Editor credits

Quote

Emerita Dhoti

And just to add insult to injury, you're gonna insist that "Dhoti" is pronounced "Thish," right?

"Dh" like in Cornish, which is like "th" in "this"

"o" like in "women"

"ti" like in "nation"

Anyone got it yet?



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reem hot rita? does reem count?

[Make yourself an alias. Use that and then you can explain to people why you used an alias.]

If it's that bad, you may not have to explain.

Smithee is for directors and I think, writers. I think editors need their own damn avatar.

Alan Cuttee
Alan Sharpnee
Alan Blaidee
Alan Slicelee
Royce Cuttingham III

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Invoke Big Timecode window with Control-T!

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

I've always wondered what the female form of "Alan J. Smithee" was.

Burn, Hollywood, Burn.


www.derekmok.com

"Ms Alan J. Smithee"?



www.strypesinpost.com

Okay, so I got curious and looked it up. The Wikipedia has a surprisingly comprehensive article on "Alan Smithee," including a list of projects to which it's been applied. I was startled to see it on a bunch of music videos and TV episodes, including the pilot of "MacGyver!"

[en.wikipedia.org]

There is a real guy who is actually called Alan Smithee though, so some of them may be actual credits. What a bummer huh?

My pseudonym is Molly B Denum. Technically that should only have one l in it though. Another good one I know is Phil McCracken. So if you see Molly, you know it was me but I'd have preferred it wasn't.

I sometimes do little jobs here and there under the false name "Verna Fields." Don't tell anyone.

Really? I often use Dede Allen.

shuuuush

Michael Horton
-------------------

Mike, you should set the forum up so that on April 1, all posts go up under the name Alan Smithee.

Certainly many of my often wrong answer posts should go under that name

Michael Horton
-------------------

>Certainly many of my often wrong answer posts should go under that name

And there are others which go under this name.

Michael Horton
-------------------
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www.strypesinpost.com

Before this thread goes into a complete comedy, I'll address the OP's post a bit.


>That kind of thing only tends to make a director look good -- s/he does whatever is necessary to
>make a great film.

As an editor, I love it when the director or producer comes in and makes a calls that improves the cut and the overall story, which is the whole point of the cut anyway. However, in many cases, just like what would happen in production, you do have a myriad of folks who will walk into the editing room after the editor's cut is complete. I mean, everyone suddenly knows how to edit after the editors cut is done, right? Sometimes, it's about people who want more power and control over the piece, sometimes you have a certain director who hates an actor on set, and more often than not, you also have people who try to over emphasize their own agenda and role in the film.

I just had a case yesterday, where the reason for putting a shot, is because we paid quite a lot for a particular actor, so we should see more of that actor. Naturally, the person making this type of calls would be the producer. The director may like a particular shot because they spent a lot of time and effort filming it, or they may hate a certain actor.

Our job is to look at it, and see if it flows. If it doesn't, we try to dissuade the person from making that call, partly because that's our job. But at the end of the day, it's really them who makes that final decision. And as an creative person on the job, you must be willing to let go of the piece, even if you feel it's a bad decision. And hey, even editors sometimes do work too hard on a scene and they'll feel too connected to a particular aspect of a film, which may not transcend to the audience in that certain manner. It happens.



www.strypesinpost.com

Emerita Dhoti - I am the Editor



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

> even editors sometimes do work too hard on a scene

Oh yeah. One of the most dangerous traits in directors or producers in the editing room is that they start watching the cuts, not the shots, not the flow. That's when they start asking you to cut too short.

A maxim I've been offering for years: You don't make a scene shorter by making every shot shorter. You don't make a film shorter by making every shot shorter. You cut out whole moments, whole shots, whole beats. Not faster rhythms, but fewer beats.


www.derekmok.com

Hoo, man. I wish Abrams, Brandon and Markey would have heeded that lesson when they were cutting Star Trek. Don't get me wrong; I like the film. But god, it's dense. The other night (hi, I'm a homebody nerd) I watched that and The Wrath of Khan back-to-back, and I was astonished by the contrast. Wrath of Khan is twelve minutes shorter than Star Trek, but it feels longer and more complete. By cramming two movie's worth of story beats into one film, the folks behind Star Trek ended up with a movie that really ought to offer a free sample of Adderall with every ticket sold.

