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Brad Bird’s ‘The Iron Giant’

by uncredited
written by uncredited 4 minutes read

by Sheri Galloway

What if a gun had a soul? That was the question that was pinned to walls, doors and bulletin boards on the production of The Iron Giant. The year was 1999 and we had been working on the film for over a year when the Columbine Massacre happened. Like the rest of the world, we were stunned — but even more so because our movie was about a giant robot who didn’t know he was designed to be a killing machine.

I started my career on low-budget live action movies in Texas. My IMDb page has a few “wish to be forgotten” titles on it. So when I had a chance to move from Lawnmower Man 2 to Mulan, I made the leap to animation. It was a little frightening, but I knew that I would now have the opportunity to work on films that I could share with my grandchildren. And of all the animated films I have worked on, The Iron Giant is the one of which I am most proud.

This film not only shows that the government can be irrational, it also covers the question of guns. Guns kill. The recent Colorado theatre massacre brings that to our attention again. The Iron Giant learned he was “a gun.” He was attacked by people who did not understand him. He tried to run but was pursued and damaged by violence. He lost who he was and turned into that killing machine. It seems we don’t know or understand how an innocent child can somehow turn to violence, but The Iron Giant opened up that world. It showed how violence creates more violence. Just as the giant was about to destroy the world, he was saved by his friend Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal). Hogarth was there for him and told him he did not have to be a gun.

The film was directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and edited by Darren Holmes, ACE (How to Train Your Dragon). As first assistant, I learned so much from watching Darren’s work. He created performances by taking pieces of dialogue from different readings and putting them together. Sometimes all he had to do was add a sigh and we gained a whole new insight into the character’s feelings. Of course, the biggest challenge in editorial is that animators often open up the length of each scene and this can endanger the pacing of the entire film. It was a cherished learning experience to watch Darren collaborate with Brad and the animators to preserve the best of both worlds.

The Iron Giant. Warner Bros.

The names of the crew who worked on this film are a Who’s Who of animation. However, Entertainment Weekly has it listed in the “50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen.” The Iron Giant dominated the Annie Awards in 1999, winning every category in which it was nominated. How is it that this movie was never seen? It was a blow to us. We thought we were making a film that audiences would throng to see.

But the truth? The Iron Giant was a marketing tragedy. The Studio didn’t understand the film from the start. A movie that harkens back to the Red Scare of the ‘50s? But I lived those days. Brave New World and 1984 were books we studied in high school. So I totally identified with a small boy trying to hide a gentle giant robot from a government fearful that everything was a Communist threat.

The Iron Giant is a film that teaches us about our humanity, our soul. It delivers the message in a gentle and warm story. If just for those reasons alone, this would be one of my favorite films. But I also learned a lesson from working on it. Marketing matters. Because a big massive studio didn’t put anything into it, three years of my life boiled down to a DVD in the kids’ rental aisle of my local video store. At the time, the pain I experienced when The Iron Giant opened and closed in just a few weeks was stunning. It felt like a catastrophe. For years, we got sympathetic smiles from our fellow filmmakers. There was lots of praise and appreciation for what we did and it helped so much to have the respect of our peers, yet it was so disheartening that so few people knew what a great little film it was.

Luckily, over the years something incredible happened. A new generation of young people found The Iron Giant on the Cartoon Network. In a recent article for Indiewire.com, a comparison was made between The Iron Giant and It’s a Wonderful Life: Both films gained their fame on television. I have learned that despite the box office, a truly great film will find its way.

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Features

Ghoul’s Night Out: Catherine Apple Checks into ‘Hotel Transylvania’

by Garrett Gilchrist
written by Garrett Gilchrist 11 minutes read

by Garrett Gilchrist • portraits by Wm. Stetz

Fun. Catherine Apple keeps saying that word while discussing Hotel Transylvania, the animated feature from Sony Pictures Animation and Columbia Pictures, which she edited. Opening September 28, in plenty of time for Halloween, the 3D film stars Adam Sandler, who voices Dracula and leads a cast that includes Andy Samberg, Kevin James, David Spade and Fran Drescher, among others. Sandler is also one of the producers.

Image from Hotel Transylvania. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

“It’s extremely funny,” Apple enthuses. “It’s different than anything that’s been out, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Hotel Transylvania is a hotel for monsters, all these wonderful characters that are friends of Dracula, who runs it. His daughter Mavis is turning 118, and a human, Jonathan, finds his way into the hotel. Drac has to get this human out to keep his daughter safe. He’s struggling with the fact that she’s growing up, which I think a lot of parents can understand.

“Yet it has a really nice story about friendship and the relationship between Drac and Jonathan, and how it changes them,” she continues. “It’s done in such a fun way. There are jokes in the movie that I’ve seen over and over and I’m still laughing. That says a lot for me, because I usually stop laughing by now.”

Hotel Transylvania is the first feature film from Russian-born director Genndy Tartakovsky, who is well respected in the animation world for extremely stylized, action-packed 2D TV series like Sym-Bionic Titan (2010-11), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2003-05), Samurai Jack (2001- 04) and Dexter’s Laboratory (1996-2003).

Image from Hotel Transylvania. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

“Genndy’s 2D style really comes over in 3D,” Apple says. “It’s much more broad animation than you’ve seen in other features. Everything’s taken to the next level, which really adds to the comedy. The film is cartoony but not Saturday-morning cartoony; there’s a sophistication to it. Smaller kids like the idea of being scared and seeing monsters, while older people will be entertained. The film takes these characters that everyone knows and puts a little twist on them, making them fun and funny.”

Despite the fact that Hotel Transylvania is Tartakovsky’s first feature, the director wasn’t nervous, according to his editor. “He’s extraordinarily comfortable in this medium, and he knows exactly what he wants,” Apple attests. “I know he’s working with a much bigger team and that must be different. But if there were any hiccups or bumps with him coming into such a large project, I didn’t feel them. He made that transition with ease.”

Tartakovsky’s expressive animation style brought the best out of the voice performances, according to Apple. “Genndy really brings these characters to life, in a very fun, entertaining way. I think every character is likeable in this movie. Adam Sandler has a range of emotions that he brings to Drac, and Kevin James — just saying his lines as Frankenstein — makes me laugh so much. But the character I liked better after we started putting his voice to it was the Mummy; Cee-Lo Green brought such a nice flavor to it.”

For both director and editor, the film often walked a tightrope between comedy and characterization. “It’s a pretty fast- paced film, and the timing is crucial,” Apple says. “How do you keep the comedy going, and make sure the story works? Sometimes you’re choosing between humor and what needs to be said. There’s always a balance.”

An animation editor is often on a film for three years or more. An animated film starts out as simply drawn storyboards and temporary voices. Over time, the script and storyboards evolve until the team has a film with which it is happy. In the case of Hotel Transylvania, that development was a long and rocky road, according to Apple.

Scenes from Hotel Transylvania. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

“I wasn’t on this movie for three years; I’ve been on it only for 11 months, which is very rare for me,” she says. “It was one of those projects that’s been through quite a few different hands over quite a few years. Genndy wasn’t the first director. I’m not even sure what number he is. But when he started, that’s when the film came together. They had just found a script they liked. There was no animation then, just boards and some production dialogue — but a lot of scratch dialogue and sound effects, as well as temp music. Genndy completely revamped it for his style and vision. Then I came on and we revamped it again. We went into every sequence in the movie and reworked it.”

Tartakovsky’s clear, expressive vision came as a relief to the producers. “I know that right away they were very impressed with him,” Apple continues. “They liked his direction, the way he took the story, and where it was going.” The studio trusted Tartakovsky, and so did co-producer and star Sandler, according to the editor. “Adam was at all the test screenings, and he definitely had notes; he’d even come into editorial for a while,” she says. “The screenings have been extremely well received. There have been hardly any negative comments at all, and it just keeps getting better all the time.”

Apple is quick to credit her editorial staff for their work on Hotel Transylvania. “I have a great crew,” she says. “[Additional editor] Mark Yeager, my associate, is absolutely wonderful. Nolan Southerland and Andy Leviton are my assistants, and James Kirkpatrick is my first assistant. We’ve worked together before.”

A scene from Hotel Transylvania. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

According to Apple, she “just fell into” a career in animation. “I come from a small town in Michigan, and had a career there; I never thought about coming to LA to work,” she recalls. “I went back to school, to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and then to CalArts for my master’s degree.” She soon realized that editing was what she liked best, and decided to pursue an internship; she began working on the animated TV series Life with Louie (1995) as a track reader. “This was all on mag,” she continues. “Then I became an assistant there. When you study film, you have to do animation, but I can’t draw in any way. I’d animate with photos and always enjoyed it, but never even thought about doing it as a career.”

In 1997, Apple was first assistant to Dan Molina on Cats Don’t Dance. “That was my first feature so it always holds a special place in my heart,” she says. “I learned a lot from Dan by watching and working with him. He is a very open editor and, from the beginning, always gave me stuff to practice cutting. That’s really when I got the animation bug. You see the film change and grow and you get very attached to the movies you work on. It’s so different
than live action.”

Apple worked with Molina again on Road to El Dorado (2000) and Chicken Little (2005). “I’ve worked with Dan for most of my career,” she adds. “And with each film I moved up.”

On El Dorado, the team moved from film to digital editing. “That was the biggest change, learning the Avid,” Apple says. “It was a really exciting time to be at DreamWorks; they were just up-and-coming.” Chicken Little was her first 3D film, in stereoscopic CGI. “I didn’t find that going to 3D changed what we go through as much, because we spend so much time working with storyboards,” she reveals. “We edit things the same. Maybe it’s faster- paced, cutting with 3D. But it definitely changed how we work with layout. We used to get layout back as drawn boards. Now we get back rendered 3D scenes with camera movement. It was a great movie, learning-wise. I enjoy each movie so much when I’m on it, and a lot of it has to do with the people I work with. It was a great crew.”

Apple’s first film as lead editor was Gnomeo and Juliet (2011). “Kelly Asbury really gave me my start as an editor,” she says. “He’s a veteran director, and was absolutely wonderful to work with. That’s another movie they tried to make several times before the final director came on. We were living in London, and went to Toronto. We moved around together as a group, and it’s a different camaraderie when you’re making a film that way for three years.”

The editorial crew for Hotel Transylvania, with a three-dimensional figure of one of the characters from the film, on the lot at Sony Pictures Studios: first assistant editor James Kirkpatrick, assistant editor Andrew Leviton, associate production manager Michelle Wong, assistant editor Nolan Southerland, picture editor Catherine Apple and additional editor Mark Yeager.

The film featured music by Elton John. “Of course, I grew up with his music, and it was really strange hearing, ‘Elton John is coming into your office!’” Apple recalls. “Musically, he was very involved, especially early on. He’d come in every few months and we’d show him where we were at. His husband was a producer on the show, and we’d always send the cuts to Elton. He’d give us good feedback and was always very positive.”

Apple confesses to learning a lot from Asbury, and also from Tartakovsky, who had a completely different approach to directing. “Whatever director you’re working with, you learn something new — and have to bring something else to the table and understand their sensibility. You change the way you cut,” she says. “I’m sure every editor feels this way. You’re constantly learning.”

For Apple, adaptability is the key to animation editing. “In live action you have the footage, but in animation anything can happen,” she says. “Things change drastically and you really have to be flexible. When the director wants to alter something, you’ve got to be able to change things very quickly and be open to trying anything. You cut so much material that won’t make it past storyboards. In animation, you can’t be too precious about anything.”

She finds the most creative period of animation editing is in watching the film in the storyboard stage. “You really see what’s missing, what you need to add, what you don’t like,”she explains. “You’re fleshing out the story and constantly trying different things — for three to six months or sometimes a year before you even bring the real actors in or start sending shots to layout.”

It’s as if the animation editor becomes another pair of hands for the director. “You’re constantly trying to get the timing and the feeling of the sequence that the director wants,” Apple says. “It’s not like live action, where he’s directing an actor. You have the voices he’s directed, but you’re putting it to a face and timing it.” In a way, the editor is an actor being directed and giving a performance.

“I feel very connected to the animation community,” Apple says in conclusion. “This career just kinda fell into my lap, but I love it. I’m really glad to be working in animation.”

