Walter Murch on Editing

I’ve been editing Part II for the past 7 months, and it’s been a roller coaster of a ride. After a brief hiatus into production mode for re-shoots, I found myself back at the computer again with all of this new footage and the same old feeling of dread.  I slapped together what I thought was right and compressed it and sent it out.  Then, thank god, Spring Break (my last and surely best) swept me off my feet.  For fun, I brought along a copy of In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch.  They say that milk was a bad choice, but this was a good one.

In a series of brilliant micro-chapters, Murch explores the process and theory of editing, taking us with him through his transition from analog non-linear editing of 35-mm workprints to linear editing on flatbeds on to the avid system.  He writes about the advantages of each system and how he had to change his habits as the technology advanced.  (Peter Hutton, who had lunch with Murch recently, reports that he’s switched entirely to Final Cut Pro.)  I took my time with the book and still finished it in a few days.

Back after my week in Brewster, MA, I decided to try some of the new information I had gleaned from Mr. Murch.

TIP #1: Stand while editing.

This actually works.  I turned my mac pro sideways and put my monitor on top of it, my mouse on my subwoofer, and my keyboard on some DVDs.  I might look like a nut but it kept me focused on my film.  Plus, I could walk away from it and watch it from the other side of the room, which leads to the next tip:

TIP #2: Remember the scale of the image.

In our world of smaller and better screens, we often forget that the point of a film is to project it onto a big screen.  Murch suggests putting little paper people next to your monitor so you can see the image in relation to them.  I didn’t go that far, but I have been screening it in the cinema at Bard every week.  A bad cut glares at you from the silver screen- I’ve learned a lot seeing my film big.

TIP #3: Review your unused footage.

Murch laments the loss of the linear editing machine where, if you want to get a particular take from the reel, you have to play through the entire reel to find it.  One of my scenes wasn’t working exactly right, so I tried this method out: I searched through all of my bins looking for odds and ends that I had shot but not labeled.  I found 44 frames of Eli’s clothes sitting on the shore that I had shot to roll out, slowed it down a little, and saved the pacing of the scene.

TIP #4: Change your perspective.

Murch has his master output monitor mounted on the wall to his left.  This allows him to turn sideways and review the cut from a different vantage point.  At first I thought this sounded somewhat crazy, but I tried it out.  Now, after making a cut, I stand up, walk out of the room, walk back into the room, play the clip and stand against the far wall. Because I can’t see the timeline, I’m can’t anticipate the cut; it just happens.  It’s a great way to put your cuts through the “does it feel natural” test.

I highly recommend you buy In the Blink of an Eye and read it every once in a while.  It’s an easy way to get your film-theory gears turning.

This is your HD footage in SD.

I have to say, when Kelly Reichardt asked me to burn a DVD of “Part II” for review, my heart jumped to my throat and I almost fainted.  Ok, a slight exaggeration, but anyone who has ever needed to burn HD footage onto a standard-definition DVD has felt this dread.  Would all of the hard work that my DP Jeff had put into the lighting and focus be lost among the 12 pixels of each frame?  Would my film become some form of experimental genius about replication of format and data loss?  Would everything look horrible? (at least I know that the answer to that last one is yes.)  Well fear not: I found the BONSAI METHOD.

Don’t ask why it’s called that.  Just LEARN

The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2009)

While I was touring in NYC with my band last week, I took some downtime and went to go see The Lovely Bones.  $12.85 later, I find myself in a theater with about 25 seats and a screen no bigger than a Jimmy Hendrix wall hanging.  Whatever, it’s New York.

I was concerned at first that I would need to be completely enveloped by this film in order to enjoy it’s overwhelming visuals and super dramatic content.  Fortunately, I was wrong.

The out-of-this-world visuals fall flatter than a Bard kid after 40 ounces of Olde English.  All of the drama lies in the real world of this film.  Only two words make The Lovely Bones totally worth watching:  Stanley and Tucci.  Even on my 6′ screen, I hung on his every snort, mumble, and breath.

While Peter Jackson doesn’t take too many risks, he does start to show his experience in some of the most beautiful visual sequences I’ve seen all year.  No, I’m not talking about the giant ships in their giant bottles crashing against the giant rocks (as my companion astutely put it: “like a microsoft window’s screen-saver”), I’m talking about George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) and his doll houses.  What struck me most was a single ingenious aesthetic decision; as it looked to me, all of the interiors of George’s house and his constructed doll houses were shot on RED.  The digital technology brings about a gorgeous sterility to the image that instantly put me on edge.  Peter Jackson finds intimate shots of the miniature houses and watches as George lords over them and inspects them to the last detail.  The mixed-media works especially well on an audience that doesn’t know the difference between the RED and film because they subconsciously detect a difference: something is wrong.  It is beautiful and unnerving.

