Movies by the fireside

With Oscar time approaching and movie-going, as well as, movie-giving a holiday tradition for many families, I decided to post a list of some films that are fun for editors to watch. These aren’t all Oscar-contenders, although there’s plenty of bling in this list. They are presented in no particular order, so I hope you enjoy.

Inglourious Basterds
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Film editor: Sally Menke

This is the newest film in the batch and I found it to be not only well-crafted, but also beautifully shot (cinematography by Robert Richardson). Tarantino draws a lot of opinions, but it’s clear that his approach to shooting and editing uses a very classic style. Pay attention to the dialogue scenes and you’ll agree that Tarantino is probably the best director today in structuring and directing dialogue-driven films.

Memento
Director: Christopher Nolan
Film editor: Dody Dorn

This quirky film is best known for the way the plot is revealed in reverse. In fact, there’s a DVD version that lets you run the scenes from back-to-front in a somewhat linear, chronological order. Although you’d think the scene construction is a contrivance developed in the cutting room, Dorn is the first to admit that this was actually how the script was written.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Director: David Fincher
Film editors: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall

Slumdog Millionaire beat it out for best cinematography, but nevertheless, Button is a gorgeous example of how digital films can look (cinematography by Claudio Miranda). The aging VFX are the hook, of course, but they work well in service of the story. The editing helps to move the story along, aiding the matter of fact way in which the story is told by its characters.

Murderball
Directors: Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro
Film editors: Conor O’Neill and Geoffrey Richman

I enjoy documentaries, but they don’t get any better than when the actual events take plot turns as if they were scripted. In this story about paraplegic rugby, the participants are like gladiators in wheelchairs. It was shot with a variety of DV cameras, but the editing pace makes that something you’ll never obsess over. Natural rivalries develop and this story is a blast for anyone who loves films about sports and sports personalities.

Blackhawk Down
Director: Ridley Scott
Film editor: Pietro Scalia

Scott’s film about the horrific events in Mogadishu is a seminal war film – representative of the surrealism of conflict in ways that a film like Apocalypse Now could never do justice to. It’s also a movie that I feel was largely built in the edit bay. Dump a bushel basket of disjointed combat footage on the editor and see what you get.

The Bourne Ultimatum (or Supremacy or Identity)
Directors: Paul Greengrass and Doug Liman
Film editors: Christopher Rouse, Richard Person and Saar Klein

Pick any or all of the three. They are all great. The main criticism leveled by others is the shaky-cam style of shooting and the frenetic ADD cutting. Not something that bothers me in the least. Nevertheless, the films are a fast ride for the audience and exemplify good, fast-paced cutting. It’s all the more helped by the believability Matt Damon brings to the role.

The Italian Job
Director: F. Gary Gray
Film editors: Richard Francis-Bruce and Christopher Rouse

This 2003 remake probably didn’t make many “best lists”, but I enjoyed the film. It’s a nicely crafted caper flick without many flaws. You’ll notice the deft editing Christopher Rouse (The Bourne Ultimatum) brings to the movie. Plus a really cool car chase scene with Minis!

Youth Without Youth
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Film editor: Walter Murch

This is Coppola’s first digital film. It was shot in Romania and is highlighted by some gorgeous cinematography (Mihai Malaimare, Jr.) and a very evocative score (Osvaldo Golijov). It’s a very romantic and surrealistic tale that will keep you enthralled until the end.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Director: Joel Coen
Film editors: Joel and Ethan Coen (credited as Roderick Jaynes), Tricia Cooke

This film is credited with starting the move to DI finishing, thanks to DP Roger Deakins. It’s got a great look and the story shows the Coens at their best, with homages to The Wizard of Oz and Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. I happen to like George Clooney when he plays the buffoon and the stellar cast of O Brother never disappoints in the madcap category.

Shine A Light
Director: Martin Scorsese
Film editor: David Tedeschi

Although technically a documentary, Shine A Light is one of the best concert films in years. I’ve cut my share of concert shows, so I was cutting this one right in my head the whole time I was watching. It’s certainly a fun cut and one that gives you an intimate look inside the performance. Coupled with a Bob Clearmountain live music mix, you’ll feel like you’re right in the middle of the Beacon Theater when you watch this one.

Hot Fuzz
Director: Edgar Wright
Film editor: Chris Dickens

I saw this again the other night on Comedy Central and it was hilarious. This is a Wright/Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) spoof of cop/buddy films, that has more action than most action films. Pay close attention to the cutting, as this film has over 5,000 picture edits! Dickens picked up an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, but this effort is no less inspiring for other editors. There is some over-the-top violence (a la Monty Python), but in spite of the parody, Hot Fuzz holds up well against “legitimate” action films like the Bourne franchise.