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Features

Honor Thy Editor

by Edward Landler
written by Edward Landler 4 minutes read

by Edward Landler

As part of their ongoing effort to gain recognition and acknowledgement for picture editors, the Motion Picture Editors Guild and the American Cinema Editors (ACE) launched a Petition for the Recognition of Editors in late June. The Committee for Creative Recognition, comprised of members from the Boards of Directors of both organizations, hopes to encourage film festivals and other organizations (both domestic and international) that present awards for achievement to honor the vital contributions of editors.

The petition clearly states its purpose: “Given the essential role film editors play in the creative process of making a film, acknowledging them is long overdue.”

The ACE Board began the campaign for greater awards recognition of editors over a year ago and has already scored some success. Last September, the 27th annual Boston Film Festival initiated an Editing category among the awards it bestowed upon its festival entries. In February 2012, the International Animated Film Society (ASIFA- Hollywood) for the first time included awards for Editing in a Feature Production and Editing in a  Television Production among its 39th Annual Annie Awards for outstanding achievements in animation. Also, in July of this year, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films presented an award for Best Film Editing as part of its 38th annual Saturn Awards for achievement in the genre.

Announcing the new category, Robin Dawson, executive director of the Boston Film Festival, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Editing is definitely one of the main elements of the film…and is critical to the director’s success.”

According to MPEG and ACE Board Member and chair of the Committee for Creative Recognition, Stephen Rivkin, A.C.E., who has been spearheading the campaign, the initial approach to those three venues involved letters and personal e-mails.

In the original letter, the case for the editor’s crucial role in filmmaking was made: “The editor creates the first cut as the film is being shot, which requires skills in storytelling, performance and shot selection, structure, rhythm, pace, length, taste and talent. This first viewing of the film is often the most important as a first impression is formed, and it helps the filmmakers to define the task ahead. The director and the editor are collaborators in the process of refining and trimming, working closely together through completion and delivery of the final film.”

In the case of ASIFA-Hollywood, the written communication led to a coordinated effort with DreamWorks Animation Studios and a demonstration of editing’s importance in the animation process to ASIFA board members in the DreamWorks cutting room.

Stephen Rivkin.
Photo by Wm. Stetz

Among the other organizations asked to consider editing awards are the Sundance Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, Film Independent’s Independent Spirit Awards, the Shanghai Film Festival, the San Sebastian (Spain) Film Festival, the Byron Bay (Australia) International Film Festival, the New York Film Critics Circle, the New York Film Critics Online, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics. The awards of all of these organizations already recognize either cinematography or production design or both. “We are going to continue our campaign of letter-writing and ongoing contact with those organizations — and back it up with these signatures,” Rivkin told The Hollywood Reporter as part of the kick- off of the petition drive.

Later, Rivkin said to CineMontage, “It’s time to take it to the next level to show that we have the support of more members of the film community. It adds more weight. In our e-mails to the critics associations, we send a link to the online petition to show we’re in the process of garnering support.” As of mid-August, the petition had received nearly 2,000 signatures.

Noting that they are looking for ways to branch out to the other industry guilds, societies and organizations, Rivkin said that they already have received signatures of directors, producers, writers, production designers and cinematographers from over 25 countries around the world. Along with the signatures, encouraging and helpful comments are coming in as well.

“One of our petition supporters suggested that we approach the Tribeca Film Festival,” he related, “because it was pointed out that they were recognizing documentary editing but not narrative editing.” Guild and ACE members are excited by the idea of getting involved, according to Rivkin. “They are sensing support and now they’re seeing progress as organization by organization is recognizing their work. We will make every effort it takes to elevate the perception of editors everywhere. I don’t care how much time it takes, as long as we’re moving in the right direction.”

For more information, see the ad on the opposite page, or visit www.editorspetition.com, where you can read and sign the petition.

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Union Made

UNION MADE: Following in Father’s Footsteps

by uncredited
written by uncredited 5 minutes read

by Nancy Frazen

Nancy Frazen.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I spent many Saturdays of my childhood watching my father, Stanley Frazen, A.C.E., edit hit television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian, Get Smart and The Monkees.  I loved coming to work with him, but I always thought it was too dark and solitary in those cutting rooms and wanted nothing to do with editing.

I had other plans.  I wanted to study acting.  After finishing college with a teaching credential (my parents insisted that I have a profession to “fall back on”), I attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in LA and then moved to New York, where I joined an improv group and did voiceovers, commercials and soaps.  I loved New York and was able to support myself acting, but the constant auditioning was wearing on me so I took a summer off to go home.

Back in Los Angeles, an assistant editor friend said that an animation company, Ruby Spears, needed an apprentice.  It would only be for six weeks so I thought, “Why not?”  I started editing quarter-inch reels of recorded audio sessions, then got bumped up to an assistant working with film on a Moviola.  I was surprised by how much I liked it.  Editing mirrored everything I had learned about performance, and it was fun to be behind the camera.

My father had instilled in me the value of a union with its benefits and solidarity (he even served as president of the Editors Guild), so when Ruby Spears went union and we all got in, I knew this was a giant foot-in-the-door opportunity.  Soon, another job followed at another animation production company, Filmation, working nights as an assistant editor.  During the day, I took improv classes at the Groundlings.  But when they asked me to perform on Sunday nights, I knew it would conflict with my assistant editing job.  Finally I had to choose––and editing became my next path.

I wanted to work in live action, but my only editorial experience was animation, so I had to start over as an apprentice, learning from three teams of editors and assistants on a TV series.  The first day, after I was finished synching and coding 35mm film dailies for the first time, the assistants and editors were all having a quick lunch when I nonchalantly asked, “So how many frames does it take to be out of sync?”  I still remember at least one fork dropping.

A supervising editor opportunity on the very challenging Space Jam followed my Paris adventure.  It was the early days of the Avid (as well as CG), so we had both Avid and film assistants, all helping and training each other.  We also worked with both a live-action crew and an animation crew, interpreting for both how the other worked.  Additionally, there were 14 different international animation studios submitting their work in very different formats.

Other jobs soon followed, including working for David Bretherton, ACE, on my first feature, and even assisting my father, which I will always treasure as a special experience.  Assisting Dede Allen, ACE, gave me my first glimpse of working for a smart, perceptive woman, and I finally allowed myself to imagine being an editor.

After cutting scenes with many of the editors with whom I had worked, a friend’s recommendation landed me my first solo editing job on the HBO documentary You Don’t Have to Die.  I loved the documentary form––finding the structure and organizing the material so it told a compelling story.  What a bonus when it won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short the next year.

My animation experience opened another door when I got a call for a six-week editing gig on an animated Mickey Mouse theatrical short called Runaway Brain.  Well, those six weeks turned into two years and for eight of those months I got to work at Disney’s Paris Studio!  I lived across from the Arc de Triomphe and traveled on the weekends when we were free.  The Parisian artists at the studio encouraged us to join them for long lunches, with wine, of course.  We had a beautiful cutting room with a large window overlooking the city.  It was an amazing experience that I will never forget!

Both live action and animation start with a script, but in animation, only voices are recorded and the visuals are still frames of storyboards.  The editor cuts together the stills with the voice tracks, along with the complete music and sound effects (even footsteps).  Frequently the story is rewritten and re-recorded, and the storyboards redrawn multiple times before going to the expense of the actual animation.  This collaborative editing process can take years.

A supervising editor opportunity on the very challenging Space Jam followed my Paris adventure.  It was the early days of the Avid (as well as CG), so we had both Avid and film assistants, all helping and training each other.  We also worked with both a live-action crew and an animation crew, interpreting for both how the other worked.  Additionally, there were 14 different international animation studios submitting their work in very different formats.

I love working in animation, live action and documentaries.  They all have a different process of getting to the final product, but they all have the same goal: To tell a good story.

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Features

Once Upon a Time in the Animated West: ‘Rango’s’ Craig Wood

by Garrett Gilchrist
written by Garrett Gilchrist 14 minutes read

by Garrett Gilchrist 

The first animated feature from special effects masters Industrial Light and Magic is Rango, a Western starring Johnny Depp as the voice of a chameleon with an identity crisis.  The film opens nationwide March 4 through Paramount Pictures.

Taking his first feature film foray into animation, director Gore Verbinski, who worked with ILM helming the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, directed the voice performances as if shooting a live-action film.  Verbinski’s longtime collaborator, Australian editor Craig Wood––also a feature animation virgin––spoke with CineMontage to discuss how Verbinski’s live-action crew handled the challenges of animation. >>>

CineMontage: You’ve worked with Gore Verbinkski for a while now, even doing effects-filled commercials, such as the Budweiser Frogs.

Craig Wood: I met Gore in 1992.  He’s tremendous fun to work with––irreverent in his humor and always giving his work a certain quirk and edge.  He’s been incredibly loyal to me––for which I am immensely grateful…and a little protective.  He’ll sit in the cutting room strumming his guitar, singing and making up ballads while we work.

We’ve now done eight features together.  Over time, the communication becomes simpler and easier.  Gore loves to talk in the abstract––and making the abstract a reality is our job.

CM: For Rango, there were 20 days of live-action filming; that’s very unusual for an animated film.

CW: Yes, with Gore’s same live-action crew––and very rudimentary props and costumes.  The cast loved performing off one another, rather than reading into a microphone.  The performances are much more natural and alive.  Gore shot coverage––enough to get a feel of the performances, and some of the camera angles and shot sizes.  There’s overlapping dialogue, a wonderful complicated back-and-forth.  There was no motion capture.  Rather, Johnny Depp called it “Emotion Capture.”

CM: It’s traditional in animated features to film live action as a reference, but not follow it exactly.

CW: A lot can be gleaned from the actors’ performances, but the character design is so radically not human that it certainly has to be interpreted by an animator.  If you’re purely copying life, I’m not sure why you’re doing an animated film.  ILM has a mastery of bringing life into these characters’ eyes.  You’d swear they’re alive and real.  I’ve seen shows where the eyes look completely dead, where the characters almost look blind.

There are no happy accidents in animation.  You have to think of everything and create it.  Everyone went to great lengths to create imperfection––lens flares and visual aberrations––and I tried to edit it as if it had been actually shot.  I’d jump the action a little bit, or have action slightly overlap.  We deliberately built in small continuity errors.  I pride myself as a live action editor on bringing that to an animated film.

A scene from Rango. Courtesy of and Copyright 2011 Paramount Pictures


CM: On an animated film, editing begins with rough storyboards.  How did it work on Rango?

CW: Gore worked on it over a year before I came on.  He’d imagine a camera angle, and artists would draw and re-draw storyboards.  Storyboard artist Jim Byrkit worked heavily on the story.  He’s a good friend of Gore’s, and was the temporary voice of Rango that we all heard for a long time.  I did a pass on the story reel, and we made some story adjustments.  Once they recorded the actors, all the timings changed, and new ideas came out of that.  ILM then did digital layouts, placing the characters in the scene in a primitive way, while Gore figured out the precise angles and blocking.  It only goes to the animators once it’s locked for cut.

CM: What was your reaction as the finished shots were coming in?

CW: I’d never seen animation like this.  These characters are alive; every little nuance.  Our production designer, Crash McCreery, designed the world in all its minute detail and populated it with all these unique characters.  ILM’s first animated feature had to be special.  I think it took someone like Gore Verbinski to make this happen.  Everyone was extremely excited.

I think we’re seeing a shift in what animation means.  Pixar has pushed the envelope in films like Up.  Avatar, while being motion capture, used animation techniques to realize its vision.  They’re adult stories––which children are happy to watch––sophisticated emotionally, and aimed at all audiences.  I love the original Disney films.  Fantasia is extremely sophisticated.  Animation is just another tool to tell a story, and we are telling stories in a more live-action way.

CM: The film is a sort of Spaghetti Western; even the title recalls Django from 1966.

CW: It’s a journey of self-discovery.  Rango is forced to finally discover who he really is.  We referenced Chinatown, and the Sergio Leone films Once Upon a Time in the West, and Duck, You Sucker––one of Gore’s favorites.

CM: Speaking of self-discovery, how did you get your start in editing?

CW: I was 19 and an assistant editor at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  I gradually became a sound editor there on feature documentaries.  To this day, I have a passion for sound.  Sometimes I’ll create a complete soundscape for a scene before I cut a frame of picture––an emotional atmospheric bed, perhaps insects or spooky wind or tones.  Some editors cut with music.  I’d rather do it with sound.