> By cramming two movie's worth of story beats into one film

It's also because nine out of 10 film people I've met mistake "tight" with "short".

Shorter doesn't mean tighter. "Tight" means all your beats get across in a good rhythm, there's contrast in faster and slower moments. When I teach, I like to show the director's cut of a short film set in a club, and then my final cut. The final cut was at least two minutes longer, but it's tighter, because the climax of the film didn't feel vacant, and the structure and emotions are better orchestrated. The director's cut wasn't focused, and therefore couldn't hold our attention despite its relative brevity.

Every good editor knows that it's easy, after editing a film for a while, to forget that people need time to absorb points and information. Not just to have those points delivered, but to have them hit home. In one documentary, whenever we were missing a point in the story, the story editors always said, "We'll get an interview bite". It drove me absolutely crazy. Guys, soundbites don't do the job of scene beats. Soundbites offer the information on a platter in the most unengaging setting possible, the staged, sit-down interview. It is very rare that the information will be satisfying. Unless the soundbite were given in an interesting way, or if the information is very basic and doesn't have huge story weight.

It's not just getting the information; it's how you get it. There are some beats that, if improperly conveyed (eg. a very important story moment squandered in an interview bite or voice-over), even hurt your film.


www.derekmok.com

It's funny, now that you mention it. I hadn't realized it before, but I think I often use "tight" as a pejorative term. That doesn't really make any sense, because just as you say, a tight film (be it a feature or a commercial or anything in between) is one where the rhythm is correct, not one where all the air has been squeezed out. I guess I picked up the habit over the past couple years, when I've primarily been working in an environment where the dominant paradigm was "cram all the information in and make it as short as humanly possible." It's the same mentality that leads to powerpoint slides with sixteen bullet points and 300 words of text.

> It's the same mentality that leads to powerpoint slides with sixteen bullet points and 300 words
> of text.

I think all of us who have edited promos and commercials have come across this: With onscreen text, often less is more.

When a voice-over is exactly replicated, word for word, in onscreen text, the two actually cancel each other out and the viewer is more likely to miss the information, not less. Whereas if you pick only short key words from the voice-over to put as onscreen text, viewers will pick it up well. It also has to do with the fact that complete sentences don't play well as an onscreen visual element, period. That's the job of audio, not visuals.

Commercial agencies are really bad with that. In their quest for more and more information, they actually manage to obfuscate, rather than clarify. Too much useful information turns into white noise.


www.derekmok.com

One neat trick I've always enjoyed, but that's really very difficult to pull off, is to have the voiceover artist say one thing, and the on-screen text say something synonymous. Not the same words, but synonyms. If your writer is clever, the two words don't even have to be exact synonyms, just adjacent concepts you want to associate in the audience's mind.

Not the best example ever, but the first one that popped into my head:

Thanks for all the responses.

Yes, it is very different if it were an experienced editor calling the shots without physically editing. That I could live with because they've been through the trenches, paid their dues, and I could trust their experience and instincts. But if you have a first-time director with no editing experience who doesn't even want to take the time to learn the software, then I really have a hard time sharing an editing credit with them (or worse if they're wanting sole Editor credit).

And you're right about stacking the credits, you're the writer and star then you decide to direct it, then wanting producer credit and/or executive producer credit, and now editing! I knew a guy like that in college but he actually did all of the things he credited himself with but he just didn't trust anyone to handle anything because he thought they'd screw up his vision.

It is a paying gig but not a huge amount and I am fairly new to editing so I need the credit. I'll have a talk with them and see if I can persuade to not take an editor credit using some of your responses/logic. If they refuse, then I might walk away.

Quote

I am fairly new to editing so I need the credit.