There Will Be Blood
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Film editor: Dylan Tichenor

Daniel Day-Lewis is totally captivating as oilman Daniel Plainview in this film adaption of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! This is also a look at the beauty of film at its best, done the “natural way” – i.e. no DI. Kudos to Robert Elswit, whose cinematography has a real richness to it. For the editors in the crowd, pay attention to the first portion of the film. Tichenor does a masterful job of advancing the story over many years of Plainview’s life without any dialogue.

Well, that’s a quick look at a dozen films for the holidays. Have fun!

© 2009 Oliver Peters

Blindsided – Case Study of Editing a Documentary

Walter Murch has explained film editing as part plumbing, part performance and part writing. Plumbing is understanding the workflow. Performance is the inherent feeling of knowing where to make the best cut to establish pace and rhythm, much the same as a musician. The third component – the film editor as writer – is most true when cutting documentaries. In dramatic films, the editor helps shape the story and often ends up with a film that is radically different from the script; but, in documentaries, the editor commonly creates that script through the process of juxtaposing images and sounds.

 

A few years ago I began the cut of Blindsided, which chronicles the story of teenager Jared Hara’s struggle with going blind (from Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neoropathy) and the emotional turmoil of the family during that initial period. A false start by another editor resulted in the project coming to me. By then, the production was complete with footage already transcribed and digitized. Nothing had actually been cut yet, so I was able to start with a clean slate. Some documentaries take years to shoot, but the bulk of this footage was recorded during three weeks in the midst of Florida’s series of hurricane encounters during the fall of 2004.

 

The footage consisted predominantly of on-camera interviews with friends, doctors and family taped with a Sony F900 high-def camera. Other content included a fishing trip to Canada, Jared at school, a hurricane relief concert performance by the band Shinedown and coverage of Jared and two friends tubing from Ft. Lauderdale to the Bahamas in 4-5 foot seas. In total, about 50-60 hours of 24p HD content. The Bahamas trip was the original impetus for this production, as the Haras had hoped to attract attention to this medical disorder. It also provided an important diversion for Jared to help take his mind off of the reality of permanently going blind.

 

To aid in the production, the Haras brought in Talia Osteen – a family friend and then USC film student – as the director. The project quickly morphed from simple coverage of the event into a full-blown documentary film with an eye towards a Sundance submission. As the concept grew, so did the production, which added Digibeta helicopter aerials to the tube crossing, as well as Panasonic DVX-100 “B-Unit” camcorders and multi-track audio recording to the Shinedown concert. Talia had wrapped with school and was moving on to her first film career job, so when I joined the team in mid-2005, it was sans writer or director.

 

Where to begin?

 

Cutting Blindsided fit well into an approach I use with most unscripted projects. The first thing you have to do is review the footage, listen to all the interviews and start culling the useable from the useless. I tend not to work from transcripts, because I like to work with the footage that’s in front of me. Some editors swear by transcriptions and software like Avid’s ScriptSync, but I often find that “paper edits” don’t work well. The resulting dialogue edits simply sound odd, because the spoken inflections don’t match. However, transcripts do prove to be useful later on, when the producer or director ask for alternate sound bites. They can quickly find the dialogue on paper or in a Word document and locate the closest timecode (part of the transcription). Then it’s simple to call up the right clip in your NLE for a preview.

 

I’ll make editorial decisions about key sound bites for each person (presumably their best statements) and edit these into a “selects” sequence. Next, I’ll copy-and-paste appropriate segments from each person into new topic-related sequences. Then I duplicate those sequences and start cutting them down. For example, if three people talk about the same subject in the same way, I’ll pick the best of the three and eliminate the other two. I now have a grouping of all the relevant sound bites, but can always step back to an earlier version to restore a comment I might have cut. So, like eating an elephant, you start one bite at a time!

 

The story arc

 

At this point, a story structure – or arc – starts to emerge. In Blindsided, that arc covered the disease and the two-year-long degradation of Jared’s eyesight, then the downward spiral of the family – finally leading to how they have coped with the situation. This sounds clean and concise, but there were several messy parts. One of our challenges was to weave in what might really be considered as too many stories and “events”. For example, the Haras are Jewish, but their best friends are Muslim. This is tied to the friendship of the two sons who met as junior hockey players. Friendship was a key ingredient to the larger story.

 

The trip to Canada, the tubing trip and the concert were events – tangents to the main theme. At the Shinedown concert, Jared appeared on stage with the band, playing guitar on one number in front of an audience of about 6,000 people. This provided an uplifting ending, but it, too, was an event. So editorially, I had to balance these moments – which added a nice level of production value – with the real meat of the story, told largely in less visually-interesting interviews. The concert created a natural ending, but we wanted to be careful not to have it be too long or too triumphant. We didn’t want the viewer to forget the rest of the story and just focus on the end. Furthermore, this story has no happy “Hollywood” ending. The reality is that Jared is blind for the rest of his life.

