Having won Best Editing for a Documentary Film at Sundance Film Festival 2011, JW chatted to Marshall Curry & Matthew Hamachek on the cutting of this acclaimed Film.

Sara Gouveia gave JW insight into cutting this film.

The Fallen is a one minute short film and South Africa’s only finalist in the International One-minute Film Festival. JW chatted with director/editor Bauke Brouwer on his experience in cutting this film.

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.

Director, Rina Jooste and editor, C.A. van Aswegen, gave JW insight into cutting this award winning film.

JW: How would you describe what makes editing a docci unique to other genres?

CA: I think the biggest challenge for editing documentary, is that you are essentially writing the script as you cut. There is no real predetermined structure or script.

No solid guidelines or parameters as one would have in drama or film. This would be the most unique aspect of editing documentaries.

RINA: I see a documentary film as a work in progress, i dont use a script but do have a very focused and fleshed out treatment/shot list before I start shooting.

I also do very thorough research to inform my story/content and do very thorough planning for the interviews and know exactly what content I need to come out of the interviews (an art in itself).

I try to spend as much time as possible with characters beforehand as well, part of research and to become familiar with characters in order to get better interviews and footage.

The more comfortable characters are with me, the better quality content we get.

After filming, we end up with lots of footage that then has to be condensed into a story, without a script.

This is not an easy task and we work with real life charactes and situations, its reality and cannot be faked, although one do use manupilation of characters from time to time.

We always have to keep in mind: our characters vs our viewers vs our aim/objective of telling the story, keeping all these elements in mind makes it a complex, but interesting task.

JW: In terms of cutting JAMMER AS EK SO BITTER IS,  what was the timespan it took to cut from start to finish?

CA: As the film was a SABC commission, we had a lot of time pressure on this project. From starting the capturing process to final delivery of the broadcast master, we had a total of four weeks in post production.

JW: What format was the footage shot in?

CA: Most of the documentary was shot HDV (on the Sony V1). We also had some additional footage from the characters themselves – Rina had asked the girls to take their personal handycams to some of the parties and events they go to.

Integrating this footage into the film was more of a challenge as quality, aspect ratio and style was so completely different to the beautiful images created by our cinematographer – Natalie Haarhoff.

JW: What edit system do you use?

CA: I cut on a Quad-Core Intel Xeon MAC G5. I work mainly on Final Cut Pro 7 – and then the peripheral work in Final Cut Studio 3.

JW: Can you please describe your workflow?

CA: I work with an assistant editor who logs, bins and capture all the footage for me. From that point I prefer, especially with documentaries, to take over the project completely. As documentaries are so reliant on the post production process, and is such a collaborative journey with the director – I do think it is crucial for an editor to be hands on.

My personal preference in terms of workflow, is to keep the footage at the highest possible quality throughout the edit process – this means that I usually end up editing with my ‘online’ footage from the start. It is the only way to truly know exactly what you’re working with.This projects’ shooting ratio was about 12:1, which means that it was still rather manageable and contained throughout.

When I start on a documentary, the first thing to do is make sure I have a very clear understanding from the director of why they wanted to tell this specific story. If you understand the true intention and heart behind the story, it is often a lot easier to find it within the footage as well, because you know exactly what you’re looking for.

I then do a very rough structure assembly, which is usually just the interview sections of the footage. I use title cards for montage or image sequence, but focus on getting the core narrative down first.

Once the core elements are placed, I start shuffling the structure around for overall rhythm, pace, character and emotional engagement levels.

After I’m happy with the content and the overall structure, I start laying down additional images and build montage sequences to further enhance the film.

Before we get to a final cut, I do like to take a couple of days away from the project to get some distance and clear my head. Usually when we view it again a couple of days later, I can see the film again and it is then also a lot easier to see if there are potential problem areas.

JW: Tell us more about the Director/Editor collaboration.

