Adrenaline, cliff diving, and live television

Greetings from a lounge chair sitting within view of a palm tree-lined beach and the Pacific Ocean.  We just finished a tasty breakfast (egg, veggie, and bacon frittata with orange juice and locally grown Maui coffee) and are now lounging poolside before lunch. It’s a rough life for sure.

Those who know me will attest that I’m a pretty driven guy – always got multiple projects going, always making plans.  Usually, I’m the one who goes on vacation and always has to be doing something or going somewhere.  Go go go go.

Except this time.  I, my wife, and another couple are spending a week in Maui with the specific goal of doing very, very little.  So far, so good – yesterday we walked along the beach coastline, hung out in the surf, drank maitais with lunch, sat around our condo, barbecued ribs and zucchini for dinner, and sat on our lanai (Hawaii-speak for “balcony”) talking until we retired for the evening.  Today promises to be much the same.

I’m very aware that other people’s vacations to Hawaii tend towards much more activity.  They get up at 5am, go mountain biking for 3 hours before breakfast, then drive to the sea cliffs where they go rock climbing, then paddle a kayak to the next beach to cook lunch over a campfire, then take a helicopter tour to the top of oceanside cliffs from which they go cliff diving.  Afterwards they go into town to the nearest bar that has a DJ and dance until the wee hours of the morning.

Oy.  I’m getting tired just imagining it.

When it comes to vacation, certain people are obvious adrenaline junkies.  But did you know there are adrenaline junkies in the editing world too?

Have you ever seen the end of a live show like American Idol and enjoyed the montage of all the singers’ performances that just happened minutes earlier?  Have you ever watched the Super Bowl or World Cup games and seen the final compilation of the best moments of the broadcast put together to a high-energy piece of music?  All those montages were put together by an editor in a matter of minutes, sometimes with mere seconds to spare before dropping in the final shot and beginning live playback.  To do that, you gotta be good at your job – you have to be fast, and you have to be accurate. If you’ve ever been inside a control room during a live broadcast, you’ll know that it requires a lot of concentration to do your job.  You’re expected to be perfect, because mistakes often end up being very obviously seen or heard often by millions of people.  Mistakes reflect poorly on you, the whole crew, and the entire television network, so live television is often very stressful.  People yell, scream, and regularly get fired and then rehired after the show finishes for the day.

I’ve done some quick-turn editing for live tv myself, and it’s a blast.  

3 Big Ideas – You Pick!

We’re cooking up some new stuff here at Editmentor. In exchange for a couple clicks from you, we’re dropping some knowledge in today’s post that you very well may not be able to find anywhere else. There’s a whole world of things I (Jeff) and my people here in Hollywood could talk about and demonstrate – but you know what? It doesn’t mean squat unless it speaks to YOU.  What are YOU into?

We’ve come up with three potential subjects that we could talk about for AGES. I’ll be talking about the general idea of each one plus specific technique or information that will give you the flavor for each subject.  Then just click on our fancy little poll thing to let us know what you think – including ideas of your own – and you can even find out what other people think too.

We give YOU some tasty knowledge, and YOU tell US which idea you like best. Deal?

Here we go.

Idea #1: The Feel of Editing – specific, rarely discussed techniques that help edits work.

I remember when I was an assistant editor at my first tv show in Hollywood (Blind Date, for the record).  My boss was talking about one of the editors at the show. “Peter’s edits are like butter.  They’re so smooth, all the time.”  He obviously saw that as a very complimentary thing, and I wondered how I could become an editor with sequences that “played like butter.”  Years later, I can say that I achieve that goal regularly.  And that’s not just my own opinion – I can’t tell you how many times in recent years producers have said “this section just doesn’t work, could you just make it better?” or “just take a pass and give it some love” or some variation of “Jeff, just make it feel right.”

The feel.  It all comes down to the feel.

How do you make your sequences FEEL RIGHT?

Oscars! Success! And why film degrees are not the point.

Well here we are.  It’s post-Oscars, the Super Bowl of US moviemaking.  Those of you who follow me on Facebook, you know that I publicly announced how amazing I thought The Hurt Locker was before it won any golden statues.  I’ll be talking more about that movie in another post.

In the meantime, you know all those folks who were saying “thank you” for their awards?  Did you notice how often they thanked the colleges they went to?  Cuz they didn’t.

Speaking plainly, film school – and most film professors who share their knowledge and passion for storytelling at film school –  is good for reasons discussed below.  The need for a film degree, though, is greatly misunderstood.  In fact, I’ll be as transparent to say that I have not finished my Bachelor degree.

