Drinking from a Fire Hose

Starting a project for the first time can feel a-lot, like a-lot, a-lot.

Where to begin and how to begin? The overwhelming amount of hard rives and sometimes creative naming conventions and flavours used on shoot can cause anxiety in the best of us. With reference to the beginning, here I'm talking of the beginning of the edit, I don't necessarily mean the beginning of the storyline or narrative but the start day of the shoot and or shoots. So with this in mind the best place to start is usually (spoiler alert) at the beginning.

Side Note: Talking about the beginning, as in at the very start of Preproduction - this is a critical time. I'll cover this Preproduction considerations, and shooting for the edit in a later blog, watch this space.

Day 1, roll 1, as is the mantra of the cutting room, it's a process of elimination, then moving onto all things creative as we weave our tapestry.

Understanding what you will need to kick off this epic adventure of making a natural history film is best practice.

I almost always begin with stringouts. This is the way I prefer to work, the thing with using only logging is that you tend to go with your first couple of searches mitigating the opportunity to see what gems lie hidden, now with stringouts you create a work flow that allows you to understand exactly what you're working with. Stringouts are not to be confused with selects, however.

Selects come out of the stringouts you've poured over. It's very much like building a house, once the foundation is solid the fun begins.

Side Note: If you work at a facility or with producers that prefer to log before hand, then you get that as an option in your arsenal, if you use the stringout methodology as well. I prefer to keep my world in sync. There are no wrong or rights, it's just how I work, learning new tricks all the time.

Let's play a game, you've been hired to work on an epic piece, the footage is somewhere in the region of 500 hours. It's a-lot, but panicking will only make you cloudy. So we sort and organise, we do this by sorting it into achievable portions, you can then also understand and work out an edit schedule. You can’t run a marathon at full pace (well 95% of the gen pop can’t). As many experienced hikers will tell you, it's one step at a time while having the ultimate goal in there somewhere- the trick being not to overwhelm yourself.

Starting a new edit is like this, we all have rituals or routines that help find our zone. But it can feel like a mountain we are just a little too unfit to conquer at times.

Chatting with the husband the other morning, we were having quite a, techno intense conversation, more specifically backing up in the cloud space (I'm not just referring to Dropbox or Google Drive) the real back end of how this vertical works, kind of chat.

(He's in the biz) these conversations usually leave me armed with some much needed knowledge but also the impending need to sit down and take deep breaths with my head between my knees, its an overload.

Seeing my expression on this specific day, in a crowded coffee shop he looked at me over his cappuccino and calmly said "look I know this is a-lot and it's like drinking from a fire hose", I didn't hear much after that, I tell you what, my tea come out of my face, I think my ears may have also joined in.

After regaining some composure and wiping the table, ignoring the stares. I had an epiphany, my aching nerves, this is a perfect way to describe starting an edit. There's so much information, story lines, footage, music considerations, natural sound, proxies, proxies that inexplicably won't export, different frame rates, multiple cameras, technical "fixes" that shouldn't be but are. Not to mention on space and hard drive management, as I said at the beginning, it's a-lot.

It's just like drinking from a fire hose, some goes in but there's a-lot of spray and it makes a hell of a mess. And that's also okay, because if you're systematic about the process and calm, let's never forget calm. You can and will get to where you need to be.

The hard drives arrive, you stare at them for a moment, bracing for the next step, you take charge of your mouse albeit on shaky legs, wondering how you will ever get through this. Oh dear heart, you will and you will own it, too.

It's a phased approach.

Copy the media (in three places) 321 Rule, always.

Make your proxies keeping the identical naming conventions (this will save your ass) it’s not the time to get creative. There's plenty of time for that later. This is systematic and calculated. You're finally ready to get going.

Stringouts - one of my favourite parts of the process. It's like opening presents on Christmas morning. All shiny and new, full of possibilities.