I could go on about Stanley Tucci, but I’d be missing the other unsung hero of this film, who works tirelessly behind the scenes to bring something interesting to purgatory.  Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Eno.

Fortunately for you, the best special-effect shot in the film is in this little clip: her glowing silhouette as she grabs at the flower at 1:01.

Brian Eno gives Peter Jackson the gift of pace and silence.  The strongest moments come between the over-blown voice over and the silly vistas as we watch the bright-eyed Saoirse Ronan exist alone while Eno provides the ethereal soundscape.  The sound excels without drawing attention to itself, which the images do.  The images shout: “LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFUL I AM! YOU CAN CRY NOW!” but the score doesn’t over-stimulate.  It’s moody, yes, but I never felt manipulated.

I wasn’t expecting a lot from the film, but I was pleasantly surprised by pieces of it, and I think it worth watching at least once.  So there’s the actual review part, although personally, I enjoy fixating on a few details for a whole post instead.

Oh and don’t forget: Don’t go down into subterranean clubhouses with strange men.

I went to see The Road (2009) today.  I went to see it alone–a new experience for me that I’m now sure to repeat.  I found it liberating because I didn’t have to come up with an opinion to defend afterward; instead, I let it simmer while I watched another film at the Landmark theater (something only possible when alone).  I kept coming back to the scenes in the underground bunker with all of the food and the cellar stocked with starving people–food for cannibals.  It reminded me of Fallout 3, a video game that I had beaten a month ago.  And then pirates.

When I was six, I buried a LEGO piece in my carpet.  I was delighted by the fact that it was entirely hidden and only I knew its location.  I have always been obsessed with secrets, time capsules, and the ending of In the Mood for Love (2000), but only now do I notice how thoroughly this desire permeates humanity.

Take pirates, for example.  After the enemies are all killed and the treasure is buried, pirates rejoice the fact that no one will find their booty.  In the handful of pirate-themed stories I have read, no swashbuckler has ever pondered: “Why did we bury the treasure?  Why aren’t we spending the riches?”  We derive such pleasure from having a secret that the symbolic value of the secret far surpasses the physical value of the hidden object itself.

In Fallout 3, you are an escapee of the underground Vault 101.  You scour the post-apocalyptic landscape of Washington DC, finding small colonies and trading goods for weapons and food.  The map is a block-to-block copy of the capital, all the way down to the subway system, and items can be found everywhere.  As I reached the level cap at 20, I found myself at a loss as to what to do next.  I had already built most of the weapons (including a Rock-It launcher, a weapon capable of using random junk for ammunition, from dinner plates to teddy bears), I had more than my fill of food and water and stimpaks (health), and any new quest I completed would not reward me with perks or experience points.  I found myself in an underground colony of Ghouls I had just exterminated, emptying all of my “worldly” possessions into a metal box I had found behind a boulder.  Now, mostly naked, I returned to the surface and found myself completely satisfied.  I dropped a marker on the map and quit the game.

I haven’t been back in a month.  I hadn’t even thought about it until I saw Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee climb down into the abandoned underground bomb shelter full of food and water.  That was someone’s buried treasure.  Someone saw this coming and now they’re gone.  It was a physical remainder of someone’s actions, a sign of their existence–and perhaps the only way of achieving physical permanence in this world.  In The Road, the actions of men above-ground leave barrels full of charred human bones behind: here, underground, someone has created something good. When the father and son sit down to eat, they give thanks.  They give thanks for the food; they give thanks for the memory.

While the technique behind the motion graphics is quite remarkable (see the behind the scenes on the PVC post), I found the acting totally sunk the spot.  Companies are desperate to reach out to our youtube generation – and I think it shows.  The woman’s delivery treads the line between sculpted narrative and improvised realism: the uncanny valley of cinema.

What bothers me is that the thought process is transparent.  As you watch “Apples”, you can see the filmmaker getting the shots but then thinking, “oh, youtube!” and then shaking it up. It’s a problem of self-consciousness and it happens in all kinds of films.  You can always tell, because it feels like you’re being baby-talked to.  Both the actress and the shooter are falling into the same trap as high-school actors: they are over-thinking their parts and missing the necessary details.

This got me thinking about how hard it is to pull of this kind of advertisement.  Do you remember this video from a while ago?