A scene from Rango. Courtesy of and Copyright 2011 Paramount Pictures

CM: You did some uncredited sound design for The Ring?

CW: My good friend Peter Miller has been our sound designer on a number of the films we’ve done.  He worked in Australia creating an enormous library of very unique sound work, which I’d cut into my sequences.  We duplicated that for the final, because I’d been using the intended final sounds.  Rango was quite similar; Peter created a large library of unique sounds for us.

On The Ring, the first thing I cut was the video that is the centerpiece of the film.  Gore played the sound of that video to the actors to creep them out and set the tone.  The video needed to be incredibly abstract, but also have a feeling of narrative structure.  It wasn’t conventionally scripted.  I took thermals––black-and-white images of what Gore had shot––and laid them on the floor.  I wanted to see everything in front of me and move the pieces around as frames, not as moving images.  “Well, we don’t need that one,” I’d think. We had only a couple of scenes that directly mimicked the Japanese version, but it was interesting to analyze.  Why is that as scary as it is?  There were certain scenes I thought worked particularly well.  You don’t often get the chance to make that direct comparison.  I tried to get the essence of the original without copying it.

CM: Talk about your first feature, Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds.

CW: I started out editing music videos with Alex Proyas.  Spirits was his first feature film, in Australia in 1986.  It was certainly educational.  Peter was the art director and sound designer, so we’ve known each other a long time.  I’ve always been grateful for starting in music video.  I still think of the entire soundtrack as music and the picture being another instrument playing along.

CM: You went to work for Gore on his first feature, Mousehunt.

CW: He wanted an ally, someone he knew and could trust and communicate with; I was delighted to be chosen.  If I’d known what I knew at the end, I’d have been terrified, but I went in blindly confident and came out okay at the other end.  The music videos and commercials we did were visual effects-driven, and I’ve had a passion for visual effects photography since my teens, so that didn’t scare me at all.  Alex was very confident with effects, and Gore certainly is; he comes from an effects background.  But the logistics of making a Hollywood feature film––navigating the minefield of politics––that’s always been a challenge.

CM: Tell me about cutting The Mexican.

CW: There are scenes between James Gandolfini and Julia Roberts that I think are magical.  There are three flashback scenes that end with the clock tower chiming––just a soundtrack detail.  At the end, Julia has to decide whether she’ll fire the gun.  She fires, and a gold ring falls from the gun, in huge slow motion.  I held the silence, and as it hits the ground, the town clock chimes again.  It’s beautifully symmetrical.  These things we bury in our work; I’m not sure anyone notices, but I think people feel that stuff.

Just as Gore has been loyal to me over the years, I’ve tried to be loyal to my assistants.  Simon Morgan has assisted me on every one of the films I’ve done, and has been my first since The Mexican.  It’s hard to imagine doing a film without him.

CM: Between the first two Pirates of the Caribbean films, you did The Weather Man.

CW: I’m particularly proud of that one.  One of the reasons I love working with Gore is that everything we do––when it’s not a trilogy––is completely different.  We’ve never done an animated film, and we’re figuring out our own way of doing it on Rango; finding ways to break the rules and make that work.  Whatever you think of any of the films we’ve done, they’ve got integrity and uniqueness––and a voice that is very specifically Gore.  I love supporting that voice.

A scene from Rango. Courtesy of and Copyright 2011 Paramount Pictures

CM: But you’ve edited films other than Gore’s––Highway, James Cox’s first feature, for instance.

CW: There’s an excitement and energy in a first-time director that’s just infectious.  It’s new to them and it becomes new to you.  I love things to feel fresh; each film has to be testing me in some new way.  Otherwise, an audience feels that staleness.  Some studios would like things to be a little safer, but the most interesting films, and the biggest successes, are risks.

CM: Even Pirates of the Caribbean seemed like an unlikely hit on paper.

CW: I remember saying, “You’ve got to be kidding!  An amusement park ride?” And we didn’t have a script yet.  “What are you thinking?”  But Gore pulled that one out!  It was a huge rollercoaster ride, and so much fun.

CM: Johnny Depp’s performance as Jack Sparrow was a bold and unusual choice that made the film.

CW: I know, and I don’t think many people understood the performance until well after the film came out.  Gore was very confident.  Johnny knew what he was doing.  But the producers weren’t sure.  I wasn’t even 100 percent sure.  I didn’t understand it, and toned it down quite a bit initially.  We had to go back later and amp up those scenes to match the rest.  It takes some figuring out, some teething time.

CM: You did Pirates 2 and 3 back-to-back.

CW: It was two very intensive years, right through.  The schedule was tight; we had unmovable release dates well in advance––and far more visual effects.  I’m especially proud of Pirates 2, the middle part of a trilogy.  You have to be even more creative because you can’t rely on conventional story structure.  How many editors have had the opportunity to cut a trilogy?  They’re very complicated films.  People love to revisit them; they keep finding something new.  Rango is very much the same.  In fact, to this day, I’m finding fantastic background details that have a joke, or are full of resonance to the scene, which I never noticed before.

“My philosophy has always been: The more finished it can seem as you’re cutting it, the better your choices are.  Even down to spatial references, where you’ve placed things.  It’s an upside-down process, editing before a frame of film has been shot.” – Craig Wood

CM: After Pirates, you did another director’s first feature, Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain.

CW: After Pirates, I consciously wanted to do something completely different––a serious drama.  The producers, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, suggested me to Guillermo.  “The editor of Pirates of the Caribbean?  You have to be kidding me!”  But he really liked me; he realized I’d cut The Weather Man, and that helped convince him.  Pirates gave us all some respect, but there’s a curse with that too, because we don’t always want to be making one type of film.

CM: Well, doing an animated film is certainly something completely different. What was the process like on Rango?

CW: Rango is the first film I’ve edited in five-track stereo––full immersive surround.  My philosophy has always been: The more finished it can seem as you’re cutting it, the better your choices are.  Even down to spatial references, where you’ve placed things.  It’s an upside-down process, editing before a frame of film has been shot.  It gives you much more input.  You not only can choose your takes, and the rhythm between shots, but you can adjust the rhythm internally in a shot before it’s animated.

CM: Now that you’ve almost finished one, what do you think of editing animated films?

CW: I’ve developed a huge respect for editors of animated films.  Any live-action film I’ve ever worked on took less than a year.  I’ve been on Rango for over two years now!  It’s a huge commitment, but I’m proud and grateful to be involved.  A lot of love went into making Rango.  I know there’s a lot of me––and all of the key creative personnel––in it.  And Gore, of course.  So many performances owe a lot to his acting out facial expressions for the animators, encouraging them to “give it more fuzz,” a twist in a more interesting and unusual direction.

Things get tough, but even when we’ve had huge problems to solve, we just get to it and it’s fun.  This past week, I’ve been in the best mood––and we’re working stupid hours.  I think there’s something wrong with me!

 

 

Craig Wood
Selected Editing Credits

Rango (2011) *
The Burning Plain (2008)
Pirates of the Caribbean:
At World’s End (2007) *
Pirates of the Caribbean:
Dead Man’s Chest (2006) *
The Weather Man (2005) *
Pirates of the Caribbean: The
Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) *
The Ring (2002) *
Highway (2002)
The Mexican (2001) *
Forces of Nature (1999)
MouseHunt (1997) *
Spirits of the Air,
Gremlins of the Clouds (1989)

* directed by Gore Verbinski

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Features

Remote. Control. Sonoma:
Editor Kirk Demorest is a Telecommuter

by uncredited
written by uncredited 9 minutes read

by Robin Rowe

Working remotely has become commonplace in big, visual effects-laden feature films, with post-production work being done at effects and sound houses spread all over the world. But with the economy in its current state, not to mention the time and money consumed in traveling to and from a workplace on a daily basis, telecommuting on smaller projects, like television, is looking more and more attractive to post-production professionals. For reasons like this a universal remote similar to the ones provided by VIZIO might come in handy!

However, the entire situation certainly appealed to Kirk Demorest. So much so that he decided to figure out a way to do it. The editor of Curious George, the top-rated animated series for pre-schoolers that airs daily on the PBS network, Demorest loved his job at Universal Animation Studios in Burbank, but in August 2007 came to the conclusion that he was tired of living and working in LA. “In the third season of Curious George, my wife and I decided we didn’t want to raise our first-grader in Los Angeles,” Demorest reveals. “I really thought I was going to have to quit my job.”

To cut to the chase, a year later––in August 2008––Demorest was performing his editorial duties on the show remotely––from his home editing suite in the Northern California town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County. “It’s really rural up here, with goats, chickens and wild turkeys,” he says. “It’s very different from LA; there’s a wild river here, the Russian River.” Talk about a Universal remote!
Here’s how he made it happen:

Kirk Demorest reviewing storyboards for Curious George.

“My producer at Universal, David Wilcox, asked if it was possible for me to work remotely,” Demorest explains. “So I went to our vice president of production, Tom Ruzicka, who was doubtful because it would be costly, and told me, ‘You can’t make it work with the people who need to sit in the cutting room.’ I got Tom and Barbara Beck, our vice president of post-production, and went down and demo’d a couple systems to do remote teleconferencing with the Avid footage. But it was outrageously expensive––like $100,000 minimum, or $450 an hour.”

Obviously, a more cost-effective method would have to be found. So Demorest got to work trying to find one. He began researching the message boards and calling everyone he knew working in post. “I found out about Slingbox, this device that let’s you watch your TV from any room in your house, or even from a hotel in China; you can even control the remote and everything,” he says. “I hooked it up to my Avid and it totally worked.” It gave the editor much hope that the output of his client monitor could be seen across the Internet.

“So I started training all the people working on the show to watch QuickTime,” continues Demorest. “Co-producer WGBH in Boston used to get DVDs FedEx’d from us. So, we started sending them QuickTimes instead. It took them about three weeks to get in the groove with that. We cut our FedEx bill. I upload right from my Avid to an FTP site on Universal’s server. Our post schedule, online schedule, status of the show and artwork are on there––everything.”

The “people problem” was a little more difficult for Demorest to solve. “People are used to working face-to-face in the cutting room,” he acknowledges. “Our executive producer, Ellen Cockrill, was aware I was going to try to work remotely. She said, ‘As long as I get to see my DVD and sit with you in the cutting room one day a week, that’s all I care about.'” As a compromise, Demorest had agreed to fly down from Sonoma County when needed, although, as it turns out, he now only has to visit LA once a week or less.

Kirk Demorest in his home editing suite in Sebastopol, California.

Using Slingbox, the show’s supervising director Jeff McGrath is able to call edits in real time. “He’ll say, ‘Cut that shot out,'” says Demorest. “I cut it out, and that’s that. I used to sit down with him for maybe a half-hour session to go through a section. We didn’t spend all day long cutting a session; once I did the notes, we didn’t have a lot of stuff to do together after that.” So that wasn’t a problem.

The voice actors go into the studio in LA. The sound house cuts the audio into a loose radio play that’s sent to the server as an AIFF file. There are also other takes that can be edited if needed. Demorest has a library of sounds of all the characters laughing or talking, like the character with the yellow hat who’s always saying, “George…George…,” every which way. Once the show is locked, Demorest sends an OMF over to the sound house.

Then there is the edit session. “They have me on speakerphone,” says Demorest. “They cannot see me, but what they can see is my Avid. I can talk to them as I work. If I scroll back, if I scroll forward, if I cut something, they all see that on Slingbox. If I say, ‘What do you think of this shot?’ they can see exactly what’s on the screen. That’s the live edit session. They’re seeing my Avid monitor output, but they don’t see my timeline.”

The Slingbox does have limitations, according to Demorest. “Some of the footage looks a little cruddy,” he admits. “I’d say it looks a little better than YouTube footage.” On the big monitor in LA, the actual image is about the size of a sheet of paper. It’s adequate for following the edit session live. However, it wasn’t acceptable for watching color, contrast or animation, so Demorest had to come up with another solution.

What he found was a program called SyncVue. “It’s this amazing QuickTime annotating software, with which you can put up a really big file,” Demorest says. “It’s a good quality image; you can study it carefully. The LA people can write notes or even make a voice note. You can print out the XML file with the frames that you’re working on. The problem is that it’s not real-time for editing; you have to jump back to Slingbox to edit.”