Starting at shot 1 and moving from there, I start allocating shots to timeliness. Every shot no matter what you think of it needs to go onto a timeline, you never know when you might need that wobbly, rack focus shot, and I promise you finding that needle in the haystack of 500+ hours later is a nightmare, its not worth your time or stress. Pull it now, as you see it.

When you see something new you make a new timeline. Rinse and repeat.

Yes this can become many of timelines but you will quickly start to see your story unfolding. And get your head around the TL's too.

Ie: if you're making a film about ducks. You'd start at the beginning (not sure if I've rammed this home yet...)

I have some standard timelines (a recipe I keep as a library to be filled in) and then when I see something unique I'll add a new one with relevance to that moment. Sometimes I'll have a TL with just one shot, moment or scene on it and other TL’s will be many hours long.

Ie:

Scenics Morning

Scenics Afternoon

Time-lapse

Drone with ducks

Drone with cameo characters (these can be stripped out too - up to your workflow)

Close ups

Ducks feeding

Duck lone

Ducks two shots cameos

Ducks mamma and ducklings

Ducks in water.

Etc

This can also lead to multiple projects (libraries)

Ie:

Ducks Cameo Stringouts

Interview Stringouts

Once you've laid every shot onto a timeline you can then take a breath, go for a walk, clear your head, make some tea and get comfy for a viewing marathon, watch it all - in high speed of course.

Side note: while adding to these TL's I usually add markers for specifics as I go along to reference back at the next step.

Moving onto creating Selects. The way I do this is to have a stringouts Project (Library if you're in FCP) and then duplicate it, always keeping the master stringout untouched to refer back to if ever you need it. It shouldn't be that big, you're working in proxies.

Once duplicated, I rename the projects to:

Ducks Stringouts Cameo_Selects

Stringouts Interview_Selects ETC

I start the process of splitting out the timelines and delete what I think I won't need. Remembering that I always have the stringouts to refer back to.

As I go along (and you guessed it, from the top) I delete and consolidate scenes on the timelines. I try to keep whole scenes together. So for example if I have a scene - ducklings hatching, I would add to this the relevant Scenics, I would also have those Scenics on the Scenics TL for incase and also if I didn't end up using them there I have them for a scenic establishing scene or a cutaway breathing moment sprinkled into the edit.

From here it's all about eliminating what you don't need and getting to a place where you have your scenes constructed in a way that you can start editing. The TL’s can be hours long with a slug between scenes, sequences and sometimes a lone shot that I've identified as important or noteworthy.

It's around now that the post-its come out to play. I write out the scenes I've identified and each gets their own post-it and up it goes onto the wall. Once this starts to happen I start to "see" the story. It's all there, laid out. Have I mentioned I do all this while listening to music. Check out the "Scratching an itch - music my love" blog post if you'd like to see my peculiar music process.

It's at this point I begin to cut Scenes, this time I create a new project (library) and use the timelines (projects in FCP) to start cutting whole scenes, sometimes even laying in a track. Moving from here I create a Rough Cut project and always have the Rough Cut Timeline and a Working Timeline, as I complete scenes they go in. I don't edit in sequence to the narrative, I will find a scene that inspires me and cut that, I generally at this stage will have a rough idea of what's going in (shout out to post-its again) as I finish Rough scenes I lay them into the greater TL. The story starts to comes together. If I've eliminated something and need to find it to make the scene work better, I'll go through the stringouts again to find a perfect match cut or graphic match.

Once I have a fleshy edit and a few days before I'm due to export the Rough Cut, I usually scrub through the stringouts again just to check I haven't changed a storyline that will now benefit from something left out.

Polishing the RC story is next, adding sound and music and even a basic grade, I’ll then finesse scenes as I add scratch tracks and find if the narrative is working. It’s the best part, seeing all this clips on the timeline, constructed and making sense.

It’s the jelly beans on top of an extraordinary parfait!

Thoughts on The Jackson Wild Summit 2022

Making The Jump From Premiere To Resolve