 

Letting the story tell itself

 

My inclination was to have the interview sound bites tell the story without the use of a “voice of God” narrator. In crafting unscripted films, you first edit a “radio cut” – concentrating on making the sound work without worrying about visual coverage. Think radio play! In other words – Is there a complete story? At the beginning, I didn’t think I could avoid some narration and planned on bringing in a script writer to add narrative bridges between segments – essentially treating the story like chapters in a book. By the end of my two-hour-long first cut, Talia and producer David Coleman stepped back into the picture and helped refine the story. We tightened and rearranged segments and sound bites to eliminate the need for any announcer. This structure had been Talia’s vision from the start and I was glad to succeed in that goal. Talia worked with us for a few weeks and then David and I continued with further refinements. Sundance didn’t pick up Blindsided, which gave us time to screen the film for some informal focus group audiences. Their feedback helped to guide our revisions.

 

Blindness from Leber’s is genetically passed down on the maternal side, so Mark (Jared’s dad) irrationally blamed his wife Ellen (Jared’s mother). These feelings brought the family to the brink of dissolution. Mark had been brutally honest during the on-camera interviews about his emotions at that time and their impact on the rest of the family. He wanted to keep as much of this in the finished film to show the reality of what people go through when confronted by such a family tragedy. It’s an important part of what is in essence a grieving process that families have to pass through. The Haras stayed together, so the point was to show that you can regain a somewhat normal, yet different life by working through this. However, some of our audience feedback indicated a strong negative reaction to Mark’s honesty – so much so, that it tainted their opinion of the show.

 

The second issue was a bit harder to deal with. In an effort to involve Jared in activities that would help him cope and maintain a passion for life, the Haras engaged in “projects”, like the tubing trip, the fishing trip and helping Jared discover a talent for playing guitar. A small percentage of the focus audiences made comments like, “I’d trade my eyesight for the life this kid’s having.” Obviously these people didn’t get it, yet it was something we needed to address editorially. These two issues guided us in toning down some areas of the cut and accentuating others.

 

Adding the spice

 

Even with the wealth of original footage, I still needed more video, especially to cover sound bite edits within the interviews. Family photos and home videos helped flesh out the story and punctuate poignant moments. These included digital stills, scanned photos and nearly every video format imaginable, including VHS, Mini-DV, DVD and Mini-DVD-RAM. I even asked the second unit DP to spend a day with his own HDV camcorder at the Hara’s home to shoot cutaway shots around the house.

 

The first online edit took place in mid-2006. Since I’d used Apple Final Cut Pro for the offline edit, I uprezzed the footage in FCP, as well. The principal HD footage was 23.98fps, but the offline editing had been done from DVCAM copies, so the project was 29.97fps. The chances of this documentary going to 35mm film were slight, so we decided on a 1080i HD finish at 29.97fps. This maintained the quality of the interlaced SD footage, which would inevitably get softer if de-interlaced and converted to 24p. I especially wanted to keep the maximum quality of the dramatic aerials of the boys on an inner tube crossing to the Bahamas with extremely choppy water. All SD footage was upconverted to HD using a Teranex Mini, so even the DVX concert shots cut well against the angles from the F900. It took about a week and a half to uprez and color grade the show in FCP.

 

Blindsided went on to a series of successful film festival appearances. We made a few further trims in 2007 and then again in 2008, when Blindsided was accepted by HBO Family for airing on both the HBO Family channel and the main HBO channel. I don’t believe editors should get a writing credit for this kind of project. In my mind, it’s all part of earning the title of film editor. On the other hand, Blindsided provides the perfect example of how a “script” is created simply through the language of editing.

 

For more about the ongoing story, go to www.blindsidedthemovie.com.

 

Written by Oliver Peters for Videography magazine and NewBay Media, L.L.C.

Shine A Light

 

Once again the Rolling Stones rock the house. First in Berlin to open the 58th Berlin International Film Festival and now around the country. I’m not talking about stadiums, but rather Martin Scorsese’s new concert film Shine A Light. Scorsese was instrumental in inventing the rock ‘n roll concert film genre as an editor on Woodstock and the director of The Last Waltz. Now he continues his passion for the art form by teaming up with none other than Mick and Keith to bring you up close and personal with the world’s greatest rock ‘n roll band.

