Trust us, we’re professionals

We recently discussed the Very Serious Topic of Brown M&Ms and why they matter.  Next question: what do you do with Brown M&Ms?  What is acceptable procedure for dealing with Brown M&Ms?  Weighty questions which deserve sober answers, to be sure.

In the previous Brown M&Ms post, I mentioned the following:

…part of editing professionally is learning the appropriate practices for any given project, and sticking to them so everyone knows that they can hand things off to you and know it’s gonna be done excellently, and done right.

Rick, a friend of Editmentor, commented:

Forgive the noob comment, but where exactly are the specifications of appropriate practices?
  Is it a customer by customer basis? How would one develop the good habits without specifications or guidelines?

Far from being noobish – those are very legitimate questions that aren’t quickly answered.  “Professional practices” vary wildly at times, are rarely codified, and sometimes it’s difficult to find that out until you’re actually on a job and you “screw up” – i.e. go against expectations that may not even have been concretely expressed!  At which point you say “how the heck was I supposed to know that?”  And people just kind of look at you funny and say “Uh, that’s normal.  Everyone knows that.”  (It’s not unlike women expecting men to read their minds without actually saying what they actually want, then getting all worked up when men’s ESP isn’t perfect.  My wife is not like that, and I am so grateful.  But I digress.)

The more I thought about professional practices, the more I realized I had other questions to address first.  Editmentor serves lots of different people with varying levels of experience, and we’ve had a number of questions from people asking “How can I become a professional editor?”  And, in a world where literally anyone can assemble clips of video and audio on their own computer, what makes a professional editor professional?

Change – not just coins in your pocket

Change happens to all of us, certainly to me.  I was watching a movie at home last night with my wife, both notable things – I rarely watch movies at home, and up until last month I didn’t have a wife.

We were watching That’s Entertainment, a film featuring clips from classic MGM musicals and hosted by former MGM stars including Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Frank Sinatra.  In the 1940’s and 50’s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) was the undisputed king of the Hollywood musical, producing classics including The Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain, Gigi, An American In Paris, and many others.  By 1974, when the host segments for That’s Entertainment were shot on the old MGM backlot, the studio barely resembled the powerhouse it once was.  In fact, the studio had failed to evolve with the times and had lost so much money in the 60’s that in 1973 the studio’s new owners almost completely shut down production to rein in the studio’s massive debts.  Not only that, That’s Entertainment’s host segment shoots were emotional for some of these stars, who, having spent years acting on those sets, knew that they were the last scenes to be shot before the entire backlot, recently sold to real estate developers, would be bulldozed to the ground.

Not only was MGM in dire straits, the studio heads weren’t all that sure about the film’s prospects, being one of the first “docu-tainment” or “clip show” movies.  

ADR, Emmys, and Atomic Bombs

Part 2 of the recent online discussion of ADR and looping took place via Facebook email – on my asking permission to use her name in the Actors in tiny boxes post, Jill D’Aubery sent along some extra details about her experience as an ADR editor. Oh, and by the way, the project which she mentions below earned her an Emmy. Not bad.

Jill D’Aubery: The story behind my Emmy win is quite interesting since it was for The Day After way back in 1984. The TV special was originally 4 hours long, cut to 3.5 hours when it showed. But since over half of it took place after nuclear bombs fell on Kansas City and there was an EMP effect story-wise, and all the dialogue had to be replaced after the bombs fell because we couldn’t use any sort of white sound. The EMP meant that there was no electricity; so no air conditioners, no traffic noise, etc. I worked alone on that one project, no other ADR editors, and lived with those damned bombs for 6 months of my life. And the sound that was concocted for the actual bombing reel was incredible!!! I think, if I remember rightly, that we went out to some 93 reels of sound for that one reel alone…a great deal of which was added ADR.

Jeff’s added comments: Of course at that time, they didn’t have Avids, Pro Tools, Final Cut, any of that… sound was compiled on separate reels of magnetic film stock and eventually played back at the dubbing stage for mixdown on “dubber” machines like the one shown here. So when you see the term “rerecording mixer”, that’s literally what they were doing – the ADR and SFX editors had assembled all the sound elements on separate sound reels that were played back all at once in sync to picture and were literally rerecorded on the mixing stage to the final mixdown tapes. So as Jill mentions above, just imagine 93 dubbers spinning at once in the machine room of the mixing stage. Crazy.

jeff bartsch, pt 1: hollywood? nah… well, okay.

Towards the goal of helping you think like a successful editor, we feature stories from different editors about their career paths. Knowing the paths that other people have taken is part of figuring out how one’s own path compares… and figuring out if we’re heading in the right direction. Which may or may not have anything to do with other people’s stories at all – your story is your choice. Here’s part of Jeff’s.

I was in high school in a tiny Midwest town, the only kid I knew who was actually into video and film. I produced a video that won some regional awards, which afforded me semi-celebrity status in the eyes of the local newspaper. Either that or they had some extra space left over from an unusually slow day in the obituary column. (No, I’m not kidding. Deadly serious, that’s me.) The reporter asked me about my future aspirations: “So Jeff, do you see yourself ending up in Hollywood?” Frankly, I had never considered it and wasn’t all that interested at the time, so I said no. Fast forward a decade and where do I end up? Go figure.

Fact is, when I graduated from high school, I had so many different things I was into… I produced, shot, and edited all my video projects; played piano, French horn, and the occasional Sousaphone for marching band; taught piano lessons, did some radio announcing, spent hours recording music with my MIDI studio, read voraciously, and still played with Legos (the really cool kind with gears and levers and electric motors). Didn’t have many friends, but then again I was too busy to really worry about it. So when I thought about “what I wanted to be when I grew up” and thought I had to choose just one thing, my brain started spinning in circles. Should I specialize in one thing, or be the jack of all trades, master of none? I had no idea.

gimme a gluepot.

The following sentences could quite possibly be one of the biggest things I’d wished I had known when I first started editing:

 

All editing systems are tools, nothing more. Tools in and of themselves are meaningless. Only when a person engages his or her mind in conjunction with the tools can anything meaningful take place.

 

A few years ago I went to lunch in Hollywood with my friend Sam (not his real name). Sam is about the same age as I, also grew up in the Midwest, and loves working on the Avid. We were talking about this at-the-time new program called Final Cut Pro, and he was vehement.

“It’s not the Avid. It can never be as good. There’s no way.”

By that time I had actually forced myself to start learning Final Cut, and like most people who use both Avid and Final Cut, I had things I liked and disliked about both. I tried to tell him that it doesn’t matter what system you use, it matters what you do with it. These days, most people hire editors for their editing skills, not their knowledge of a certain fancy editing rig… the knowledge of the editing rig is a given.

Sam was unconvinced. “The Avid is the only system for me,” he declared. I shrugged and changed the subject.