See, that sucks. You need the credit, but you're not actually going to earn it if the director is doing your job for you. And plus, if you're not contributing creatively then you'll have no influence over the finished product, so the eventual credit might end up being one you wish you didn't have.

Not knowing anything more about your situation than you've told us, if I were in your shoes I'd be inclined to let him have sole editing credit, take an assistant editor credit and call it a learning experience. If it's a small production, odds are you're going to be doing all the responsibilities of the assistant anyway ? dealing with the lab, syncing rushes, keeping track of all the various notes and scripts and stuff, so forth and so on. And it might be better, career-wise, to have an assistant credit on a bad film and a director who'll say good things about you than to fight for an edited-by credit on a bad film and have a director out there who doesn't have a good opinion of you.

But again, I'm not there. I'm just thinking out loud at this point.

derekmok Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> A maxim I've been offering for years: You don't
> make a scene shorter by making every shot shorter.
> You don't make a film shorter by making every
> shot shorter. You cut out whole moments, whole
> shots, whole beats. Not faster rhythms, but fewer
> beats.

Great point. If there are Ten Holy Rules of good editing, surely that is one of them.

- Justin Barham -

Back in the mid 1980's when I was in Canada starting my career as a sound editor & re-recording mixer, I worked under a NABET contract at a large broadcaster/cable operator/post facility. All audio guys - including me - were labeled "Operators." Most of the video editors in the building were called "Operators" as well.

The only "Editors" in the place were the guys in the video post part of the company, the guys who were flying the 5 million dollar suites (where I was as well, only in the audio room, yet I was still an "Operator". The pay grade for video "Editors" was significantly above that of video "Operators." The theory was that the workaday guys cutting news and travel shows were simply button pushers taking strict direction and little input to the process (which wasn't true at all) - thus "Operators" - while the guys cutting more creative stuff - spots, big $$ productions - were artists, thus editors. A lot of this rests in creative ego, some of it is $$, etc.

A producer I know hires editors who are happy being button pushers. I asked him why. "Because I have enough guys in this damn building who want to be directors."

derekmok Wrote:
-------In one documentary, whenever we
> were missing a point in the story, the story
> editors always said, "We'll get an interview
> bite". It drove me absolutely crazy. Guys,
> soundbites don't do the job of scene beats.

Derek - can you expand on this a bit ? I think I'm not getting something here. If there's a story point missing, how else can it be covered except by either a 'soundbite' or narration ? Or are you suggesting that a beat would allow the audience to work the story point out for themselves ?

> Soundbites offer the information on a platter in
> the most unengaging setting possible, the staged,
> sit-down interview. It is very rare that the
> information will be satisfying. Unless the
> soundbite were given in an interesting way, or if
> the information is very basic and doesn't have
> huge story weight.
>
> It's not just getting the information; it's how
> you get it. There are some beats that, if
> improperly conveyed (eg. a very important story
> moment squandered in an interview bite or
> voice-over), even hurt your film.

I couldn't agree more, but I do differ somewhat from you in your opinion about talking heads. I'm in New Zealand and worked a lot over many years with an NZ director, Barry Barclay. Barry (now sadly deceased) wrote a number of books and in one of them he said "I can think of nothing more beautiful than a shot of the human head talking from the heart."

I tend to agree with him. On a documentary, I believe it's a large part of the directors job to get the information in an interesting way.

Hope this isn't too OT...

> Derek - can you expand on this a bit ? I think I'm not getting something here. If there's a
> story point missing, how else can it be covered except by either a 'soundbite' or narration?

Let me give you an example. X is mad at Y for having done something. Instead of showing the fight, they have X sit down and say, "I'm so mad at Y because he did this and that", and in order to make sure the audience gets the information 100 per cent, they keep getting X to repeat his answer and make it clearer, until there's no spontaneity or honesty left in what X is saying.

So, okay, we're told X is mad at Y. But if we don't see it onscreen, how does it help? It's just information with no consequence or emotional attachment.