My lack of a college degree has not at all hindered me or many others in our paths to success in Hollywood.  Now granted, I haven’t won an Emmy or an Oscar.  I will say, though, that my editing work has been seen around the world by millions of people, and I have earned over $100,000 a year in Hollywood since the age of 22.  Which is why when a Facebook friend asked me my thoughts on BFAs and MFAs in film and the relative values thereof, I proceeded to step up onto my soapbox and typed out the following, which I would wish every film student in the world could see before embarking on becoming the next Spielberg.  By the way, keep reading for a shocking tidbit about Mr. Spielberg.

Dreams of an Olympic editor

A couple nights ago I watched the Olympics on my big HDTV at home.  After my initial gawking at all the makeup caked on the figure skaters, I started thinking about goals and how they shift.  See, there was a time when the one thing I wanted to do most was… edit for the Olympics.  Now I’ve never been athletic – to this very day I become insecure the instant I set foot on a basketball court, pick up a baseball bat, or swing a golf club.  I figured that even though I have no desire to put in the work necessary to be an Olympic athlete, I would achieve the next best thing by being one of the people who bring their stories to the world.

In 2003, NBC was crewing up for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.  I was cutting for a daily entertainment news show on FOX, and I started asking everyone I knew about who I should contact to get on board with NBC.  Well whaddya know, I started getting leads.  A fellow editor from my previous job, also at FOX, had a friend who ran a post house in New York City who had also cut on location for multiple rounds of Olympics.  I called the contact in New York, and he gave me the info for the Director of Olympic Operations at NBC.  I kept asking around in Los Angeles for leads to the Olympics, and they pointed me to the same guy, who I emailed inquiring about how a young, fast, motivated editor could end up editing for the Olympics in Athens.

Screaming into microphones

A follow-up of our discussion of ADR and looping. Make sure to check out previous posts Actors In Tiny Boxes and ADR, Emmys, and Atomic Bombs.  Not only do individual actors often come back into the studio to re-record audio after production has wrapped, sometimes groups of actors called “loop groups” are brought in to recreate or enhance off-camera dialogue, ambience, or general group chatter.

The following is a follow-up to ADR editor Jill D’Aubery’s story of The Day After, for which she won an Emmy.  Jill remembers…

I had a wonderful loop group that worked on that project. The director, Nick Meyer, wanted the sound of the earth itself screaming in protest as it was torn apart. So I lined up my 20 loopers and recorded a separate scream from each of them. I also recorded a scream from all the women loopers together and a separate scream from all the men plus a few screams from the entire group. I did this at the complete end of the group looping sessions which lasted, if I remember correctly, around a week or so.

I cut these screams together and the result was amazing! When you heard the screams without any other sound, it WAS like the death throes of the earth! But when the incredible work of the sound effect editors was added to the screams it was chilling. And even though we had all worked on this for months and months, when we heard and saw the final result on the dub stage, I don’t think there was a single dry eye in the room. The bombs fell, the trees swayed violently, buildings crumbled and exploded, people and horses were vaporized…and over, through, and beneath it all was sound. Terrifying sound. Sound made more human by the voices of 20 terrific actors portraying the earth itself.

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Clearly a moment to remember.  Work on enough projects – be they professional or personal – and you’ll have those kind of moments yourself.  Here’s one of mine.

Picture from Brendan Donnison www.lypsinc.com

Got Greener Grass?

Cows like grass.  So do people, especially when it appears to be greener than the grass on which they’re currently standing.  Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if… oh, if only I could… oh, I’d be so much happier if… blah blah blah.  Now don’t get me wrong, imagining possibilities is critical.  Never being satifisfied with anything?  That’ll wear you down, and usually others too.

In the world of acting,there’s a hierarchy. Thousands of would-be actors in Los Angeles would give their eyeteeth to book a gig, one gig, ANY paying gig.  Many already have and wish they could just get any kind of recurring role.  Then there are the working actors – those who randomly book the occasional supporting or featured roles on a commercial, tv, or movie, and can keep the rent paid.  The ones who have it good are actors who book regular roles on soap operas, which crank out episodes day after day.

Yet I happen to know many actors don’t value roles on soap operas as much as if they were working on a dramatic tv series.  And those in tv series *really* wish they could make the jump to C or B-list movie roles.  Those who do appear in said C/B-list roles wish they were A-list.  And A-listers have been known to be discontent because they’re not Tom Cruise.  And you know what?  

Rethinking…. in glorious Technicolor!

Everything changes. This is what occupies my mind as I sit down for Sunday lunch at one of my favorite restaurants in Hollywood – a tiny Cuban restaurant called El Floridita. It’s in a dumpy little strip mall at Fountain and Vine, and you’d never know it existed unless someone told you. The food is mouth-watering, and the mojitos are the real deal, Havana style… crumpled mint leaves and a freshly squeezed lemon wedge swirling around in the glass, together conspiring to clog the straw completely. Sooooo good.