This is an ad for Gatorade.

However, this is the most realistic viral ad I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in the subtleties.  The simple fact that the video cuts out mid-sentence gives the short the feeling as if it were just grabbed from a DVR.  The setting of the baseball game gives you all the familiar tropes of sports footage – instant replay, scrolling text, fans waving in the background – to completely sell the illusion.  Now, it’s clear that Gatorade has a much larger budget, but I have a few pointers for any of you planning on making and pulling off a “youtube” style promotional piece.

1. Act Natural: get a real amateur to shoot your footage – there’s no film school looking through the lens.
2. Be Concise: let your subject be present but subtle (i.e. the Gatorade bottle underneath the ball girl’s chair, therefore Gatorade is a constant in the world of sports.)
3. MacGuffin: provide a reason for filming – a skateboard trick, beatboxing, basically anything can get a camera rolling these days – use that to your advantage.  It’s much more believable than an actress explaining the subway route for no particular reason.

So let’s get out there and become the next Mad Men!  I’ve already bought the suspenders. You bring the bourbon.

Walking out of the theater after seeing a film with a satisfying ending is like walking out of a restaurant stuffed: the last thing you want to do is go back in for another meal.  As a filmmaker, it seems in my best interest to end my films in such a way that the audience craves to go back in again.

I’ve consistently found that the first time through many of the films I’ve come to love, I walk out scratching my head thinking “really? what’s the big deal?”  That’s the key.

It wasn’t until I walked out of the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009) that I firmly grasped the power of this sort of ending.

An ending that’s tied up nicely in a bow leaves the viewer with nothing to do.  Everyone’s alive; mankind will survive to fight another day; they got married.  An ending with ambiguity allows the viewer to ask themselves the crucial question: “What did I miss?”  The answer? Everything.

The final thought contextualizes the entire film.  It provides that little bit of knowledge that makes all of the preceding scenes ring true.  In the particular case of A Serious Man, it introduces the relationship between deus ex machina and coincidence.  As Larry Gopnik finally receives his tenure, a tornado threatens the life of his first son.  The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.

This idea is only introduced in this final scene.  There is no tornado striking down young Danny Gopnik, no tearful funeral, no resolution from Larry to go to Temple more often, simply the two situations.  Throughout the film, we have aligned ourselves with Larry in his growing cynicism of Judaism, but this final scene is just enough to instill a heaping dose of doubt.

Part II, Opening Shot

Peter Hutton (I paraphrase): “The first shots of a film tell the viewer that you’re in control, that they can trust you and relax.”

I recently screened the first ten minutes of my thesis film, Part II, for my compatriots in senior seminar.  Terrifying.  Turns out Peter’s more than correct, he’s onto something that can make any film seem bigger than its budget.

I took this notion home with me and watched the beginnings of some of my favorite films (8 1/2, Children of Men, Crank 2: High Voltage).  Like the first lines of novel, the openings of these films properly prepare you for whatever lies ahead, be it nostalgic reveries, a decrepit world falling to random violence, or ADD-inducing coverage with 8-bit video game titles.  But those are the pros.

The first shot of a film needs to fulfill two roles: it has to introduce the viewers to the aesthetic and engage them with enough mystery to continue watching.  As I watched my classmates watch the opening of my film, I realized that my first shot works.  After a grueling week of dissatisfaction and building anxiety towards this presentation, I found myself feeling oddly proud.  I looked at the screen; that’s mine.  It’s not perfect in any sense of the word, but step one, the first shot, works.

It prompts enough questions without suffering from Dan Brown Disorder, while bringing the viewer in the intimate perspective and pace I’m taking on an otherwise hackneyed sci-fi concept.  So now I feel just a little bit better about the film.

It’s so easy to fall into the pits of despair that line the road of any creative endeavor, but step by step, one thing after another starts to work.  I hope.

In the words of Matt: “You tend to forget all the good ideas you had.”  Don’t forget them.

If I haven’t told you to do this already, go to pandora.com and make a station for Lemon Jelly. The UK duo manage to create dynamic, enthusiastic yet chill grooves with great samples and organic instrumentation. “Space Walk” (above) is my personal favorite, but I recommend you find your own.

I was watching the special features on Crank 2: High Voltage (more on that brilliant film later (you think I’m kidding (I’m not))), and I saw this beautiful poster. I had completely forgotten how extraordinary the production design was for Henry Selik’s 1996 adaptation of James and the Giant Peach.

ALSO: for a beautiful background for your desktop.

Digital Mag