At Universal Animation, the show is cut on an Avid running on Mac OS/9 G4s. In Sebastapol, Demorest has a Mac 8-core with Avid Media Composer 3.0 and Mojo SDI. “Once I get the Digibeta, if I’m in town, I’ll digitize it,” says Demorest. “Otherwise, my second editor, Jay Bixsen, will digitize the footage. “Jay is a jack-of-all-trades for the technical stuff. He’ll post the media to the server, and I can download it whenever I want. I’ll make it into a show. Once that’s done, we’ll start to call reviews on it and retakes for the animation and music. Then everyone signs off on it as a cut.”

Kirk Demorest takes a break from editing Curious George.

The show’s composer receives a DVD of the episode, according to Demorest. “It has to be 29.97, because I’m coming off a 24-frame project,” he explains. “I use the Avid Mojo to make the conversion. Then it goes to a DVD recorder box. I rip the DVD and put the TS folder onto our server. David, our producer, burns it onto a disc and messengers it over to our composer.”

Once the show is edited, Demorest makes a QuickTime movie to send to the post house to make the online. “It’s amazing; assembling it as an online is fully automatic,” he says. “All the cuts and the freeze frames are there. All they’ve got to do is spot-check for weird field problems.”

Before moving to Sonoma, he did a lot of dry runs from his then home in Sherman Oaks from May to August of last year. “I would work at home for weeks and only come in for the meetings,” says Demorest. ‘If there was an issue, I could zip over to Burbank to take care of it. We did a lot of tests.”

Demorest is currently in the middle of Season 4 of Curious George––working from the rustic surroundings of his Sebastapol home. He now uses his iMac, as well as a Skype camera in both Northern and Southern California in order to see the team in Burbank, and vice versa. “Before, we were just looking at my Avid output on Slingbox,” he explains. “But honestly, being able to see the people at Universal has helped me enormously. Reading body language and seeing who is in the room really helps me run the session better. It is way more important than I ever imagined.

“So, my Mac 8-core Avid pumps out the timeline Slingbox signal, my iMac shows video of the rooms, and we use a landline conference call for our communication,” Demorest continues. ” Universal hears the timeline audio from my Slingbox and we both mute the Skype sound.”

He sees the trend to work remotely expanding, especially with new technology making post work and remote editing more economical for many productions. Several artists on the show have since gone to working several days a week from home. “It is easy for them, because most of their work is just drawing and painting,” Demorest adds.

“Except for some time from our IT guys to sort out the FTP, Universal didn’t really spend anything for this––a couple of hundred dollars here and there; this could be done anywhere,” he concludes. “It’s exciting that it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to work where you want.”

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‘Monsters’ Mash-Up: Joyce Arrastia and Eric Dapkewicz Pioneer 3-D Editing in Animation

by Garrett Gilchrist
written by Garrett Gilchrist 17 minutes read

by Garrett Gilchrist photos • by Gregory Shwartz

DreamWorks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens may seem like your average CGI-animated blockbuster. But it’s more than that; it’s the first animated feature from DreamWorks that’s been planned, start to finish, as a stereo 3-D film. The film will be released through Paramount Pictures on March 27. Studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg and directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon are hoping it’s a success, since all future DreamWorks Animation films, including the upcoming Shrek Goes Forth, are being planned as stereo 3-D releases.

Forget the old days of red and blue glasses. This is a cutting-edge experience with polarized-lens glasses on your local IMAX screen, which follows a cast of larger-than-life heroes voiced by some very big names. A lot is riding on the film’s success. So how do editors Joyce Arrastia and Eric Dapkewicz help make this a feature that can stand on its own as a film, with characters the audience will care about? In 3-D, the danger is that the film might never rise above the level of a gimmick or a theme park ride.

When Editors Guild Magazine spoke to the editors in December, they were huge- ly excited about the 3-D element of the film, and surprisingly they felt that, in terms of characterization and the reality of the story, the 3-D was a huge blessing, rather than a distraction. Following is what they had to say, in their own words:

B.O.B. TM and Š 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Joyce Arrastia: The producers knew right away that they wanted to do this film differently. They did not want to have this be gimmicky…things coming right out at you.

Eric Dapkewicz: Even though we have a few of those elements in there, those are mainly for comedic moments in the film. We wanted to make a film in which we felt the audience was immersed––into the actual storytelling itself.

JA: You feel as a viewer that you’re inside the movie. Rather than feeling like the characters are popping out of the screen, you feel like you are sitting in their fantasy world. We’re saying, “Come in! Come in closer!” The end result is a more compelling story than if we hadn’t done it in 3-D.

ED: It’s an adventure for us here. Jeffrey Katzenberg is a big proponent of it, because it is a new element, a different aspect of looking at telling stories, up on the screen.

JA: I feel that our movie breathes a lot more than a lot of animated movies. I think there’s a tendency for animated movies to be very tightly cut. The 3-D has given us a chance to allow a little extra time with each scene, or between cuts, without compromising the pacing. It feels a lot more real, and the people to whom we’ve shown the movie all react in a similar way. They think, “Wow, this doesn’t feel like any animated movie I’ve ever seen.”

ED: We incorporated the 3-D process before we even went into animation. That saved everybody a lot of time and money. We could decide early on that this shot would work better if we held it a little longer, or if we opened it up and slowed down the camera move. We would send it back to layout and ask, “Can you try another version with a more sweeping epic shot?

nsectosaurus pursues, from left, the Missing Link, Dr. Cockroach PhD, Susan (aka Ginormica) and B.O.B. TM and Š 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

JA: It’s evolved into using more panoramic views and true-to-life aerial shots; just the attention between the foreground and the background landscapes, all to enhance the story. The cinematographer, Damon O’Byrne, started to generate previsualization. We’d get maybe four or five different takes on different shots with different camera moves, different approaches. This process has lent itself to making this particular movie feel more like a live-action movie. I think that’s going to happen more and more, and of course with live action also now having so much animation in it.

ED: We’ve been the guinea pigs; we’ve gone through all the good times and bad times. From a technology viewpoint, we needed the resources at our disposal to get us up and running, so that we could get shots from production in 3-D––any- where from layout to animation to effects to lighting––into editorial and look at them both in mono and 3-D. Creating those pipelines took a little bit of time and finessing.

JA: I was really worried about it. Everything they were talking about… “We’re going to have playback and real 3- D in your rooms and you’ll edit in 3-D.” I thought, “Oh no! I just wanted to edit the movie!” I really thought it was going to interfere with the day-to-day process of just editing the film. Everyone was really excited, saying we were going to be pioneers, because it had never been done before––certainly not at our studio. All of the 3-D movies that we were researching had their 3-D done as a post conversion process.

ED: We’d seen films made in a regular version and then they add the 3-D process in post after it’s all been done.

JA: You’re just a lot more limited if you apply the process after the film is done. If you have a choice, you would definitely want to author it in 3-D as you make it. A lot of people just don’t realize the creative advantages of doing it that way. A lot of animated 3-D movies that are converted don’t feel like they’re edited well, because they weren’t edited for 3-D. So unless you’re prepared to open up shots later in post-production––and that’s an expensive thing to do––I think the end result is a movie that feels a little uncomfortable to watch, and it just doesn’t have the same impact.

Editors vs. Monsters vs. Aliens: clockwise from top: Rich Dietl, first assistant editor; Vivek Sharma, assistant editor; Joe Monteleone, first assistant editor; Eric Dapkewicz, editor; Joyce Arrastia, editor; Lynn Hobson, editor; and Dan Fort, assistant editor.

ED: I can’t say enough about our cast. Stephen Colbert’s just funny as heck. Rainn Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen; they’re all great.

JA: The character B.O.B. (Rogen) is this kind of gelatinous mass. You can see through him, he can move in different directions. He’s a great 3-D character. There’s a lot about the characters and the story that lend themselves well to 3-D.

ED: The Susan character (Witherspoon) is a 49-and-a- half-foot-tall woman––that in and of itself has been a challenge; then there was the size issue of getting everybody on screen together, so we can actually make her stand out from a building or trees.

JA: Susan is shown in her everyday life at the beginning. That character would be shot behind the stereo window, so that she appears to be more flat on the screen. As a viewer, you’re watching her inside of her world. But once her transformation happens, the stereo settings change so that her character’s actually in front of the stereo window. The stereo window is something that the audience doesn’t see, but the character looks more like she’s pushed out toward the audience. She’s now more in our personal space as we watch her.

Later, we see her reunite for the first time with the people from her past that are still normal size. In a scene like that, those stereo windows would almost be split down the middle, so she’s pushed out, but the character she’s talking to is still pushed back. That subtlety emphasized her separation. She’s not normal, not part of their world anymore. This kind of thought was put into all the scenes with the 3-D.

Alien Robot. TM and Š 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ED: We may go a year or two in just storyboard form before we ever get into a previz or layout stage. That, to me, is actually very fulfilling from an editing standpoint. You get a bit more into the creative process of the actual movie itself, of the storytelling and character development.

JA: We started on the film in early 2006. It was a very small group and we were just putting together conceptual pieces. The story slowly started to evolve, and a lot of it really does take its shape in editorial. Once we have our sequence cut together as storyboard, and the directors come in and work on it, that’s when we realize: “Hey, y’know, what she really needs to be saying is this!” We’ll even record lines right there in our rooms, because we have microphones set up. We can kick the script back to the writers.

ED: What’s happened on every film I’ve ever been on is that we get the storyboards, script and dialogue. We put them into a cut, and a lot of times we realize it just doesn’t work. We then work with the directors to change those things that aren’t working. Would it be better if the character did this? Should they not be in this scene? Does this section need to be rewritten by the writers? We’re just brainstorming, trying new things and throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.

JA: I started out in live action, and when I would hear about animation editing, I used to think that it was just a process of assembling. But it’s much more complicated than live action. In live action, you get handed film that came out of the camera. You have your choices on which takes to choose. But the animation editor also has to put together the storyboards in a way that appears to be live-action footage. It’s all about just the right amount of frames, adding a lot of temp sound effects and dialogue and music, and just polishing it in a way that it plays like a real scene. And only then can the directors sit back and look at it and judge if it works or not.

The Missing Link. TM and Š 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ED: When we have sections of the movie that the directors are happy with, we’ll start shooting some of it into previz. It’s laid out in a very rough kind of 3-D form.

JA: There’s a lot of collaborative work done, particularly with our cinematographer as well as the guy we call our 3-D guru, Phil McNally. He came from Disney and worked on Monster House. His nickname, even before coming to DreamWorks, was Captain 3-D. We had him to guide us along this overhaul, converting the studio into making all of its films in 3-D now.

DreamWorks wanted us to be able to edit in 3-D, right there in our room. The Avid at the time was not supporting that platform. A team of technology experts figured out a way to do it; it took a few months. We had to upgrade to HD, and they developed this box that they called Videotron, which takes the stereo image, the stereo pair, and blends it together so we can project it in 3-D.

ED: We actually put an Avid in our theatre. We look at it the most during the animatic previz process. But when a scene gets all animated, we’ll look at it again, on a bigger screen, and see if it’s still working in 3-D or if we need to do any adjustments. The animators will come up with some new ideas, or a shot might need to be extended in animation, or maybe the blocking slightly changed, and an animator moved a character slightly more screen right.

JA: There’s a file that looks like two mono images on top of each other. The top image represents the left side, and the bottom the right side. Clicking back and forth on the viewer, we were able to see the image either in 3-D or in mono. We’re able to flag all the potential problems that are common in 3-D early on.

Gallaxhar. TM and Š 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ED: It just takes more time for people to register an image on the screen when it’s in 3-D because it’s more information than your brain is used to taking in. There’s a couple of ways we can approach a scene to make sure the information isn’t too overwhelming for viewers.

JA: We can see if something feels too abrupt. We’re able to fix it right there in our rooms by adding time, or collaborate with the other departments and pick up the phone and discuss what our other options are.

ED: We can play around with the depth cues. If we have a shot we want to last on the screen for over five seconds, we can have it feel like there’s more depth to the shot, because then your eyes have more time to register what’s on the screen.

