the scene I lay it right in and I look at my A-B side and I might go “oh man that’s a cool opening shot but I ended that with the…hmm… what am I going to do there might have to go back… Look at how I’m ending the other scene, work on the opening” and then I’ll get into the dialogue, and I do a pass where I just splice and listen and fine cut go to the next, listen and fine cut, next cut listen and fine cut. Sometimes I might overlap in there if I’ve got my reactions then I’ll go back again and I’ll look at what I’ve built, and I’ll think about reactions I’ll look to see if I’ve laid any reactions on video 2 and then I’ll think about whether I’m going to use them or not. And then I go back and I back up into the preceding scene if I have it, and I play through and if I’m happy I move on. And then the next day I will revise that scene. And typically you know there’s some scenes where… you just know like “I don’t like this at all but I’m moving on” because I have like five other scenes to cut and I might do like quite a big recut the next day or I might not. I might just do… I usually end up tightening a bit more and I might look at it third time and that’s it. So how I revise is that as I’m building the bigger piece I skip over the chunks that I’ve looked at two or three times, because I don’t want to saturate myself. It’s not till the last day of shooting is in that I really will watch the whole episode down unless we’re… sometimes when you’re block shooting you might end up having one episode ready earlier than another and if I’m only missing a scene or two I might start revising that episode after I’m finished cutting my dailies for the day, I might start revising that as an episode but… so my process is I cut all the scenes that are new that day. Then I go back and look at what I did yesterday and then I might start adding music at that point to the stuff that I cut the day before and the other thing that I do is I drop locators as a build, for all the sound that I want my assistant to do. And sometimes I’ll even drop a locator for music especially if it’s something genre that is sort of maybe out of character for our episode so that it won’t be… in the case of Virgin River we have a library of composer cues but, on a new show you might have a temp track that you’re using for the feel of the show but then all of a sudden we have a suspense scene, it’s out of character and I might ask my assistant “see what you can do with this. Give me some underscore here” or whatever and any VFX that needs to be done I’ll drop a locator there for my assistant and I feel like it’s really important for my assistants to work through my cut because I feel like it’s a good way to edit without having to edit and also, you know the assistants begin to absorb like how important sound is and sometimes I see how they are trying to like squeeze a excellent sound into where I haven’t left enough room. Then I’m like oh and then I just like kind of open up my cut to make room for that beautiful explosion shot or whatever because I don’t want them to adjust my cut but I I can sort of see how it’s been cut off or it’s got like some a little fade out on it. I’m like oh “I didn’t leave enough room there for that! That nice reverb out!”

Audience Question

Do you still use ScriptSync?

Daria Ellerman

No but I would at the drop of a hat. If they do multi cam here they have to do that.

Kirk Hay

Once you get the taste of that ScriptSync. Thank you Daria very much.

Sarah Taylor

Thanks for joining us today, and a big thank you to Daria and Kirk. Special thanks goes to Trevor Mirosh, Greg Ng, Jane MacRae, and Finale.  The main title sound design was created by Jane Tattersall. Additional ADR recording by Andrea Rusch. Original music provided by Chad Blain. This episode was mixed and mastered by Tony Bao. The CCE has been supporting Indspire – an organization that provides funding and scholarships to Indigenous post secondary students. We have a permanent portal on our website at cceditors.ca or you can donate directly at indspire.ca. The CCE is taking steps to build a more equitable ecosystem within our industry and we encourage our members to participate in a way they can.  

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends to tune in. Til next time I’m your host Sarah Taylor.

Outtro

The CCE is a non-profit organization with the goal of bettering the art and science of picture editing. If you wish to become a CCE member please visit our website www.cceditors.ca. Join our great community of Canadian editors for more related info.

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Credits

A special thanks goes to

Trevor Mirosh

Greg Ng

Jane MacRae

Finalé

Hosted, Produced and Edited by

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Recorded by

Mychaylo Prystup

Mixed and Mastered by

Tony Bao

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L'art du montage

Episode 003: Meeting with Arthur Tarnowski, ACE, hosted by Isabelle Malenfant, CCE

Épisode 003: L’art du Montage: Rencontre avec Arthur Tarnowski, ACE, animée par Isabelle Malenfant, CCE

Episode 3: Meet Arthur Tarnowski, ACE, hosted by Isabelle Malenfant, CCE

Épisode 003: L’art du Montage: Rencontre avec Arthur Tarnowski, ACE

This episode is Arthur Tarnowski’s Master Class. The discussion is focusing on his last project, the first ever Quebec Netflix production: The Decline.

The event was generously sponsored by Annex Pro/Avid.

Presented in French.

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Credits

A special thanks goes to

Arthur Tarnowski, ACE

Isabelle Malenfant, CCE

Julie Groleau, Couronne Nord

Sarah Taylor

Michel Arcand, CCE

Bam Library, Maud Le Chevallier

and our sponsors Annex Pro/Avid

Monderator

Isabelle Malenfant, CCE

Podcast Host

Myriam Poirier

Editing

Pauline Decroix

Main Title Sound Design by

Jane Tattersall, adapted in french by Pauline Decroix

Mixed and Mastered by

Tony Bao

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Articles

Pride Month 2020

Celebrating Pride Month 2020!

2020 Pride Month at the CCE Feature Image

Celebrate Pride month with the CCE!

The CCE acknowledges and celebrates the trans women of colour — Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson — who began the Stonewall protests in New York City in 1969. Last year, we screened the short films “Happy Birthday Marsha”, and “Haus” at the CCE’s Pride Party.

This year, we will be celebrating with virtual events:

June 14th: Behind the ScreenCapernaum

June 21st: Behind the Screen – Queering the Script

These events are free but donations in support of The 519 can be made when you sign up.

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