 

This isn’t your average production. Scorsese pulled together an Oscar-winning crew, headed up by cinematographer Robert Richardson (The Aviator, JFK). Cameras were manned by a crew that included John Toll (The Last Samurai, Braveheart), Andrew Lesnie (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong), Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano, The Painted Veil), Robert Elswit (Magnolia, Good Night and Good Luck), Emmanuel Lubezki (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Sleepy Hollow) and Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Live recording was handled by Grammy-nominated recording engineer Bob Clearmountain. Rounding out this ensemble was editor David Tedeschi, who most recently had worked with Scorsese on the acclaimed Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

 

I caught up with David Tedeschi as he was wrapping up the bonus features for the Shine A Light DVD. Tedeschi is a New York-based editor who mainly works on feature films, documentaries and music projects. He first hooked up with Scorsese on The Blues, which was being posted at the same time as Scorsese was working on The Aviator. Something must have worked, because Tedeschi was tapped to cut No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and now Shine A Light. David filled me in on Scorsese’s approach to this production. “Marty didn’t want to film a Rolling Stones concert in a huge arena. There have been many Rolling Stones concert films – mostly in stadiums and large venues. He wanted a smaller, more intimate stage and that’s where the idea to film in the Beacon Theater in New York was conceived. This gave Marty a chance to show these guys for who they are – and lend an immediacy to the performances. It’s really a very positive and exciting film about how these four guys go out and make music. They are the real deal, with Mick singing and moving around on the stage like a 20-year-old – and Keith, Ronnie and Charlie going out there every night with great passion. That really comes across in Shine A Light.”

 

“Marty has a very clear vision of what he wants as a director. He’s a great film historian and is inspired by a lot of films, but at the same time he always wants to do something fresh. Marty decided that adding the element of comedy would give a concert film something different – another way to see rock ‘n roll. The behind-the-scenes footage and the archival clips are often funny.” Some of that can be seen in the Shine A Light trailer, as Scorsese’s reactions are juxtaposed with comments from Jagger and others for a very humorous result.

 

18 Cameras – No Waiting

 

Shine A Light was filmed in a smaller theater over two performance nights. Given the resolution of modern HD cameras, you would think this would have been a natural application for the Sony CineAlta models, as Robert Altman had done on A Prairie Home Companion. Instead, Scorsese and Richardson opted to stick with film. In fact, seventeen 35mm cameras rolled along with one Panavision Genesis during both nights. More than 100,000 feet of film ran through the gates – as much as a typical dramatic production, shot over several weeks and months.

 

The edited film is about two hours long, based largely on the running length of the songs in the concert. Tedeschi explained, “Getting to the two hour length was an intuitive process. We had planned to lose one song, since the entire performance would otherwise be too long. That was easy, but then it turned out that we actually had to lose two songs, which was a tough decision. At least people will get to see them in the DVD extras.”

 

David continued, “They had actually scheduled four days of rehearsals for the cameras, but in the end, the first night really ended up being like a dress rehearsal. The second night was a much better performance, so 98% of the cut comes from that second night.” I know from experience that no matter how many cameras you have, you still run into situations where you want another angle. David laughed, “Yes, I ran into that, too, but the truth is that Bob Richardson is a bold, dynamic cinematographer. The footage was beautifully lit and working with this team of such great talent was a pleasure, because they delivered superb footage. They did have a modified zone coverage plan for the cameras and Marty was in radio contact with them, of course. But he had such faith in them that he was able to trust their instincts and let them explore, as well. As a result, the performances and the shots they were able to get were more spontaneous than just a series of planned camera moves. In fact, there was a Plan B involving a back-up shoot. The concern was that we might need to shoot some extra angles, such as really tight shots of the Stones, because there weren’t any ‘in your face’ handheld cameras on the stage during the actual performances. In the end, everyone was happy with the material we were able to capture and there was no need to use Plan B.”

 

The Basement

 

Post production followed a rather unique path thanks to Scorsese’s frequent visual effects collaborator, Rob Legato (The Aviator, The Departed). Together with producer Ron Ames, Legato is a proponent of many desktop tools and operates a small visual effects facility out of his house, known as The Basement. Legato explained their approach, “Sparkle, Bob Richardson’s preferred colorist at Complete Post, transferred all the film dailies to HDCAM-SR tape in the 10-bit RGB 4:4:4 mode, which becomes the equivalent of a digital negative. He also provided SD dailies for David to capture into the Avid. During the course of the editing, we would take David’s Avid sequence and boil down the nearly 300 source tapes into only two main source tapes. These were basically clones of the originals, so there was no quality loss in this step.”

 

The Basement’s editor, Adam Gertel, used an Apple Final Cut Pro workstation and a Sony HDCAM-SR deck to do this. Their Mac is configured with a high-speed Ciprico MediaVault RAID and a Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme capture/output unit – ideal for handling the data throughput and preserve the color integrity of the 10-bit 4:4:4 media. The key to this method was to create new Avid-compatible logs so that it was easy to locate any shot on the new tapes, as well as find additional shots on the original transfer masters, if needed.