To get here today, I took the Sunset Boulevard exit on the 101 Freeway, driving by the venerable Sunset Gower Studios on Sunset Boulevard and the gleaming office building housing the Hollywood operations of Technicolor. Ah, Technicolor – now there’s a name that’s been attached to Hollywood for quite some time. Ever since 35mm film was invented, Technicolor has been synonymous with innovation, bringing color to a cinematic world that had previously existed only in black and white.

To bring “glorious Technicolor” to the world, the company built its business model around vast film laboratories and printers built to crank out negative film stock for Hollywood productions, and the resources needed to take a master negative cut of a film and reproduce it hundreds, even thousands of times, and distribute to all the movie theaters around the United States for decades and decades.

So imagine that you’re the CEO of Technicolor, and you see a phenomenon creeping into Hollywood that allows filmmakers to shoot not on film, but digital files that eventually could end up replacing film completely. What to do? The entire business model that has worked for your company for the last 80 years is disappearing. What do you do?

Who do you work with?

Many people who come to Hollywood do so with preconceptions they may not know they even hold. Ideas of what roles they see themselves taking on, places they’d like to work, and people with whom they could collaborate or hang out.

Often when just starting out, I’ve seen people say, “Ooh, you act? Sweet! You should act in my film!” Or “Ooh, you edit? Cool, wanna cut my short film?”

That’s all well and good when you’re in a place where any gig is a good gig, and any credit is better than no credit. As we progress down whatever our path may be, we start figuring out more about what jobs are good to take and what we turn down. Also the people with whom we like to work, and those whom we don’t.

It took me a while to figure out how important it is to seek projects that have good people on them. And when I say “good”, I mean people with whom you can actually stand spending time. Of course, you’ll end up working with jerks at some point no matter what business you’re in, and Hollywood is no exception.

I was at an industry event a number of years ago, and a member of the panel was telling about his time as a rerecording mixer at Warner Brothers. He said that he and his crew always cringed when they heard that the next film to mix there would be one with lots of car chases and explosions – because inevitably the people in charge of those sessions would be testosterone-driven jerks, and the next four months of sound editing and mixing would be hell.

Private screening: Dang, I have arrived.

It’s the day after my birthday, and I will say that it’s been a very good one. People ask me if I ever feel shortchanged by the fact that my birthday is as close to Christmas as it is, and the truth is I don’t. As I grew up in a family that celebrated only Christmas, my parents insisted on not putting up Christmas decorations until after my birthday, so I always had that dividing line; my birthday belonged exclusively to me. Just one of the multitude of things my parents did right.

I still keep that separation to this day. Believe it or not, the main reminder happens every morning, thinking “Even though Starbucks is pushing their holiday drinks, I’m not going to deviate from my daily Grande Vanilla Latte until after my birthday.” Heh. Am I a creature of habit? In some ways, not at all. In others, ohhh yes. And I’m getting off topic here. Back to birthdays.

Not only have I always had my own birthday, I’ve always received presents for both my birthday and Christmas. Very few gifts or occasions stand out in my memory… though I’m always reminded of one in particular each time December rolls around.

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Some years after I had moved to LA, I grew dissatisfied of only editing on other people’s projects and decided to produce some short films to show off my film editing chops. Lavinia’s Heist was one of those projects. Don Goodman, the writer/director/producer, brought me on board initially to edit, and later as full producer as Lavinia went through the finishing process.

Into the sunset – in a British taxi

Humans constantly wrestle with ways to provide meaning to themselves and the world around them, and Hollywood provides the tantalizing possibility of an enormous venue that speaks messages to the entire planet. People coming here ponder dreams of becoming a movie star, an entertainment mogul, or a renowned artist known for communicating ideas and feelings that change the world. Heady prospects indeed.

Whatever the dreams may be, it’s safe to say that most people don’t come to Hollywood with the aspiration of putting out content that’s pointless, disposable, or both, any more than anyone else gets out of bed in the morning saying “I aspire to be useless and superficial today.”

Now it’s one thing to acknowledge that Hollywood puts out shocking amounts of content that is exactly that – superficial, or so ephemeral as to be outdated mere moments after being released to the world. It’s another thing entirely to get paid good money to crank out that material, day after day after day, realizing that those cherished dreams of saying something meaningful to the world through moving pictures could so easily languish or even die if we let them.

But every once in a while, we have moments (like those mentioned in the previous post) that remind us why we’re storytellers, and why stories are so powerful.