Short Film: Cutting “Dirty Laundry”, an interview with editor, Stanley M. Agnew.
Winner of three international awards, Stephen Abbott’s short film Dirty Laundry will be screened at the upcoming SHNIT Short Film Festival in October 2011 and at London’s Film Africa in November 2011.
JW spoke to editor, Stanley M. Agnew on his experience on cutting the film.
For more on the film, visit their website http://www.dirtyshort.com
JW: Please give us a brief synopsis of the short film.
STANLEY: Dirty Laundry is the story of Roger, a guy trying to do his washing late at night. All sorts of crazy characters come out of the woodwork, from randy teenagers to incompetent spies. Rog has to decide how to deal with a night of escalating madness!
JW: How would you describe what makes editing a short film unique to other genres?
STANLEY: It’s a different medium to write or direct, for sure. But I think that there’s no consistent difference to cutting short films.
I think genres and stories are more important than the length of the film. Maybe you’re a bit more constrained by time, though I’d like to think you cut a feature trying with the same attitude to every precious minute of screen time.
JW: In terms of cutting the film: the timespan it took to cut from start to finish.
STANLEY: I don’t remember exactly, but it was 10 weeks from wrapping production to wrapping all post.
We didn’t cut every day, maybe we needed the downtime. Also there were some interruptions. This was during the world cup.
And of course the cut was locked to allow for sound and grading. I think we had a first cut in 2 and a half weeks. Locked cut after 5 or 6 weeks.
JW: …and the format the footage was in?
STANLEY: Shot on the Red camera. I worked using prores HD proxies, then finished the film using Redcine to export to prores 4444.
JW: …and the shooting ratio?
STANLEY: Just over 5 hours of footage so thats a shoot:edit of about 20:1 .
JW: What edit system do you use?
STANLEY: Cut and onlined on a mac pro, using final cut. Redcine for proxy, colour correction and master output. After effects for touchups. Onlined in fcp. Sound was in Protools.
JW: Can you please describe your workflow? (assemblies -> rough cut -> final cut)
STANLEY:
- Export proxies from Redcine (this happened on set)
- Mark takes from continuity.
- Rough cuts & lots of reviews
- Final cut & picture lock
- Conform from fcp back to Redcine
- Colour correction in redcine
- Exports from redcine
- Touchups in After effects
- Online in fcp,
- Marry mixes
- Outputs.
- Make masters: Quicktime Prores, Quicktim web mpeg4, DVD, BluRay,HDCAM, Digibeta (all PAL and NTSC)
JW: Tell us more about your collaboration with director Stephen Abbott?
STANLEY: We worked pretty closely. He did some cutting, especially at the start.
He had shot the film pretty specifically, so there wasn’t much wiggle room.
I would cut and then show Stephen and Ed from Stealth Donkey, we’d discuss and I’d go from there.
JW: Tell us more about your method/approach in cutting a short film? (story development, structure, characters)
STANLEY: I like to focus on getting scenes or beats right so often i work on sections in isolation. I choose these sections pretty much at random, based around what I’m excited about. The film starts to take shape like this, then I go back and string everything together properly.
There wasn’t much freedom in this film for story development, structure or characters because it was shot so specifically.
The only real tweaking was the lead Roger’s performance. Stephen had shot some key moments with a variety of subtlety, and in the edit we felt we needed to maximise what we had, to help make Rog as empathetic as possible. Since Roger doesn’t talk, we were at first worried about this becoming ‘eyebrow acting’, but Bryan van Niekerk’s performance was excellent, so it survived this stretching.
I often went for the biggest take I could find, sometimes looking for good smiles, laughs or whatever in the slate or after the CUT!
But this is relative of course! All the takes were pretty subtle and Bryan’s performance is still nicely nuanced.
JW: Can you describe a particular challenge (story/technical) and the solution you arrived at?
STANLEY: Dirty Laundry is all one location, and is pretty much continuous. There’s even very little exterior to the laundromat, I think we only go outside twice, apart from the top n tail wide shots. Stephen had shot it very carefully so that each scene has an in and out that worked with the next scene or beat, like a jigsaw puzzle. That was a bit challenging to get right, the transition between scenes, since it’s essentially one long scene with different beats.
There were a few times when it nearly didn’t work, and it’s pretty exciting because you can’t solve anything in the edit.
No re-ordering of scenes, no cross-cutting, that’s a bit scary! In the end I think we nailed it and the continuous or linearity really works.
You start to feel like you’re there with Roger.
JW: To what degree do you focus on sound during your cutting?
STANLEY: Quite a bit. I like to do a fair amount of sound design as I cut. On Dirty Laundry it was needed because it was pretty fundamental to telling the story, to telling whether the scenes were working. They’d recorded a lot of laundromat sounds on location, and then we added a whole lot more from some libraries. The sounds are pretty important to making the film work.
They help to sell the malevolence of the laundromat, but also the warm comfort of some of the machines.
Outside we can hear dogs barking but inside the laundromat its insulated.
Sounds were a big part of that linear jigsaw puzzle I mentioned earlier. Sounds often brings characters into the laundromat, we hear rather than see people arriving. I spent a lot of time lining sound effects up to accentuate performances and pictures.
I even lined up the flicker sound of fluorescents to sync with a character blinking!
The framework, the broad strokes were all done by the time we felt we could lock the cut.
And then sound designer and mixer Guy Steer made everything a lot sweeter, and subtler. Guy was brilliant.