 

Legato continued, “Once the film was consolidated onto two tapes, it was easier to reconform the film in Final Cut as David and Marty made additional changes to the cut. Our final color correction was done on a daVinci. Since the source was tape and not media files on a hard drive, any last minute updates could be made in Final Cut, output to HDCAM-SR and then color-corrected on the daVinci in real-time. Although the HDCAM-SR format is only high definition (1920 x 1080) and not a true 2K film file, it’s still more than acceptable for a film-out. The format is still wider than the actual 1828 pixel width of a release print.” The Basement also handled about 80 shots that required some repair or treatment and called upon their Adobe toolkit (After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator) to create effects and titles for the film.

 

Completing the Cut

 

Tedeschi did all his cutting on an Avid Media Composer Adrenaline HD system connected to Avid Lanshare shared storage. David explained the rationale to cut in standard definition, “I had to use the multicam feature all along the way and that simply works best on Adrenaline when you stay in standard definition. I needed the responsiveness for Marty and by staying in standard def we were able to see nine camera angles at any given time playing back in real-time. We did our screenings in high definition, though, using Avid’s DNxHD 175 resolution. We would do these screenings at least once a month – and sometimes once a week. The image looked wonderful.” The edit lasted ten to twelve months, but in spite of the time, David tells me there were no surprises. “Every decision was incremental. The band also believed in Marty’s vision, although they had their own insights into the material. We flew to Italy with Bob Clearmountain to screen it for the Stones while they were on tour. The screening was at Technicolor’s screening room in Rome and luckily it was a great sounding room!”

 

Music, of course, is the most important element to the film and this required plenty of interaction between the mix and the image. Tedeschi pointed out that, “As we made picture changes, it would impact the mix. Generally, Marty would try to accentuate an instrument in the mix if it was featured in a shot, so Bob Clearmountain ended up doing a number of remixes to adjust to our various versions. It’s a great track and all of the concert sound in the film comes from the live recording. In order to get the truest reaction during our screenings, we would present the film in 5.1 surround. I was lucky to have Nick Damiano as my first assistant. He used to work at Sony Studios in New York and knows the audio world extremely well, so he was able to help communicate with Clearmountain, as well as prepare the Avid timeline for our 5.1 screenings. Nick was especially helpful in the tricky sound transitions between the documentary sections and the concert.”

 

Shine A Light is being released by Paramount Classics as well as by Imax, however music films aren’t off the table for either David Tedeschi or Martin Scorsese. Even as the Rolling Stones echo in the background, both move on to their newest project together, a documentary about George Harrison.

 

Written by Oliver Peters for Videography magazine (NewBay Media, LLC)

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down A Dream

Epic documentaries about iconic personalities invariably take longer to post than first anticipated. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down A Dream certainly became a prime example. What started out as potentially a fifteen week project ended up taking nearly two years of editor Mary Ann McClure’s time. Like many a good documentary, Runnin’ Down A Dream benefited from a wealth of rich content that few had ever seen. Her journey started in Tom Petty’s vault searching through thousands of hours of archival footage related to Petty’s career. A short while later, famed director Peter Bogdanovich was brought in to direct the documentary – handling the new interviews and shaping the entire project. According to McClure, “One of Tom Petty’s producers, George Drakoulias knew Peter and felt that he had a good feeling for southern stories, based on how he handled The Last Picture Show. It was George who brought Peter to Warner Brothers. Before this project, Peter hadn’t been familiar with Tom Petty’s career. He’s more from the Frank Sinatra era. So, the first thing we did was assemble a lot of the archival footage so that Peter could assess the material. Then he started to get a sense of how much of an icon Petty is to people.”

 

McClure pulled from thousands of hours of content in a range of formats to build Runnin’ Down A Dream. Much of the footage was on one-inch videotape, which was transferred to DVCAM and Digital Betacam or Betacam SP for the edit. The DVCAM with burned-in timecode was the offline editing source while the Digital Betacam and Betacam SP tapes were vaulted until the time for online editing. This footage contained a mix of old TV show appearances, raw multi-camera iso reels from concerts and a lot of home movies. One lucky source was Ron Blair, Petty’s bass player. Blair, an amateur filmmaker, had shot a lot of Super 8MM film during the early part of Petty’s career, which has never been seen by the general public. Of course, Petty had hundreds of photo binders with thousands of personal photographs. These were also all scanned for use in the documentary and carefully catalogued so the editors could track these files through the various stages of post. Finally, new footage, especially the interviews, was shot in high-def. 

 

Organization

 

The only way to tackle a job like this is one section at a time and Runnin’ Down A Dream is no exception. McClure elaborated on her approach, “ I decided to organize this film chronologically, based around the events in Tom’s life. I’d refer to these as pods. So, for instance, one pod might be centered on Mudcrutch – Tom’s band before the Heartbreakers. As we found new content or statements that applied to a section, it would be added to the appropriate pod. I used to cut on film and also on Lightworks, so I prefer to use [Apple’s] Final Cut Pro, because it feels more like a film-editing tool to me. One helpful aspect of Final Cut is that you can work with multiple project files at the same time and don’t have to organize everything into a single project. These pods became individual Final Cut Pro project files, which were essentially selects for that subject matter. I had hundreds of different project files corresponding to the pods. That’s the only way to break this down, because trying to do it all in a single project file would have become too unwieldy.”