RINA: I am a fairly new filmmaker in the industry that only started making films in 2007, CA has edited all my doccies since I started. Because I see documentary filmmaking as a work in progress, I dont work from a script. I usually discuss the shoot with CA before I start filming, for his inputs and to ensure a common vision/output.

Before we start with edit process we again discuss the content and direction of the film, as well as the portrayal of our characters, and use / feel of music. We then literally go through all the rough footage together and he makes notes / markers as we continue. Once all the footage has been watched, we plan the structure of the story (Paper edit) we then place chunks of footage in our structure.

Once that is complete we cut it down until we reach our estimate duration of the film.

Once we have our rough assembly of story only, without cutaways, breathing space and visuals, I step out of the process. CA then continues to place visuals and music.

CA: I have been working with Rina Jooste for a couple of years now and we have done a lot of projects together. It is an incredibly important thing – the director/editor relationship. We have developed a type of short hand between the two of us, where I understand what she is looking for, sometimes before she would even express it.

This is a rare thing to have in a professional relationship, and a hugely important one – especially in the world of documentary filmmaking. I think her ability to find interesting stories, her lack of fear and judgement on those stories and her incredible compassion with people – which allows her to get amazingly honest interviews and opinions on camera, makes her an extraordinary documentary film maker.

JW: Tell us more about your method/approach in cutting a docci?

RINA:  Before I start shooting, I discuss with CA to ensure I capture as much as possible to make for a good docci. Also to ensure we have a common vision for the end product, since we work closely until we reach the end product. Before we start editing we again disucss the content/characters/direction and aim of film, we then watch through all the footage together.

CA: It is very important for me to understand the story, the characters and the background to the documentary before I start…

So I usually have a very long conversation with Rina to get a sense of the elements with in the story that excites her, the characters that she finds most interesting and the emotional tone that attracter her to this film. Once we have adequately cover that, we sit and watch through all the interviews that was shot. This is a very important thing to do, because the we both know exactly what was said, what was inferred and what the options for the film would be.

After we have viewed and assessed all the interviews we start brainstorming an overall structure based around the main elements in the film. This happens on paper and usually involves a lot of scribbling and many confusing spider-grams. Once we have figured a structure out on paper, we do a content assembly on the timeline. This usually gives you a very good indication of the overall structure of your film, your characters and the development of the story – it is at this point that we do our major structure shuffles.

I do not pay close attention to pacing and emotional engagement at the structure phase – but once I am happy with the final structure, story development and overall character progression in the film – that is when the focus shifts completely to rhythm, pace and emotional engagement.

This is usually, for me, one of the final steps in the edit process.

JW: To what degree do you focus on sound during your cutting?

CA: For me, sound forms an integral part of the editing process. Therefor it is very important to get the audio and video worlds to merge seamlessly. I do spend quite a bit of time on sound and especially music. I think a lot of people under estimate the impact of a decent sound edit and good score to support and enhance your edit.

JW: Are you involved in other post production aspects like grading, online ect?

CA: I am involved in all aspects of post production, up to final delivery. I prefer to do the online and grade myself. And where possible, I like to sit in on the final mix. I think the collaboration between edit and sound is a very important aspect of the final process.

JW: Rina, what is your approach to bring your vision for the final product together?

RINA: CA and I work togehter as a team to get to our final product, we discuss and treat our doccies as work in progress, i have a clear direction from the start but we develop it as we edit into the final product.

I have to mention that I sat in most of the time with the edit of all my films, which is not always good for time management, but since I am new in industry and on a steep learning curve, it was part of my “on the job” training, and learnt a lot from CA in the process.

She gave JW insight into this project.

On the outside, you grow up with gangs. You end up joining a gang. You are good with a gun and become an assassin. They give you a target. You are betrayed, and they find you. You are shot twelve times, survive and end up in Pollsmoor Prison where the dreaded “number gangs” rule. Now you’re on the inside, and you’re fighting for survival.