JA: We could also combine shots. Say we had a sequence that started off with a wide establishing master, a medium shot and then a close-up. We could just create one long shot with a sweeping steadicam move. Or maybe they would add some foreground set dressing. It was actually forcing us to come up with more dynamic shots.

ED: We have an action scene in San Francisco, where our main character’s being chased by a huge robot. We wanted to pick up the pace and have the cutting quicker, but in 3-D, if we wanted the shots to be that fast we had to narrow the depth, so there’s not as much information being shot at you on the screen, and it won’t give you a headache. What doesn’t work real well in 3-D is a lot of blur, shaky camera. Movement has to be clear and precise.

JA: Our 3-D guru can also blend the convergence, which softens the depth from cut to cut, if the 3-D is too heavy. It’s almost a dissolve. Much of the 3-D––the stereo settings and everything––was done by a different department. But our biggest challenge was giving the eye a chance to adjust. You don’t want the audience to become an aesthetized to the 3-D.

ED: We really want people to walk away feeling that they’ve had a great experience. And they realize that this actually is working! At a test screening, we asked if anyone felt there was anything in particular up on the screen that was too jarring, or made them feel sick or gave them a headache. We didn’t have anybody, so that was a big thumbs up for us!

Susan (aka Ginormica). TM and Š 2009 DreamWorks Animation LLC. Reserved.

We get so close to the film that a lot of times it was difficult to see the simple things that we take for granted in the storytelling. After we’ve shown it to an audience, we get some notes. We might focus on a specific area that it seems like a lot of people were struggling with, some- thing in the story. That depends on how much time we have left––some changes we can do, some we can’t. But it’s easier to manipulate objects on the screen and in the camera, and do things that you can’t quite do in live action.

JA: We don’t want to see every movie in 3- D. Like, say, Schindler’s List. But I have to say that when I watch Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D, because of that subtle feeling of being inside the world of the characters, I find it more enjoyable. So I’m starting to think that it could make any movie a much more dynamic experience, to a certain extent.

We were the pioneers, there are already people gearing up for the next 3-D release who need to start considering the 3-D-ness of it all.

ED: I have a lot people from other shows knocking on my door, asking me, “How did you deal with this?”

JA: As an editor, I would definitely talk to them about not being afraid to give the shot more time. And avoid doing anything in 3-D that could possibly risk distracting the audience from the story. For me, it’s been a revelation. We were able to use it to emphasize key story points and a character’s emotional arc simply by adding it or lessening it. A lot of filmmakers maybe don’t realize that 3-D really is just another tool that helps you tell a more compelling story––just like the choice you make in camera composition, or using color or music or pacing to help set a tone and a style.

The end result was a much more compelling story, and so now I’ve really embraced it. I think it’s not a pass- ing phase; 3-D is definitely here to stay for a while. I hope that with the technology evolving, it’s just going to get better and perhaps easier.

ED: I guess we’ll all find out come March 27!

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Mmmm… Popcorn: ‘The Simpsons’ Goes to the Movies

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 16 minutes read

by Michael Kunkes

On July 27, that sucking sound you’ll hear at your local multiplex will be Maggie Simpson’s pacifier in all its 5.1 surround sound and widescreen glory. Maggie, along with Homer, Bart, Marge, Lisa, Mr. Burns, Smithers, Flanders and dozens of other denizens of Springfield, are making their big-screen debut. After 19 years and 400 episodes, the hit television series The Simpsons has finally spawned The Simpsons Movie, directed by David Silverman, released by 20th Century Fox and expected to be one of the biggest hits of the summer.

But it certainly won’t be one of the loudest. The Simpsons’ mindset, with its built-in, slightly fanatical audience, is that dialogue writing and all that goes with it––gag timing, topical humor, and musical and sound effects––is king. Even with a roster of A-list picture and sound editorial talent from some of the splashiest animated movies in history, as well as a Hans Zimmer score, The Simpsons Movie will not feel like most animated films of recent years, what with its 2-D production and (in comparison to most summer blockbusters) an almost minimalist soundscape.

“I started on the first day they began production dialogue, which was recorded ensemble-style with up to four characters at once on the Fox ADR stage,” says John Carnochan, a veteran animation editor whose feature work includes Robots, Beauty and the Beast, Ice Age, The Little Mermaid and The Lion King.

“This was a lot different from a typical 3-D animated show, where they go through a very long visual and story development phase,” he continues. “They already had a shooting script, cast, backgrounds and character designs, so a lot of the homework was already done. On the first day, we were already figuring out how we were going to cut it! It was almost like a radio show in that the artists are responding solely to what they hear. It was great for me because I like to start roughing out the soundtracks before I get the picture.”

The Glory of Two Dimensions
Carnochan also was thrilled to be back working in traditional 2-D animation, after years of 3-D and CGI. “You have a lot more freedom and flexibility in this process; it’s far less cumbersome and a lot easier to fix or change things,” he says. But more than anything else, he explains, “The challenge of The Simpsons Movie was about paying homage to the heritage of the series while developing a meaningful story and not being constrained by act breaks and musical play-ins and -outs.”

The picture editorial team for The Simpsons Movie at 20th Century Fox, from left, Mark Scheib, Jennifer Dolce and John Carnochan. Photo by Deverill Weekes

In a nod to the TV animation model, director Silverman did not direct the voices. “David was in charge of the visual part of the picture,” Carnochan reveals. “Executive producer James Brooks was at every recording session and very heavily involved in editing and rewriting. Producer Richard Sakai, show creator Matt Groening, Hans Zimmer and his music editor Dan Pinder were also major collaborators.”

At Fox Studios in West LA, an entirely new animation studio was assembled at what has been humorously dubbed “Stacked Animation,” in tribute to Pamela Anderson’s Stacked TV series, which was formerly housed in the complex. The facility included seven Avid Adrenaline systems, apportioned mainly to Carnochan, additional editor Mark Scheib, first assistant editor Jennifer Dolce and assistants John Currin, Vivek Sharma and Elaine Andrianos. There were also five After Effects stations.

“As we got into production, we needed to continually visualize the script––which would change after every screening––so having a quick, tight turnaround was essential,” Carnochan explains. “Our editing crew was augmented by up to 25 on-site artists, who worked in a unique way. We would listen to the dialogue and have ideas about how to stage shots. I could have a conversation with an artist about Homer’s performance and an hour or two later have a new edited version, melding picture and sound.”

Carnochan praised the 21 Wacom Cintiq systems (basically drawing tablets combined with monitors) that were installed in the studio. “You draw directly on the monitor and see your pencil strokes instantly where you draw them,” he says. “The artists export their drawings and the assistant editors import the files into the Avid for editing and further refinement if necessary. Some of the artists were specialists in either After Effects or Final Cut as well, allowing multi-planing effects.

“As a result, our story reels were very specific as to action and performance, although usually in black-and-white,” he continues. “To prepare for previews, the shots that hadn’t been animated and returned to us in color could be colored in Photoshop, and even up-rezzed to HD, which was how we previewed. The use of the Cintiqs, several terabytes of storage, Avid Unity and the file-sharing between the editorial world and visual world gave me a unique opportunity to help shape this film.”

Dolce, whose animation experience includes An Extremely Goofy Movie and Space Jam, says, “Because The Simpsons Movie is so focused on dialogue, we used script-based editing in the Avid. For over 10 years, Avid has supported a script-based program where you can load a script into a traditional Avid project and line it the way a script supervisor would line it on the set; all this does is mimic that process. She adds that although she had never used it before, it didn’t take long to realize the benefits.

Most contemporary animation directors want to emulate modern live-action films and make the sound more naturalistic.

“The writers’ assistant constantly gave us script updates in Final Draft,” Dolce continues. “John Currin was mainly responsible for lining these electronic scripts when the next round of records would come to us. Script-based editing is very quick to edit with––and it’s also a handy tool for tracking and playing back takes for the directors and writers. Takes were often reviewed in editorial as well as on the stage during any one of our four temp dubs.”

Scheib jumped at the chance to work on the movie based on his favorite television show. Primarily a single-camera comedy show editor (Arrested Development, Monk, Entourage, Crack-ing Up), Scheib says that the world of feature animation is enormously complex. “From my standpoint of working on sitcoms, what you have to work with, you work with––with the exception of re-shoots,” he explains. “In an animated feature, if a camera angle doesn’t work, a new one is quickly drawn. Or new expressions, backgrounds, shadings, etc. You don’t worry about coverage because an artist in another room will quickly pound out another version for you.”

The animation for The Simpsons Movie was completed at several studios besides Fox, including Film Roman in Burbank, Rough Draft in Glendale, and the Korean studio Akom. Each had its own sequence directors to control and divide the workload. “Working with the animators was probably my most valuable function,” adds Dolce. “I talked to them about six times a day regarding new footage and dialogue notes. We made a lot of QuickTime and AIFF files with footage-counter information so that they were aware of our new timings, and we generated a lot of written coverage via change notes on a shot-by-shot basis.”

Dolce ganged old versions with new versions and went through them manually to nail all the notes as quickly as possible in order to get them back to the studios. “There was a lot of updating all around to keep us all on the same page,” she adds. “It was not an easy task with a constantly moving target.”

The Power of the Temp Mix
The key to the sound post for The Simpsons Movie was the series of four intensive temp mixes––one every three and a half weeks. According to supervising sound editor Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, MPSE, a two-time Golden Reel Award-winner (Titanic, Saving Private Ryan), “The movie grew through each temp mix, though the main story arc has pretty much remained the same. As the temps evolved, we added a lot of things: mainly dialogue, some light ambience, sound effects––and a lot of simple, almost unnoticeable things that help fill out the track. The whole temp process was very organic and kept changing constantly as we scrambled to keep up with the picture side. It was done at breakneck speed, and the turnaround time was phenomenal––mostly because this kind of animation is so simple and easy to change.”

“Dry ice makes very odd squealing sounds when you press warm metal against it.”– Randy Thom

The temp mixes were done at Fox and Todd-AO West in Santa Monica. The staffs have varied with each mix, with the main exceptions being Whittle, temp re-recording mixer/co-sound designer Chris Scarabosio, effects editor Al Nelson, MPSE, and first assistant Stuart McCowan. “Even with all these different crews, it was the most fluid flow between dialogue and picture I’ve ever seen,” says Whittle. “On our last temp, John Carnochan was sitting next to me with his Avid laptop. I’d attach a portable hard drive, start my ProTools and away we’d go.”

Whittle adds that ProTools was an extremely flexible tool during production––even in its traditional form of use. “We’d been on so many soundstages, and so many people were working on it, that the virtual mixing thing––where everything is fluid and live and nothing gets printed––just didn’t seem to make any sense. Because of all the variables, we were carrying around every temp mix with us, and it worked out great.

“It was always an option to go back three temps and pull out that one vocal they liked,” she continues. “Most movies have a lot of layers, tons of ambience, Foley and sound design. But The Simpsons was just not that unwieldy, so we were able to use a lot of different people without having to spend days bringing them up to speed. Because it’s mainly dialogue, you just cut straight down the middle and you don’t have to do a lot of panning. It’s a much simpler show.”

“The four temp mixes have been the Rosetta Stone that we constantly refer to,” adds Nelson (winner of an MPSE Golden Reel for The Incredibles), who cut the ambiences and hard effects for the movie along with Shannon Mills and Bob Shoup. “No reel was ever locked, so we were always conforming, re-mixing and re-editing. The good part of this process was that we got multiple opportunities to fine-tune and finesse scenes as they returned to the pre-mix stage.”

The sound editorial team for The Simpsons Movie at Skywalker Sound, from left, Al Nelson, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle and Chris Scarabosio. Photo by David Klein

McCowan, assistant supervising sound editor (whose main task was to maintain a smooth workflow at Skywalker Sound in San Rafael, California, in addition to liaising with the picture department), explains that moving the whole show down to Los Angeles for the final mix (with re-recording mixers Anna Behlmer and Andy Nelson) was a huge challenge. “Not only did we have everything on Firewire drives, but we also carried a duplicate set––and sometimes triplicate––when we were working on two stages,” he says. “It was a lot of drives to be carrying through airport security.”

The other challenge for the sound department was keeping up with the rapid pace of picture changes. “That was tricky in the best of times,” McCowan recalls. “Right before the final, we were mixing on three stages [two at Skywalker for effects and one at Fox for dialogue]. Fortunately, there are two other amazing assistants on the show––Kevin Bailey and Josh Gold––and we managed to keep everything smooth for the editors.”