 

Post for the documentary was set up at Burbank’s Alphadogs. McClure said, “I was looking for a comfortable environment in Burbank that would be convenient for Tom and Peter. It needed to be professional, but more of a boutique. I wanted someone I could trust technically to cover us if there were any problems. In the end we were there for over a year and at every turn [Alphadogs president] Terence Curren and his a staff were there to help when any issues came up.” By the time the project was done, three cutting rooms were in full swing. McClure preferred to work out of her office in Santa Barbara, operating in tandem with assistant editor Sean Stack at Alphadogs. Stack aided in the editorial process by being available to search through footage.

 

Final Cut Pro timeline sequences were shared between the two via FTP and e-mail. Stack explained, “Finding the right photo for coverage was part of our process and the JPEGs were easy to email along with the FCP project sequence. To save time, I applied a push-in, pull-out or pan to the photo already dropped into a sequence. In Santa Barbara, Mary Ann could quickly shuttle through the sequence, see the pictures with these various moves applied and then easily trim and cut-and-paste her favorite into the working timeline.”

 

Telling The Story

 

Halfway through the post schedule, Jeffrey Doe was added as the second editor. McClure said, “It started to become clear that in order to meet our delivery schedule, one editor just wasn’t going to get through all this material. So, we split up the chronology. I handled the first half up to and including the Damn The Torpedoes album – around 1981 – and Jeff covered the time span after that, based on the pods [selected footage] I had already organized. Generally we worked alone, with Peter and Tom reviewing the cuts every so often. There was a good relationship with Warner Brothers, but the heat was definitely on. Towards the end, I came down nearly every day from Santa Barbara to work with Tom and Peter to get a locked cut.”

 

The final film is four hours long. It was distributed with a limited theatrical release as well as telecast on the Sundance Channel, but the real target is the DVD market. Did the four hour length create any resistance? Mary Ann responded, “In the beginning everyone was pushing for a two hour film, including me. But there was just so much to include and Tom is such a great storyteller. We didn’t want to string together a number of short clips and create yet another Behind The Music. Our interviews weave the story together instead of a ‘voice of God’ narrator, so even at four hours, the show moves along and is entertaining. When it got down to deciding on which pieces to drop in order to shorten the film, there just wasn’t any large section that everyone really felt like losing. It’s not like you could simply skip over Petty’s solo career or his legal battles with the record company or his time with the Traveling Willbourys. Our original cut actually came in at five hours, but we were able to trim an hour through tightening – literally cutting out frames here and there in sections.”

 

Pushing The Envelope

 

The task of online finishing of Runnin’ Down A Dream fell to the editorial team at Alphadogs, including editor Danica Barnes and assistant editor Sean Stack. The length and complexity of this project meant an almost four week long online session. Alphadogs owns about ten bays split between Avid systems and Apple Final Cut Pro, so generally the offline edit solution will dictate which workflow is used for finishing: Avid Symphonies for Media Composer offlines and Apple Final Cut Pro with AJA Kona cards for Final Cut offlines. In this case, that logically meant a Final Cut Pro finish. The documentary was mastered to HDCAM-SR, so all archival NTSC footage had to be rescaled to high-def. It was upconverted in a pillarbox format (black edges on the sides) using the built-in features of the AJA Kona 3 capture card, with the remaining percentage of “blow up” being handled by Final Cut’s own software resizing controls.

 

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems, though, and the Alphadogs team hit some issues when using Apple’s new ProRes 4:2:2 compressed HD codec. According to Stack, “The really large still photo files caused the system to choke and corrupt some of the ProRes renders, so in the end I completed the photo moves on a separate system. There are about 350 stills in the final piece. I would take these into [Adobe] Photoshop for cropping and clean-up. Then I’d bring these into Final Cut and do the camera-style moves, but render to the uncompressed 8-bit HD codec. This rendered media would then be available to Danica over our shared storage network, so she could drop my files back into the ProRes timeline. We really put Apple’s ProRes codec to the test and the final result speaks for itself. Two months after the finish, there was a screening and it looked really amazing projected on the big screen after watching it the edit bay for so long.”