The point is that interviews and soundbites make filmmakers lazy. Instead of working the footage harder, looking at alternate ways to convey the story, they just say, "Oh, let's get a soundbite". Nine times out of 10, it doesn't work...but they often think it does just because the words are there onscreen. Uh-uh.

For a non-documentary example, look at the ending of Executioners from Shaolin, a bad film that has, inexplicably, garnered cult status. At the end, they add a voice-over saying, "Hung Wen-ding finally beat Bai Mei's Golden Bell Armour." What does it add to the story? If we don't get from watching the film that he's done this, how would these idiotic words give us a better ending? In fact, it's insulting to the audience. Imagine if the ending of The Mousetrap, instead of showing you a scene, just added an announcer saying, "XYZ was the killer, because he was related to the story in this way."

As part of his theatrical approach, Bertolt Brecht utilized a ridiculous voice-over device like this (known as a deus ex machina) in Der Dreigroschen Oper (The Threepenny Opera). But that's all a part of his attempt at achieving Verfremdung -- "alienation". He wanted to alienate his audience because he believed that a ridiculous device like this destroys the audience's emotional engagement, leaving them no choice but to interpret the piece cerebrally. So if you use this device in a film/show where emotional engagement is the thing, you destroy the engagement.

> Barry (now sadly deceased) wrote a number of books and in one of them he said "I can think
> of nothing more beautiful than a shot of the human head talking from the heart."

Barry Barclay needed to get out more. This kind of thinking is just like those producers who think the only shot you can use for an emotional moment is a big TV-style close-up of the face, cut off at the neck. Never mind that you're missing the rest of the actor's body language (eg. Marlon Brando's "Stella!" scene in A Streetcar Named Desire).

So you have a mother who lost her child in the Haiti earthquake. Barclay would have us believe that it's sadder to sit her down on a chair, with makeup on and an artificial backdrop, rather than watch her in the real situation when it happened?

I'm not saying, if you couldn't get footage of the actual tragedy, then you shouldn't get an interview. I'm not even saying that if you had the actual footage when it happened that you shouldn't try to get her to remember what it was like. But "Nothing more beautiful"? "Compromise" is more like it.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks Derek - I appreciate your taking the time to reply.

The thing about your example of X being mad at Y is that very often in documentary you don't get the actual footage of the fight. Maybe the crew just wasn't there when it happened. If it's important to the development of the story as it evolves further down the line, then surely it's better to have an IV explaining that it happened ? I mean - we don't want to go near a re-enactment do we ?

I think Barry's comment was referring to the beauty of spontaneous and honest answers. He never put makeup on anyone and always went to great lengths to make sure the location was as relevant and real as possible. An artificial backdrop was unthinkable to him.

But perhaps we should drop Barry from this discussion. If he were still here he would fight his corner with much greater skill than I can. I was trying to make the point that there is a huge pressure these days to cut away from talking heads and it seems to me that very often the cutaways add very little - especially when they're re-enactments. I'm thinking "Man on Wire". Why can't someone 'talking from the heart' in a doco be as powerful as an actor in a drama ?

cheers

Mike

> we don't want to go near a re-enactment do we?

Good question. My background in journalism makes me especially unreceptive to the idea of re-enactments.

But I'm saying, if you didn't get footage of a moment, very often the thing to do is not to try to get across that exposition at all. Work with what you did get.

> I was trying to make the point that there is a huge pressure these days to cut away from
> talking heads

My experience has been utterly the contrary. People are now often incapable of even conceiving a documentary without sit-down interviews, especially given modern filmmakers' obsession with lighting and making things look pretty. I'll take a Harlan County, U.S.A. or American Dream (fly-on-the-wall documentaries with no interviews) any day. At least try to get the best real scenes to work before resorting to interviews! Planning interviews before you've exhausted the real footage is like writing voice-overs to try to account for missing scenes in a script.

DVD making-of documentaries are the worst. You get the usual pap, "Marty is a genius", "Wonderful", "Great", "I had such a great time". You could practically swap the "soundbites" with any other documentary in the same genre and you won't gain or lose anything.