Skywalker’s Randy Thom came on board as co-sound designer to create the initial sound design for The Simpsons Movie. Thom, who has won Oscars for Sound Mixing (The Right Stuff) and Sound Editing (The Incredibles), worked on the film off and on since it was in storyboard stage. He takes no issue with the show’s reliance on dialogue: “On the one hand, we walk a fine line between wanting to make it extremely cinematic and take advantage of all the things you can’t do on TV; on the other, we don’t want to turn it into a sound effects extravaganza–– which it is not––and distract the audience from what’s funny about it.

The Funny Thing About Animation
“There’s a funny thing about animation,” Thom continues, putting the movie into an historical perspective. “Everyone admires the sound created by Jimmy MacDonald and others on the classic ‘toons of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. But no contemporary directors or producers really want to emulate that style today in any way––and that’s at least partly because people associate that style with a short-form medium. If you attempt to do that style over the course of a feature, it gets tiring or overly ‘cartoony.’ What it comes down to is that most contemporary animation directors want to emulate modern live-action films and make the sound more naturalistic.”

Randy Thom.
Photo courtesy of Skywalker Sound

According to Thom, the bulk of the sound effects created for The Simpsons Movie came from the Skywalker library and were then mixed with newly fabricated organic effects. In a typical Simpsons moment (without revealing any plot points) in the film, a metal silo falls into a lake so polluted that it dissolves into nothing. It was a scene that provided a bit of a sound effects challenge for Thom. Sounds of water splashing and boiling, along with the sounds of frying sausages were recorded; then dry ice was employed. “Dry ice makes very odd squealing sounds when you press warm metal against it,” explains Thom. “And it does this process called sublimation–– where the vapor just shoots off and causes the metal to resonate and sound like guitar feedback. We mixed that in with the other sounds in that scene.”

In another sequence involving a giant dome that is cracking and breaking, Scarabosio tried to get certain sounds out of splintering glass. “Glass really doesn’t like to splinter; it likes to shatter and break,” says Scarabosio, a jack-of-all-sounds whose credits include sound effects editor and re-recording mixer on Munich; sound design editor on Pearl Harbor and re-recording mixer on Star Wars: Episode III. “We recorded everything at 192 kHz and then pitched it down, but it still takes time to go through and find the best elements of the cracking and scraping, and then layer the sounds to try different effect processing. Actually, we solved the one sound design problem with one of my wife’s domed cake plates and an empty tennis ball container that I threw in there. There are lots of benefits to having a wife who knows how to bake.”

Much like old-style live action, each sound editor was assigned certain reels, as opposed to working on the movie as a whole. “As it developed, it was necessary to do things almost scene to scene,” reveals Scarabosio. “Breaking the film up into reels allowed us to develop certain scenes that were a little more solid, where other scenes were still in flux. By working in chunks, we didn’t have to be constantly conforming.”

Stuart McCowan.
Photo by Deverill Weekes

Ideally, it would have been great to have the recording done all in one session. But the reality is that Skywalker works on a fiber channel system, so only one person can have a volume in write mode at a time. “If all the editors had the entire film in one session––and each was writing to his own volume––it would get pretty confusing as to who had done what, and who had the most updated version of a scene,” Scarabosio explains.

When it comes to sound effects, things really haven’t changed much in decades, according to Thom. “It’s still about finding and recording natural sounds in the real world and then manipulating and modifying them to do what you need them to do,” he says. Will there be a time when recording sounds won’t be necessary? “Theoretically, it’s possible to create every sound in a film electronically, including the voices,” he says. “The problem is that it’s massively inefficient and extremely expensive––so I don’t see it happening any time in the near future.”

Scarabosio says that The Simpsons Movie was not about layering sounds like in a big action film; there was far more subtlety. “It was about finding the right sounds for the right moment,” he says. “The creators and producers of The Simpsons have different aesthetics. Some have a more realistic approach; others want to see and hear more cartoonish things. It varies according to the situation and the animation as to what works best. The moment can be exciting, dangerous, tender or funny. They come and go by very fast, but each one is important.”

“Dialogue is the queen of this whole show,” explains Whittle. “The biggest challenge for all of us was to grow out of that TV sound and picture and to help support the music and dialogue with effects that fit the style and tradition that’s been set for almost 20 years––only translating it to the big screen.
“It’s all very realistic,” she concludes. “That is, if you believe in a yellow world.”

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Features

Jonathan Lucas Unveils His Editing Secrets on ‘Corpse Bride,’

by uncredited
written by uncredited 12 minutes read

by Robin Rowe

Representing a remarkable step forward in digital filmmaking, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is a stop-motion animated feature film created through the innovative use of editing and camera technology. Based on a 19th century Russian folktale of a groom (voiced by Johnny Depp) who marries a zombie (Helena Bonham Carter) by mistake, this groundbreaking work features puppets made from stainless steel armatures covered by a silicon skin. Corpse Bride is co-directed by Burton and stop-motion animation veteran Mike Johnson and is scheduled for release September 23 by Warner Bros.

Technologically, this is a movie of many firsts; it’s the first feature-length, stop-motion film edited using Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), it’s the first feature shot using commercial digital SLR still photography cameras and, perhaps most significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.

Editing Stop-Motion Animation with Final Cut Pro
Corpse Bride is Jonathan Lucas’ first feature as a full-fledged editor. A Guild member since 1993, Lucas has worked as an assistant on more than 20 live action movies, including Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 101 Dalmatians and Sommersby. It was his work as first assistant editor on last years’ Troy for Warners that brought Lucas to the attention of Corpse Bride producer Allison Abbate. At press time, he was still editing the film at Three Mills Studios in the Bromley by Bow section of London, England, where the production also took place.

“A lot of folks think our footage is CGI,” says Lucas. “It’s so smooth it looks computer-generated. The Canon still cameras are amazing; the quality is pretty unbelievable. If I have to, I can blow it up by 30 to 40 percent without showing degradation.” The immediacy of digital technology speeds the editing process. “I’m editing new footage three hours later, maybe quicker,” says Lucas. “It’s almost instant gratification.” As footage is edited, it replaces storyboard images and slowly the movie gets built.

Johnathan Lucas.

The preparation process for stop-motion is immense. “Shooting is monumental,” says Lucas. “As an editor you are a lot more patient.” He points out that an action film can have 14,000 feet of dailies per day––on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets he had some days with 20,000 feet of dailies. That film, a shoot with children and animals, consumed over a million feet of film.

“Most features shoot in 12 to 14 weeks,” notes Lucas. “With Corpse Bride it’s 52 weeks! We only get two minutes of film a week with stop-motion. One shot can take three weeks. Even so, I’m still refining the story on a daily basis with co-director Mike Johnson.” (Unlike on Frank Miller’s Sin City, the rules of the Directors Guild of America don’t prohibit co-directors on animation.)

It isn’t just the amount of time on the set that’s different about stop-motion production. “The animation process is almost reversed over a live action movie,” explains Lucas. “The storyboards are all JPEG images, and they shoot almost to the frame what’s on the storyboards. At one point, we had five or six storyboard artists working ten hours a day, six days a week. Do they play it in a close shot? A wide shot? It’s fine-tuned for months on end until the director says he’s happy.”

Audio for stop-motion is fine-tuned, too. “I lay in the voice record and sound effects earlier,” says Lucas. “Composer Danny Elfman does all the music for Tim Burton, and I use a lot of his music for the temp track. It’s a pretty good soundtrack before it’s handed off.” Sound DeLuxe–– which also worked on Burton’s upcoming live-action film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory––then adds footsteps (there are a lot in this movie), ADR and alternative sound effects for Burton to choose while Elfman records new music.

“For editing stop-frame animation, Final Cut Pro definitely works,” says Lucas. “It’s fairly friendly with the high-def footage I have.” A longtime Avid editor, Lucas is using FCP for the first time on Corpse Bride. “We inherited the edit system from a previous film crew,” he reveals. “I was thrown into the deep end to learn Final Cut Pro during production. It took me two weeks to master.

“Final Cut Pro is more editor-friendly in some ways than Avid,” he continues. “You can extend a shot without going into trim mode. With Avid, you always had to think what tracks to push down.” Lucas used FCP simply as an editing tool. Digital Intermediate (DI) was exchanged with London’s Moving Picture Company for the hundreds of effects shots in the movie.

The Corpse Bride puppets are made from stainless steel armatures covered by a silicon skin. Pictures’ stop-motion animated fantasy Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride

While Final Cut Pro can be easier to use and is much less expensive, being a pioneer with it in stop-motion presents some challenges. “We have an awful lot of JPEG storyboards––sometimes up to 12 soundtracks and more than six layers of video,” says Lucas. “I auto-save a lot.”

First assistant Ralph Foster explains that having so many JPEG still frames seems to challenge the system. That demand is unique to stop-motion production. Adding more RAM didn’t help, so to cut down on JPEG overhead, they were converted into QuickTime.

Lucas is running an Apple G5 (dual-2GHz) and FCP 4.5. Although version 5 and Mac OS X Tiger became available during production, there was no switch midstream because of the risk that it might break something in the production’s custom pipeline based on Final Cut Pro 4.5.

Final Cut Pro generates XML data of shot information. XML data, which is just specially formatted text, is much easier to integrate into animation pipelines. For Corpse Bride, data wrangler/computer programmer Martin Pengelly-Phillips wrote a utility in Python computer language to convert the XML data into a flattened reel. The shots get validated for naming and length, and checked against the list of known shots in the editorial database in FileMaker Pro. In Python, a series of AppleScripts are created to update the editorial database with the most recent cut.

The FCP project is 80 minutes long at 720 x 480 (offline) and 23.98 fps (for easier NTSC pull-down). Every shot is a folder of images, and each clip is treated as a reel. The EDL is eventually exported in CMX format for 2K conform on Quantel IQ, then output to film on Arri Laser.

Corpse Bride‘s groomsmen (and women), clockwise from center: Jonathan Lucas, editor; Billy Campbell, visual effects editor; Claire Rose Dodgson, assistant editor; Michael Apfel, trainee; Jane Hodge, track reader; Ralph Foster, assistant editor; and Mike Johnson, co-director.

Shooting with Canon SLR Cameras and Nikon Lenses
Corpse Bride has a surprising choice of camera for feature cinematography–– the Canon EOS-1D Mark II––a commercial digital SLR camera designed for still photography. This is a tremendous change in the state-of-the-art from five years ago, when Aardman Animations used custom-built film camera heads based on converted Mitchell cameras for the animated feature Chicken Run. The ancient Mitchells were chosen because the pin registration system was more accurate than any modern motion picture film camera. Finding that same sort of repeatable, rock-solid precision in digital SLR cameras would be a challenge.

While in London working on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, effects consultant Chris Watts happened to have dinner with Warner Bros. visual effects senior vice president Chris deFaria and Corpse Bride producer Abbate. “While discussing Corpse Bride, for some reason, I just assumed it was being shot with digital still cameras,” says Watts. “Chris deFaria is an accomplished photographer and saw the possibilities immediately.” Director of Photography Pete Kozachik and his team had been considering digital acquisition, but not with off-the-shelf SLR cameras as Watts proposed. With the beginning of photography only a month away, digital SLR camera testing began. There were many unknowns:

  • Are images from a digital still camera consistent frame to frame?
    • Is the quality comparable to film?
    • Is the image quality stable under different thermal and humidity conditions?
    • Could a system be devised for previewing animations on set?
    • Could a system be devised to keep track of all the frames?
    • Could a live video tap be created for a digital still camera?

With these issues in mind, Watts set about getting his hands on every digital camera he could find. Canon UK loaned a 10D, a 1D, a 1D Mark 2, and a 1DS. Nikon loaned a D1x, a D100, and one of the new D2H cameras. Watts also tested cameras from Sigma and Kodak. Initial tests were held at Framestore-CFC and the Moving Picture Company in London.

“We shot the same scene on every camera, converted the digital frames using dcRAW [an open-source program that accesses raw digital images], crunched everything to 2K, color-timed the sequences to match using Baselight and then output to film,” says Watts. “Basically, everything looked great until the film-originated version came up, then everyone yelled at the projectionist, ‘Focus!’” The images from digital cameras looked so stunning when projected. The tests convinced Burton, Johnson, Abbate and executives at Warners.