 

Digital Color Timing

 

A color-grading pass using Apple’s new Color application was in the original plan. Alphadogs has been working with veteran daVinci colorist Brian Hutchings to develop various workflows for Final Cut-based projects. In the end, Runnin’ Down A Dream was graded at another shop from the SR tapes on a daVinci 2K. Due to the impending delivery schedule, this was done prior to the insertion of all of the final archival footage, since some had to wait for rights clearances. This grading pass established a look for the interview sections and then the master tape came back to Alphadogs for the cleared archival footage to be inserted. These shots were largely left untouched, though Hutchings did tweak a few with the regular FCP 3-way color correction filter. Barnes also noted that some of the pristine interview footage received a slight film grain treatment to better match the appearance of the old film shots.

 

Even though Hutchings didn’t grade this documentary on Color, it’s a tool he regards with much potential. Earlier this year, he graded Werner Herzog’s latest documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World using Color in an Apple-based grading room at Alphadogs. Brian offered these thoughts on Apple’s new upstart tool, “Lately there has been a growth in software for color timing. Many different applications for different workflows. Competition is good. It forces everybody to bring their best game and listen to the feedback from those who run their software. One can only imagine what tools future versions of Color will bring to us. Apple’s support of the Red Camera is in the works, so it is incredible to think of what will be available to so many more storytellers.”

 

Rock and documentary fans alike will want to add Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down A Dream to their collection. Tom Petty joins a long list that includes The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Metallica to give us a look behind the curtain. Reviews have been great and even mention how seamless the editing is despite all the elements. The documentary DVD has been sold out, as well. All a result of the editors who have spent countless hours in rooms pouring over a wealth of material to weave together an entertaining story for the rest of us.

 

Written by Oliver Peters for Videography magazine (NewBay Media, LLC)

The Billy Graham Library Project

One of the interesting aspects of being based in central Florida is that the area is home to many themed attraction design companies. These developers supply ideas and creative content to museums, parks and entertainment venues around the world. Nearly everyone involves one-of-a-kind presentation formats that are designed to display memorable programming to entertain and enlighten guests for years to come. For a little over a year I had the pleasure of editing the content for The Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Library – a free visitor attraction commissioned by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association – is designed to tell the Billy Graham story, as well as continue his evangelistic ministry. It opened early this summer to a host of international press and dignitaries, including three former U. S. Presidents.

 

The Billy Graham Library complex was designed by ITEC Entertainment, an Orlando-based attraction company who developed the concept and supplied all creative direction. To complete the video portions of the venue, ITEC hired ImageROCKS, a local high-concept, film and video production company. ImageROCKS director Jack Tinsley and I go back quite a few years having worked together on various projects including EPCOT’s IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth. In fact, we had both worked on several other high-profile ITEC Entertainment projects including a high definition “film” that Tinsley had directed on location in Israel. Jack started production during the summer of 2005, taping HD footage at Rev. Graham’s last crusade on the grounds of the old 1964 World’s Fair near New York City. I joined the project in fall to handle all offline and online editing.

 

One Size Does Not Fit All

 

The Billy Graham Library experience winds through a series of themed rooms that present a mix of informational and inspirational videos and gallery rooms containing photos and memorabilia from Rev. Graham’s past. In total, these include eleven video programs – each about six minutes in length. These have been produced in a variety of single and multi-screen formats using standard or high definition projection or LCD display panels. Some rooms use multiple synchronized video sources. One of the most involved is a set built to look like the street side showroom window of a 1960s-era TV and appliance store. Eight sources are distributed to fifteen displays that are integrated into the old-fashioned TV consoles. Another combines four screens in a circular venue, and there’s even a replica of the Berlin Wall, complete with a projected “set extension” for a portion of the wall. Along the way, guests encounter the facade of the 1949 Los Angeles revival tent (the “Canvas Cathedral”), a Korean gate, an old radio studio and the Graham’s living room – each augmented by custom-formatted video display systems. The experience culminates in the Finale Theater, an approximately 10 ft. x 33 ft. presentation consisting of three seamless, overlapping HD projections.

 

As daunting as some of the technical issues might sound, the main focus of our effort was to tell the best story. Hopefully a visitor leaves with a more complete experience through the cumulative effect of the entire complex. Each room tells a different aspect of Rev. Graham’s legacy and mission, with certain rooms designed to create a natural guest flow through the Library. During the editing we had to pay attention to such issues as the length of the individual modules in order to maintain consistent guest traffic. Our creative content also had to form a logical story as guests move from one room to the next. My role in this as an editor was not unlike editing a documentary. In fact, all the video modules together would have equaled a linear program of about an hour in length.

 

A Wealth of Material

 

The good news – and the bad news – was that Rev. Graham has been covered in the media in every conceivable way for over sixty years. This started even before he first gained national prominence during his 1949 Los Angeles Crusade. It turned out to be our good fortune that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had kept good archives of these many tapes, films and still photos. The wealth of material kept our production coordinator Kelly Burroughs busy working with their staff to pinpoint the specific subject matter from our wish list. By the end, I had accumulated content from about 200 tapes for over 140 hours of selected raw footage. Our goal, however, was not to simply tell a story filled with facts and figures, but to show how the Christian salvation message was presented through Rev. Graham’s words and deeds during the six decades of his personal ministry.