> I'm thinking "Man on Wire". Why can't someone 'talking from the heart' in a doco be as
> powerful as an actor in a drama?

Because interviews are, by definition, self-conscious and camera-conscious. You can get something approaching genuine emotion, but it will never be even close to if the moment had happened in real life. All interviews are camera-conscious. No way around it at all, even given the best interviewer, best director and best camera operator. Interviews are contrived by nature.

If Barclay's statement were to be followed, then you would pick a father talking about the birth of his daughter, over the actual footage of the father seeing his daughter being born, because there's "nothing more beautiful than a human head...". And that's baloney.

In that situation, if the actual birth and reaction were missed in the shoot, the "interview freaks" would say, get a soundbite from the father. I would say, shoot the baby as she is now, or find footage where she interacts with the father. That's real. And no words will be necessary for us to feel the connection, if there is one.


www.derekmok.com

derekmok Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> But I'm saying, if you didn't get footage of a
> moment, very often the thing to do is not to try
> to get across that exposition at all. Work with
> what you did get.

Now that's a truly radical thought. It's also an amazing example of how these ideas are very specific to specific films. The reason I asked you to explain more in my original post is that I am cutting a feature doco at the moment which is missing certain crucial story points. The producer has the budget to shoot more and I have suggested that she should get some new IV grabs from one particular person in order to simply explain certain parts of the story. I mean really basic plot points. The reason I want to do this is because the film is looking back at events that took place 13 years ago (so there's no footage at all) - but it's not actually about those events in themselves. It's actually about how people reacted (and are reacting) to those events. I kind of want to get the factual story out of the way as fast as possible if you see what I mean. The real story is in the way people feel about what happened. I should say that the emotion in the interviews - and the spontaneous honesty - is simply incredible.

>
> > I was trying to make the point that there is a
> huge pressure these days to cut away from
> > talking heads
>
> My experience has been utterly the contrary.

I'm envious !

> People are now often incapable of even conceiving
> a documentary without sit-down interviews,
> especially given modern filmmakers' obsession with
> lighting and making things look pretty. I'll take
> a Harlan County, U.S.A. or American Dream
> (fly-on-the-wall documentaries with no interviews)
> any day. At least try to get the best real scenes
> to work before resorting to interviews! Planning
> interviews before you've exhausted the real
> footage is like writing voice-overs to try to
> account for missing scenes in a script.

I hate to admit it, but I don't remember seeing either of those. I'll try to find them...

>
> DVD making-of documentaries are the worst. You
> get the usual pap, "Marty is a genius",
> "Wonderful", "Great", "I had such a great time".
> You could practically swap the "soundbites" with
> any other documentary in the same genre and you
> won't gain or lose anything.

Absolutely ! Most 'making of' docos on DVDs are nothing more than publicity pap. Occasionally they're not though. Have a look at the 'making of' for "The Sea Inside". It's very crudely made, but a fascinating insight.

>
> > I'm thinking "Man on Wire". Why can't someone
> 'talking from the heart' in a doco be as
> > powerful as an actor in a drama?
>
> Because interviews are, by definition,
> self-conscious and camera-conscious. You can get
> something approaching genuine emotion, but it will
> never be even close to if the moment had happened
> in real life. All interviews are
> camera-conscious. No way around it at all, even
> given the best interviewer, best director and best
> camera operator. Interviews are contrived by
> nature.

Fair enough - but isn't this about the very nature of documentary making ? News coverage attempts to show the event as it happens. Current Affairs programmes try to reveal a wider context, but the role of the documentary is to reflect on the deeper meaning.

You'll probably tell me that's pretentious baloney...

>
> If Barclay's statement were to be followed, then
> you would pick a father talking about the birth of
> his daughter, over the actual footage of the
> father seeing his daughter being born, because
> there's "nothing more beautiful than a human
> head...". And that's baloney.

No - I don't think that's what he meant at all - but that's just a consequence of my taking the quote out of context. If you have the time, go here to learn a bit more about Baz:

[www.nzonscreen.com]

He's a bit of a legend down here...

cheers

Mike