Animator Peter Dodd sets up a shot with the Corpse Bride puppets. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

“We originally selected the Nikon D2H because of the wireless ftp, the chip size, and the fact that we owned $90,000 of Nikon glass [lenses],” notes Watts. However, random noise was visible as pixilation in dark areas when the shots were played back as a movie. This pixilation effect was only visible in stop-motion photography, an application the Nikon hadn’t been designed for.

The Canon EOS-1D Mark II, which uses a CMOS sensor and DIGIC II processor chip, was one of the most expensive still cameras tested, but the image quality was amazing, according to Watts. A way had to be found to mount Nikon lenses on the Canon EOS body. With the NEOS adapter, focus and aperture must be set manually, but that’s fine for stop-motion photography.

Although some digital SLR cameras have “video out” ports, by its nature, no SLR shows any video until an exposure is made. A priority was to create a live tap so animators could see what they were doing. DP Kozachik, Watts and chief motion control technician Andy Bowman designed a rig that would allow a small video camera to be mounted on the back of the still camera body, but slide out of the way for fine focus adjustments.

The production bought 24 of the Canons. The original plan for lighting stations was to have a full system at each of the 24 sets, but that was cost-prohibitive. Seven lighting crews shared one station on a mobile cart. Each cart included a Macintosh, Photoshop and a suite of JavaScript, AppleScript and QuickTime tools to enable the lighting crews to view their work as it was developing.

“A lot of folks think our footage is CGI… It’s so smooth it looks computer-generated.” -Jonathan Lucas

FilmLight built software to take a raw file from a digital camera and output a Cineon file with the look of 5248 film stock. Production software incorporated dcRAW and Truelight’s proprietary color transforms. The software took care of resizing and annotation by generating code that directed Apple Shake to produce QuickTime files for editorial and 2K DPX sequences to match the color profile of 5248 film scans. Although the Canon would shoot 4k, the images were wrangled at 2k (2048 x 1365) because that would be the final output with the Arri Laser.

For projection playback, Iridas Frame-Cycler, was run on a Boxx PC. In the Iridas software, 1.85 masking was applied as well as simple color adjustments (printer lights, saturation, contrast and gamma) without disturbing the basic calibration. FilmLight designed a proprietary 3-D color cube for the digital projector that would convert the raw files on the fly to appear as if they had been shot on 5248.

Conclusion
Corpse Bride, along with films like Sin City, lead a trend in using emerging digital technology in ways not intended for feature filmmaking. Whether using gear designed for digital still photography or for HDTV, the visual results are striking.

Digital filmmaking has long been considered a trade-off compared to 35mm filmmaking; digital was cheaper or could do things impossible with film, but at a cost to overall image quality. With Corpse Bride, this is no longer the case.

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Features

Driving that Train: Editorial Engineers Power ‘Polar Express’

by Michael Kunkes
written by Michael Kunkes 25 minutes read

Stories by Michael Kunkes • photo by Gregory Schwartz

Jean-Luc Godard was fond of saying, “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end…but not necessarily in that order.” What was true for the French Nouvelle Vague easily applies to the production, if not the final product of The Polar Express.

The Castle Rock Entertainment presentation and Warner Brothers-distributed holiday adventure was directed by Robert Zemeckis, stars Tom Hanks in multiple roles and is based on the beloved and Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg.

Volumes have been written––and deservedly so––about this groundbreaking film, which debuted a next-generation, custom-created motion capture system dubbed “performance capture,” as well as about the visual effects team at Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI). Of course, it was all driven by the vision and storytelling expertise of director Zemeckis and co-executive producer Hanks.

So why, four months after the film’s release, and following a general snubbing by both Hollywood at large and even the animation industry’s own Annie Awards show, are we talking about The Polar Express? Quite simply, almost nothing has been said about the editorial process on this film, which represents the official big-studio start of a new era in what can be called “nonlinear production.”

Multiple creative processes, including editing, storyboarding, writing and designing, were occurring simultaneously, and continued to run throughout the two-and-a-half-year production period, while technicians were busy scanning, recording and rendering. This full integration of digital tools into the production process has led to the invention of countless untested procedures––improvised or extant––creating a fusion of production and post that may not be the complete wave of the future, but is certainly here now and cannot be ignored.

Copyright 2004 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Editors who have lived on the “edge of experience” with digital technology for nearly two years are uniquely poised in this new age to sort out the vast numbers of technical issues––large and small––relating to tracking vast amounts of information, budget considerations and, of course, storytelling.

Tracking the more than multiple terabytes of data produced for The Polar Express was no doubt a Herculean task, but that is a job with which editors are well versed. It was arriving at the procedures that proved to be the tricky part.

The work of two very talented professionals, Orlando Duenas and Jeremiah O’Driscoll—both of whom make their debut as editors on this film—and a team of dedicated assistants made sense out of the mountain of storage, helped invent countless new procedures and brought order out of chaos at every step of the way. In so doing, they never lost sight of what they were there to do: Preserve the look of Van Allsburg’s illustrations, which ultimately was the only artistic vision that mattered.

“They both have a fantastic grasp of the art form,” commented Zemeckis about Duenas and O’Driscoll. “And they’re magnificent in the way they’re able to think cinematically.”

“For many years the collaboration between myself and Bob and Jeremiah and Orlando was destined to happen,” added the film’s producer, Steve Starkey. “As we explore this new technology, both Jeremiah and Orlando have been instrumental in paving the way that films will be edited in the future. In this process, typical film production is much more integrated with post-production and it becomes more of a filmmaking process.”

The Polar Express is a misunderstood film. Traditional 2-D and 3-D character animators sneer at performance/motion capture because they feel it undermines their art, and live action fans don’t understand why it wasn’t all animated or all live action. The fact is that The Polar Express is a beacon––a herald of new technology, new methodologies and especially, new opportunities.

“This performance assembly timeline represents the very moment in the ‘Hot Chocolate’ sequence in The Polar Express when the waiters back-flip off the wall. The lower video levels represent the Hero Kids and Secondary Kids. As you go up in tracks, you find the Conductor layers, followed by the Chefs, and then each individual Waiter. This timeline does not include the Extra Children who filled out the car; that step was saved until final turnover.” – Orlando Duenas

What follows is an overview of how the members of the editorial team re-defined their jobs, found new outlets for their existing skills, and gained entry to a world that has preceded and eluded them. This story, and others to come, will provide a glimpse into Hollywood’s future––and post-production’s present.

 

Orlando Duenas

From his earliest days in film, it was clear that Orlando Duenas was the perfect person to deal with the thousands of details required to support the storytelling issues that came up during the making of The Polar Express.

In 1989, he was assisting Seattle’s only film editor, Pat Barber, who had purchased a very early version of the Avid. “ Five years before the Avid caught on in features, we used to videotape the dailies of low-budget features straight off the KEM with the counters showing, digitize from those tapes and use the Avid to get the films into rough cut, then use the counters to conform the work print and finish cutting the film. So I have often found myself in the position of inventor, with a long history of hybrid procedures.”

Duenas began working with Robert Zemeckis’ team on Contact in 1997, and first met editor Arthur Schmidt and Jeremiah O’Driscoll when they joined the editorial staff of Chain Reaction in 1996. Like everyone else on the crew, he knew exactly what needed to be done to accomplish each step, but not how he wanted to do it. “The folks at SPI knew what they needed to conform the performances, but the level of change and experimentation with which we presented them was unexpected,” he says. “However, from an editorial standpoint, the most important thing for us was to present Bob with the most flexible and thereby creative way of working.”

Duenas feels that in future shows of this type, certain issues will have to be resolved.

Early in production, Duenas worked extensively on cutting together the performance assemblies (based on Zemeckis’ selected mocap takes), which he then recut with the director and sent on to SPI for integration of the selected performances with other video layers. “Performance assemblies can become a very mind-boggling process, depending on the complexity of the scene,” he explains. “You start with the character who is driving the scene, cut together his performance, and then add other characters to the mix, always keeping in mind who will probably be on camera and when.”

Since he was editing multiple characters before any coverage was actually created beyond the wildly emoting mocap images, Duenas had to throw out some rules right at the beginning. “Movie actors play to a camera, but in a mocap scenario, they don’t know where the camera is ultimately going to be,” he says. “You keep yourself out of trouble by not cutting too tightly and lining up the performances as best you can, even if you have to force it.”

For Duenas, it soon became clear that his role in the show was going to be one of jumping the huge number of technical hurdles and interfacing with SPI. “Jeremiah and I knew that one of us was going to have to be on top of insuring that the integrated material coming back from Sony was meeting our intentions, and that the thousands of requests for new shots and edited performance assemblies was being done correctly,” he relates. “That job fell to me, while Jeremiah took charge of the creative aspects of performance.”

Day to day discussions with SPI consisted in large part of the minutia of performance assembly alterations, Maya file edits, layout requests, background character tiles and three different stages of shot review. “Since we turned over different sequences at different times, we were always having the same types of discussions,” Duenas explains. “Initial turnovers involved discussing Bob’s expectations for the sequence as a whole, as well as individual shot notes, but no line-ups. More complex were the budgetary reviews where we would talk about compromises on individual shots, and final turnover talks covered counts and revisions. It pretty much killed our social lives for over two years.”

“Performance assemblies can become a very mind-boggling process, depending on the complexity of the scene.” – Orlando Duenas

The integrated scenes were delivered back to Duenas in the form of a “sync check,” which consisted of the rudimentary low-resolution place-holding characters in a mock-up of the environment, which Zemeckis called “Michelin Men.” These were synched up to the previously turned over performance assemblies and minutely checked for alternations made by SPI during the integration process.

“Sometimes modifications were necessary and we needed to work with the integrators to ensure that Bob was getting what he wanted,” says Duenas. “Usually, a couple of phone calls would be needed before a sync check was deemed okay to go to the next phase.”

Dailies were finally shot in what was called the layout process, which refers to the scene as it exists in its 3-D environment—including characters, sets, props, camera, backgrounds and secondary characters; in short, everything.

Two layout processes were employed, both under Zemeckis’ direct supervision: Maya layout, where direct camera moves could be quickly keyframed, and Filmbox layout, which refined the camera moves via the “wheels” interface [see O’Driscoll story]. “One problem I had with layout was that there was no representation of the actors’ facial performance available during shooting, but Bob’s familiarity with the performance assemblies saved us,” Duenas confesses. “Let’s say you want the camera to stop pushing in at the moment the hero realizes he’s been duped. If you don’t have the timing in your head, you have a problem.”

The original layout plan called for shooting dailies via Filmbox, but any editing or manipulation of the original integration during layout was extremely time-consuming. “We found it better to shoot dailies in Maya, lock down the cut, then have final camera––or FINCAM––applied to only specific frame counts,” he says.

Creating a constantly evolving process led to a lot of “seat of your pants” moments for Duenas: “We would decide what we felt were the required aspects of turnovers; SPI would then come back with particular requests or rejections, and then we would mutually pound out a working solution. Sometimes the road became rough, but for the good of the picture as well as the process, most battles were worth fighting.

The only way to keep sync on this show was to never get out of sync, period.

“Right from the start, we decided to use a common time-of-day or ‘house’ time code,” he continues, “which was mastered in the video department, then sent to the motion capture department and encoded into the data. It was also sent to the sound department to be used as the DAT master timecode. This time code went to all videotapes, sound masters and to the performance capture computers, so that all EDLs would reflect a common time code.”

This was a help in some areas, but not always accessible in others, especially in regards to sync, where the problems were many, and the solutions not always elegant.

“The first thing to note,” says Duenas, “is that ‘sync’ on our show referred to both video and audio; that is, video being in sync with the performance capture data, and of course audio with both. The main problem was trying to sync up the constant flow of dailies and revised shots. We had no timecode burn-ins for aligning video and audio to shots, and no paperwork either.”