Odd Number is a documentary film set on the Cape Flats. It is a story of redemption. http://www.oddnumberfilm.com/

JW: To start off with, what format was the footage shot on and what editing system did you use?

LIANI: It was shot on Sony XDcam EX which shoots onto solid state so we copied all of the clips from the memory card onto two duplicate drives, so we had complete redundancy at all times, so that if one of the drives were to go down, we would always have a back up.

We used XDcam transfer to convert the clips to Quicktime to edit in Final Cut Pro.

JW: How would you describe your workflow?

LIANI: The first thing to mention is that the shoot didn’t happen all in one go. The 1st shoot, we digested the footage, had a look at it and listened to the interviews. Based on that, there was a 2nd shooting window and once that had been incorporated, there were several 1/2 day and 1 day shoots to pick up material that we needed.

So from an editing point of view, that was fantastic! As the edit progressed, I could request footage to make the edit work…that’s quite unique and I was very lucky.

If I added everything up, post production came to about 40x days.

In terms of the technical workflow, we had the XDcam EX, but we also had a second HDV camera shooting at all times, but it was shooting behind-the-scenes. We could steal a couple of shots from this camera so combining footage from the two cameras were quite interesting as I had to up-res the HDV footage which I hate, cause if you upscale footage you can immediately see more grain and with video, it’s not nice looking film grain texture.

JW: Tell us more about your collaboration with the Director.

LIANI: With the first shoot, I started looking through the material and simultaneously the Director, Marius van Straaten, was listening through the interview. When the editing phase began, we met and he gave me about 10-15 minutes of interview selects which we also used as a promo to show to the funders of the project.

I took the 15 minutes of interview and put it in the order that I wanted to tell the story and then I went to fill in the gaps with other interviews. Based on that, we had about 35 minutes on the timeline. Then we looked through all the footage for cutaways and see how they combined and then we made a list of all the missing stuff.

The whole team went back for a further shoot and they filled in allot of those gaps which I then put into the timeline.

The third phase, Marius and some crew members went out to get individual things for me. For example, there’s a certain point where the protagonist talks about all the ammunition they got for gang wars and he then mentions all the different weapons.

So I suggested to Marius we find a suitable gun shop to shoot every one of those things the protagonist mentions. So the great thing was that we had the interview, we’ve cut the interview down to exactly what we knew we wanted to use – we basically had an audio lock – so he then went to go shoot exactly those things.

So these three phases of shoot-edit, shoot-edit, shoot-edit, Marius the Director had throughout the whole process Final Cut on his laptop so I would literally just send him a list of requests or we would view the film together and identify gaps, then he would go sift through footage till 2-3 am in the morning to find things for me.

So we had a very quick post production for a 48 minute film.

The film had a lot of different aspects to it: we had sit down interviews, cinéma vérité stuff where we follow our protagonist where he does stuff and we can’t intervene, we’re just filming, there are re-enactments of elements of his story, his past, there’s guerrilla shooting stuff in his neighborhood and then some stuff that were more set-up – it was reality but we had a certain amount of control. So there’s a lot of different type of footage and I think that the post production would have been allot longer and more difficult if I didn’t have that constant collaboration with Marius.

JW: How would you describe what makes editing non-fiction unique and your role in it?

LIANI: The biggest contribution I make to an edit is problem solving. I am prepared to sit through difficult footage and try and find the story within it and that’s very much the discipline from the cinéma vérité era of where you would have a concept, the director will go out and gather alot of material and the “story” will really only be found in post production. So the edit was challenging but very rewarding. And that’s the challenge I love, how am I gonna make this footage interesting & compelling, ad after sitting with it for a while, reducing it, finding the essence of it you, you finally end up with something that really is the “Story” and engaging to an audience.

That’s what I enjoy about non fiction cause I feel I can bring more to the edit, have more space to collaborate with the director, bring more of my own creativity to it.