 

Our desire was that guests would be left with the feeling that God had worked through Billy Graham and not simply that he was a celebrity evangelist. After all, our charge from the Association was that the message be inspirational as well as educational. To that aim, we tried to dig deeper into the available footage to find clips that weren’t the same tired sound bites used in every other video about Graham. Searching led us to some interesting discoveries, including a live ABC telecast of a Billy Graham Crusade in Times Square announced by newscaster Paul Harvey, an Edward R. Murrow remote broadcast interview with Billy and Ruth Graham from their mountain home in Montreat, North Carolina and even a late night talk show hosted by Woody Allen! The process of honing down the content for those eleven modules took the better park of 2006 as Tinsley and I worked closely with the ITEC creative team, consisting of President Bill Coan, project producer Jeff Burton, creative director Eric Gordon and art director David Roadcup.

 

Tackling HD and Beyond

 

At the start, ImageROCKS had been an all-Avid facility, but The Billy Graham Library required a fair amount of high definition video. This provided the motivation to upgrade the suites with new Apple G5s, AJA Video Kona 2 cards and a transition to Final Cut Pro. I handled all the offline editing at DV25 resolution using a single 2TB LaCie FireWire 800 drive. When it came time to finish the project at full resolution, we added “striped” (RAID-0) SATA drives to the main PowerMac G5 that had been the project’s home for over a year. All of the standard definition videos were recaptured from Digital Betacam as uncompressed video, while the high definition programs were finished in either 1080i DVCPROHD or uncompressed 720p.

 

Even though some of the modules were finished in HD, most of the content was archival NTSC footage, including some rather old material dating back decades. These required quite a bit of color correction with the Final Cut 3-way filter. To get the best image quality, I borrowed a Teranex Mini for all the SD-to-HD upconversions, instead of using the Kona’s built-in upconversion capability. Our biggest venue, the Finale Theater, even incorporated some close ups of faces from the audience at the 2005 New York Crusade that were shot with a Panasonic AG-DVX-100A in 24p. These scaled up remarkably well through the Mini and held their own when mixed with Sony 1080i and Panasonic VariCam HD footage.

 

The hardest portion to complete was the Finale Theater, since the screen format dictated a size bigger than most NLEs can handle. The concept is to immerse viewers in a small-scaled version of a Billy Graham Crusade. We wanted to give them a small taste of this and the size helps to stir the emotions. We opted to project three 720p images – sliced from a single, seamless composite of 2328 x 720. Final Cut could technically handle this, but not without great difficulty. So I worked in tandem with our graphic artist Sean Mullen to finish this portion in Adobe After Effects. The trick was to build up 1920 x 1080 layers in FCP that would become elements for him to composite in After Effects. 

 

Driven By The Mac

 

As it turned out, this was almost a total Apple-based project. The video was completed on Macs, using Final Cut Pro and After Effects. Jack Tinsley is also a talented graphic artist and created his own 3D rendering for the Berlin Wall projection using Lightwave for the Mac. We even did some on-site tweaks in North Carolina. Tinsley and I drove up to Charlotte with a Mac Pro, the drives and a couple of PowerBooks in tow. This was our only chance to see the video run on the real display systems and allowed us to add some custom masks, adjust sizing and alter some of the color correction. Even our sound designer, Pete Lehman, relied on Apple Logic Pro running on a PowerBook. On-site mixing is essential. Audio systems in themed attractions often use special configurations and additional point-source ambient sounds to acoustically augment the visual theme of the room. For example, at the Canvas Cathedral tent, guests first hear sounds of a newspaper boy, a loudspeaker with the voice of a noted area radio personality of the day and singing coming from the tent. Tinsley and Lehman returned to Charlotte in January to complete the mix.

 

The final playback of all the sync audio and video sources runs from a custom PC-based server system designed by ITEC Entertainment’s staff engineers Philip Brogan and Steve Alkhoja. We used a combination of Apple Compressor and DVD Studio Pro to encode MPEG-2 files for the server. It can support SD and HD files with a bit rate higher than that used for DVDs, so we pushed the upper encoding range of each application. Driving the whole atmosphere of this experience is an inspirational, thematic score created by Emmy-nominated composer Colin O’Malley, with additional music by Tommy Coomes and Chris Peters.

 

This year the Billy Graham Library greets its first visitors. Unlike a commercial, film or TV show, themed presentations run for years. It’s one of the few projects that a content professional can revisit and enjoy through the eyes of a brand new audience each time. If our team was successful, visitors will be moved by the message and never give a second thought to the work and technology that brought it to life. 

 

Written by Oliver Peters for Videography magazine (NewBay Media, LLC)