As an example of this, whenever edits were made in layout to the original performance assemblies, all sync reference was lost. One possible solution to the sync problem that Duenas came up with was to create Quicktime movies of the performance assemblies, that could be synched up in Maya layout to determine certain performance to camera issues. Then, in rendering, he would include the Quicktime panel in the Avid’s matte area as a reference for sync. “Since we were cutting anamorphic, we had a lot of area above and below the picture, where we traditionally placed the floating head in the ‘Michelen Man’ shots,” he said. “Placing the Quicktime panel in that area gave us a reference cut so you could tell how the original mocap material synched up to the layout material.” Since this was a solution arrived at late in the process, it served mainly as an academic exercise and as a lesson for future productions.

There was also a problem early on in the show when the integration came back from SPI and Duenas found that the time code was five or six frames off from the video time code. “Since most shots were based on known performance assemblies or specific edits to known performance assemblies, we could ballpark it, and then it essentially became an eye-matching job,” he says. “Luckily, we could revise sync any way we wanted, right up to final turnover.”

“If you don’t have the timing in your head, you have a problem.” – Orlando Duenas

Ultimately, he explains, the only way to keep sync on this show was to never get out of sync, period. Describing the typical scenario, Duenas says, “The syncher must be in perfect sync with the sync check, a painstaking process of checking every character by eye, at every edit. Then, as shots come in, we utilize this new syncher to sync up the video and audio tracks to the new shot using the layout frame counter. This works okay––until edits are made in the Maya file, and you get the cryptic note regarding the change. Now, try this with 20 dailies a night from four different sequences for 12 months straight. That’s why sync was the cotter pin that kept this entire train on the tracks.”

Duenas feels that in future shows of this type, certain issues will have to be resolved. “There still is no way to track sync via timecode, or any other reference data,” he says. “For example, say Bob wanted to delete 24 frames from a pause in a character’s performance. Easily done, but getting that information to editorial proved awkward and cumbersome. The layout operator provided a handwritten change note, but making changes in layout is not handled like making a change on film. They don’t have the time to track it that closely, and in order to make something work in layout, there are sometimes multiple edits to multiple characters at various points in the timeline. Try to get a beleaguered layout guy to track that with the director breathing down his neck!

“So, yes,” he continues, “a system of assemble and change notes will need to be devised, and some kind of burn-in referencing of the original timecode of elements is really needed, for obvious reasons.”

Although Duenas’ major role was driving the technical process, he was never out of the creative loop. “Jeremiah would consistently stick his head in my door and say, ‘Watch this,’ and I would contribute my two cents,” he recalls. “During turnover meetings, Bob maintained an open forum for commentary that allowed me to suggest and later execute revisions. And since we were constantly manipulating the video plates in terms of the performance––and also choosing all the surrounding extra Kid and Elf plates––it was a very fulfilling project creatively.”

“Sometimes the road became rough, but for the good of the picture as well as the process, most battles were worth fighting.” – Orlando Duenas

But just as Moby Dick was “a monstrous big whale, aye, but a whale, no more,” Duenas says, “The Polar Express was shot as a ‘real’ movie, and was edited as a ‘real’ movie, only with a lot more picture tracks. One of the coolest things about this process is the way you can revisit shots, pretty much all the way to turnover.”

As he looks forward to his new career as a full editor, Duenas reflects, “Helping to unleash this new technology on the unsuspecting public was exciting and a little bit scary, but I don’t want to end up working only on groundbreaking effects projects. Two and a half years…It’s far too exhausting.”

 

Jeremiah O’Driscoll

About his role on The Polar Express, Jeremiah O’Driscoll is very specific. “Having worked with editor Arthur Schmidt for so long on a number of Bob Zemeckis’ pictures, I recognized early on that my job was to be the caretaker and preserver of the original performances,” he says. “At every phase, I was the one who insisted that if what is happening on Tom Hanks’ face isn’t driving his character, we needed to get back to the original performance. I always had to keep in my mind Tom’s original inspiration and Bob’s vision for the show and speak up when something didn’t ring true. Because if we lost Tom’s original performance, then we might just as well have made a traditional animated film from the start.”

“I constantly judged who was driving the scene at any given moment and fit the other performance to match.” – Jeremiah O’Driscoll

O’Driscoll previously collaborated with Zemeckis as an apprentice and later assistant to Schmidt on five of the director’s features, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath and Cast Away. He was still a first when Schmidt called O’Driscoll in May of 2002 and asked him to help Zemeckis and producer Steve Starkey create a Leica reel based on Zemeckis’ outline for The Polar Express. “The animators had estimated that it would take two years to produce a Leica reel of the entire movie,” O’Driscoll said. “I figured that if I used the effects capabilities of the Avid to their fullest, I could approximate a 91-minute story reel in just four months. After bringing on Orlando Duenas, we also cut a one-minute sequence of test material from the script to completion and Warners gave us the green light 16 weeks before the start of principal photography––or more accurately, principal capture.”
According to O’Driscoll, the show was divided into two stages, the first of which began with the reference video created at the performance capture shoot.

“The editor takes the reference video, with all the actors’ moves and reactions shot from every conceivable direction, and recreates a real time performance assembly,” he explains. However, complicating this process was the limiting 10-by-10-foot performance capture grid (called a mocap volume) and a maximum take length of 90 seconds. “For example,” O’Driscoll says, “If the conductor walks the entire length of the train car, he must pass through the grid at least three times so that the editor can match footsteps out of one grid and into the next.”

This was not a guesswork process. The editor has to track exactly when and where the characters enter and exit the mocap volume and match them into their virtual environment. “For example, he explains, “When characters are following each other down a hall and up some stairs as they exit one volume and enter another, you have to count the number of steps to the stairs, count the number of stairs, and ensure that right foot falls match right foot falls, all the while watching the actual performance of lines and actions.”

O’Driscoll often worked with as many as six video layers (not counting background extras), each of which was covered by ten or more reference cameras covering the action. “Since Hanks plays both the conductor and the hero boy, the simplest scene between the two of them would be made up of two video layers, and each layer had to be tailored to work with the other because scenes were not acted to playback,” he says. “As an editor, I constantly judged who was driving the scene at any given moment and fit the other performance to match.”

O’Driscoll discovered that one of the joys of the process was that many scenes were not locked in almost until film out.

Once the performance assembly was completed to Zemeckis’ specifications, it was turned over to SPI for the rough integration of the performances, which took about a month from the initial turnover. “Several weeks later, we would receive a sync check with what Bob dubbed the “Michelin Men” [rudimentary low-resolution place-holding characters in a mock-up of the environment], and after more editorial scrutiny, a Maya file was created for further image processing.”

It was not until the second stage of production that anything resembling camera work and coverage could be created. Again, O’Driscoll’s skills were required to drive The Polar Express a bit farther down the track. “At this stage, the facial integration had still not been done, so I cut scenes with the ‘Michelin Men’ shots occupying most of the screen with the reference actor heads floating around along the top of the screen. Bob would sit in the ‘wheels’ rig, creating and reviewing coverage with directors of photography Don Burgess and Robert Presley. He would then leave a list of shot requests, which our assistants would track. On an average day, I would receive about 15 shots. I needed a vivid imagination to judge a scene under those conditions.”

Much has also been said about “wheels,” which, simply put, is a mechanical pan-and-tilt rig attached to a virtual camera in the computer that operates the same way as a crane. “Wheels” controlled depths of field, camera angles, lens selection, backgrounds, camera movement and shot duration; in short, anything beyond the actual performance. “We used the ‘wheels’ system so that the camera moves would not feel keyframed, but more organic, as if an actual operator were behind the camera,” O’Driscoll says.

“During this phase, we did a ‘spraydown,’ which was our way of getting basic coverage on every scene in the movie, and we did this by giving the DP license to cover the scenes in a very rudimentary fashion, getting a master and some coverage,” O’Driscoll adds. “Bob simply didn’t have the time to address the entire movie at once early on, but SPI still needed to know what shots were going to be there. Every shot was later redone and personally directed by Bob, but he did all that finessing of shots and camera work after a version of the movie already existed. We knew we would never turn over any of these shots, but it enabled us to get the running time down at an early stage.”

The editor has to track exactly when and where the characters enter and exit the mocap volume and match them into their virtual environment.

After a “wheels” shot came back to edit, O’Driscoll and first assistant Alex Olivares would once again scrutinize every move of every character and lay back five or more accompanying video tracks against the “wheels” shot. With that subclip, O’Driscoll cut the movie.

Even once Zemeckis locked his cut, counts needed to be done on every video layer, another daunting process. “A ‘wheels’ operator or Maya artist may have slipped pieces of action or performance in a particular scene to satisfy a request from Bob,” the editor relates.

Trust and communication were constant factors as The Polar Express evolved. This was especially true of the creative relationship between Zemeckis and O’Driscoll. “Bob is a very collaborative director, and made my transition from assistant to editor an easy one,” Driscoll says. “He has a very distinct vocabulary in his storytelling, and a great ability to respond to edited scenes without any preconceptions. He also doesn’t care if a shot takes three days to execute. If it doesn’t further the storytelling, then it’s history.” His long relationship with Zemeckis came into play at all stages of the production. “Much of my time was spent educating others about why Bob directs as he does.”

O’Driscoll also worked very closely with senior visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen at SPI. “Jerome and I were always working to come up with the most creative ways of trimming money out of shots without harming their intent, as well as dealing with continuity issues. With 40 or more people working on one shot, you can easily lose track of the big picture.”

O’Driscoll compares the dawn of nonlinear production to a similar time, some 15 years ago, when nonlinear post first appeared on the scene. “When Avid and Lightworks first appeared, some people adapted, and others left the business because they didn’t want to click a mouse,” he recalls. “You hear a lot of editors complain now about how we have to do temp scores and quick and dirty effects. They believe it is a drawback to suddenly have to assume a bigger slice of what a movie is. But we are entering into something that is completely new, and that brings new responsibilities and great opportunities to impact production.”

“The editor takes the reference video, with all the actors’ moves and reactions shot from every conceivable direction, and recreates a real time performance assembly,” – Jeremiah O’Driscoll

For one thing, O’Driscoll says, editors never before had to function as script supervisors. “Because shots were being farmed out to 300 artists, and because jobs were being entrusted to computer people that didn’t understand how movies are made, I had to watch continuity extremely carefully,” he explains. “You just can’t expect people that haven’t been around an Avid for ten years to be able to open up a bin and know what the coverage was. Things like this will have to be worked out in the future, and more to our benefit.”

But then, says O’Driscoll, much of what is usually done during production became a part of post to such an extent that relationships constantly crossed boundaries. For example, he says, “If the camera landed on the Hero Boy and then he blinked, something that only I could see in the video reference, I would make a request to the DP that the camera land a beat sooner to help the cut.” In the end, anything that could help the cut was fine, because O’Driscoll only was allowed a two-frame handle at the head and the tail on any given shot.

O’Driscoll discovered that one of the joys of the process was that many scenes were not locked in almost until film out, and unlike a traditional effects film, there was room in certain sequences to finesse some of the performances. “For example, in the scene near the end where Santa’s sleigh is taking off, the reaction shot of the Hero Boy and Hero Girl was taken from a totally different scene,” he says. “Sometimes it was a matter of torq’ing up a performance to get a little something extra that was different from what we’d been looking at through the entire movie.”

O’Driscoll’s skills were required to drive The Polar Express a bit farther down the track.

By far, says O’Driscoll, the biggest challenge on The Polar Express was the fact that Zemeckis was unable to see his film from start to finish for a full year after wrapping the performance capture shoot, because so many decisions had to be made before it could be viewed in its entirety. “We had to trust our intuition, and the visual effects supervisors, that it would all work out in the end,” he says.

In the end, Zemeckis came to love the process, because, as O’Driscoll explains, it freed the director from having to deal with both the performance and the cinematic aspects of the film at the same time. “One of the most unique new ideas about this is that once Bob was satisfied with the performances, he could attend to the cinematic aspects of the show in the comfort of an office full of layout artists,” he explains. “Bob would sit with me and review a scene and arrive at some inspiration for a new shot or camera move, then walk across the hall and sit with a layout artist for ten minutes making the shot. And I could cut it into the scene ten minutes after that.”

O’Driscoll continues: “In part because of what Orlando and I were able to create, Bob could work with this film the way he works with conventionally shot features. He wanted to keep The Polar Express as much like a real movie as possible and not go beyond existing cinematic vocabulary. ‘The good news is we can do anything, and the bad news is…we can do anything,’ he liked to say.”

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