JW: Please describe your use of sound in your edit.

LIANI: Initially, I was just going to do the offline edit and a professional online editor would do the online and the grade and someone to do the final mix. As the production progressed, we didn’t have the budget we thought we would have so the 1st thing that was cut was our time in final mix.

So I did all of the sound editing, which included the dialogue editing, adding ambiences, foley and sound effects. In most cases, when we had both cameras rolling, I would pick the sound that was the best.

We had two scenes where I knew we had sound problems. For those scenes, I gave the Final Mixer, Stef Albertyn, everything that I had.

In terms of music, Braam du Toit composed music for us. Some of the music he already had, and some of it he composed specifically for the film after viewing it.  We also sourced tracks from music libraries. So I did the music editing as well and I did it all in Final Cut.

JW: What other aspects of Post Production were you involved in?

LIANI: Because I was not initially going to do the grade, I only graded scenes for the promo so that Marius can get an idea of what the look & feel could be like. I also designed looks for the different aspects, such as the ‘current day’ interviews, the cinéma vérité stuff and the ‘past’ sequences.

So as you watch the film, the grade changes from period to period. So these were all preliminary grades to give Marius an idea of what it could look like after it was fully graded. But then towards the end of the production we didn’t have enough budget for an online so I just carried on along the path of my prelim grades.

I did it all in Final Cut as FCP gives you some powerful grading tools, you can save presets. Another feature I would use is that I would grade a clip and then use the ‘find’ function in the timeline to find other clips from the same source and then apply that filter and just tweak where it was necessary.

I also applied on some clips multiple 3-way color correctors and use the ‘limit’ effect so that I could do for example something to the reds in a shot and do something different to the greens in a shot. So I could manipulate colors separately.

There are a few things that I still want to do  - we’re planning to do another 2-3 days of edit. We did a 48 minute film because we were hoping for broadcast, but in the end it looks like it will be going to more festivals, we used initially a very ‘choppy’ 1 hour documentary slot pace and I feel that the film needs a bit more breathing space.

So I’ve identified a few places in the film with Marius where we’d like to give some more breathing space  – we want the audience to feel the emotion from a previous scene, take a breath…this will add to build some tension as well.

Hopeville was originally a 6 part drama series commissioned by Heartlines and SABC Education. Curious Pictures produced and John directed.

So the movie came from the series. Which sounds simple but is quite a challenge.

One has to keep in mind that in a series there are alot of sub plots and each character ends up going on their own journey.

For the film John had to zone into the main story beats and characters to put the story together.

Which again sounds simple in theory but plots intertwined or took a few episodes to be revealed fully which did not work for the features timeline. John did an amazing job of constructing the film.

I would like to point out that the series was edited by Karyn Bosh and Jan Botha – and they are credited on the film. As the movie comes from the original series their style is still very much alive in the finished film. I only came onto the film near the end.

By the time I came in we had just over 2 weeks to finish off the final edit.

We were editing in HD from the media managed online edits from the series., the movie was for digital release.

John constructed the story he wanted to tell with Bridget Fayhe Goldsmith. (Who is also credited on the film)

I was then asked to come in and take it to the next level.

So by the time I came on there was a full edit taken from the series.

John and I then sat down, watched it through a few times and discussed what was working, what was getting lost in translation from the series to the movie, what plot lines where not working and what really needed to be reworked for a feature.

I focused in on re-editing certain scenes to make them bigger and more emotional for a feature.

I also spent time on the beginning and end of the film that needed to be reworked for a film.

Music was also a biggy for me – I wanted the score to go from TV to Feature.

One main story beat had taken the whole series to come out – and it had almost been a character of it’s own in the series, which is not how we needed it to play in the feature. That took us a while to rework and introduce it correctly into the film

John was great through this whole process as he never held onto the series, he completely refocused for the film and was keen to try most suggestions I had on making it more “Filmic”.

Melanie is a Full Member of SAGE