Assistant Editors

by Edward Landler

Since starting her career, picture editor Shannon Baker Davis’ work schedule has almost always been crowded. On both coasts, most of it was in unscripted TV. Over the last three years, though, she has made a successful transition to scripted television.

Brought in last year for Season Two of creator/executive producer Ava DuVarney’s series Queen Sugar (2016-present) for OWN, she is now working on Season Three. Drawn from Natalie Baszile’s novel about an African-American family running a Louisiana sugar cane farm, the show’s new season premiere is scheduled as a two-night special on May 29 and 30.

In between Sugar’s seasons, Davis also worked on the first season of Grown-ish (2018), ABC cable channel Freeform’s spin-off of the network’s Black-ish (2014-present). Following Yara Shahidi’s Zoey Johnson to college, Grown-ish has now been picked up for a second season.

A scene from the third season of Queen Sugar. Courtesy of OWN.

Reflecting on how she made the changeover from reality to scripted, Davis says, “There’s no one thing you can do; you have to do everything. You have to throw all the hooks in the water.”

Born Shannon Baker, she grew up in Augusta, Georgia. Her mother was a nuclear chemist and her father an engineer; both worked an hour’s drive away in South Carolina. From 1996 to 2000, Davis earned her BA in Radio Television and Film (RTVF) in the Annenberg Honors Program at Howard University in Washington, DC.

For her senior thesis, she made a documentary film about how police are depicted in the movies. In the project, she intercuts viewers expressing their reactions to how the police are portrayed in films with clips ranging from the silent Keystone Kops comedies to Terminator 2 (1991). “I already knew I wanted to edit,” Davis reflects.

The summer before her final year at school, she worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee where she became familiar with Avid and other nonlinear editing systems and, during her senior year, interned at WETA, Washington, DC’s public broadcasting station. The year after graduation, she served as an assistant at a post-production house in DC, which cut political spots and ads for Time/Life Records.

While at Howard, the RTVF dean — actor/director/producer Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, 1991) — got her interested in the American Film Institute. She applied and became a fellow in its editing program. Working with such teachers as Stan Salfas, ACE, Howard Smith, ACE, and Farrel Jane Levy, ACE, she edited eight shorts between 2001 and 2003.

Shannon Baker Davis.

For Davis, a valuable aspect of the AFI education was how class discussions of scripts became story discussions to plan out the editing before the projects were shot. Of equal importance, after the project was completed, she says, “Everyone reviews your cuts.”

AFI also gave her the opportunity to meet strong African-American role models who had established careers in the industry. “I met Lillian Benson, who invited me and another black editing student to her home,” Davis recalls. “There was a roomful of black editors — the people who cut all the TV shows and movies I watched.”

Later, Terilyn A. Shropshire, ACE, came to the AFI campus with writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood to do a seminar about their film Love & Basketball (2000). Davis asked Shropshire to be her mentor, and reveals, “I still ask her for advice.”

Returning to the East Coast after completing the AFI editing program, Davis found work as an assistant editor on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown (2003-2006) on the strength of a letter to the production company. This began what turned out to be more than a decade of unscripted and documentary TV work. Based in Washington when she was hired, for four days of each of her first two weeks on this New York-produced show, she took the commuter train from DC to New York and back to get to work, which was a short walk from Penn Station.

“It was the end of one season and the start of another,” she remembers. “There was one editor, one assistant editor and one story producer on the same episode. I saw a lot of other assistants who just passed through, but they kept me on. I was doing notes; and I got to cut!”

A scene from Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. Courtesy of Picture This Productions.

Davis soon moved on to another Bravo reality show, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List (2005-2010), with the comedienne leading viewers through her experiences in the business. The first season, as assistant to editors Neal Acosta and Kevin Leffler, Davis felt that they were “basically inventing a new style of reality show,” with the camera just following Griffin. Davis was on the show five of its six seasons, except for the fifth when post-production moved to LA.

On Season Two, Davis began to edit. She notes, “The first show I edited was Kathy entertaining the troops in Iraq. It was a self-contained show and [the editors] said it would be easier for me.” The Iraq show was among those submitted for Emmy Award consideration the year the series won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program. Another episode edited by Davis was also submitted the following year, and the series won the same award a second time.

During that time, she was throwing a lot of hooks in the water. Before her full editing credit on D-List, she received her first full editing credit on TLC’s documentary series Miami Ink (2005-2008) about tattoo artists. Her first union show as editor, Granada TV’s reality series The First 48 (2004-present), aired on the A&E Network. Tracking police during the first 48 hours of an actual murder investigation, each episode of the series was so complex that it required 12 weeks of editing offline.

Davis worked with many different unscripted shows in New York until 2011, when she moved to LA to join her future husband, website designer Derek Davis, who had made the move west in 2009. Her last job before moving was editing episodes of Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes (2011), a reality series chronicling the TV personality’s life during the last season of The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986-2011).

After telling Season 25’s executive producer Arthur Borman of her upcoming move, Davis was surprised to get four job offers in LA within the following week. As in New York, she found herself working regularly on a number of unscripted shows, including 21 episodes of Bravo’s Top Chef (2006-present), but soon grew tired of the push-and-pull between producers and editors — until 2014, when she started editing for Lifetime’s Project Runway (2004-present), her first union show in LA.

Shannon Baker Davis.

“In 10 years of doing unscripted, I had never had an executive producer sit and watch the string out together with the post-production team. From the beginning, the entire season was mapped out,” Davis exclaims. On Runway, there were three or four set teams of three editors each leapfrogging episodes; Davis usually teamed with Adrienne Salisbury and Yaffa Lerea.

“On other shows, you wind up putting out the fires of the day,” she explains. “I work better when I have the big picture; you can map out the trajectory of the episode.” The more organized work setup of Runway, and the birth of her daughter Savannah late in 2014, motivated Davis’ move into scripted work. “With a baby, the biggest thing was to draw the line: By the end of 2015, no more reality shows…so that I’d be available for scripted work,” she adds.

The hardest jump for Davis was getting assistant editing work in scripted after editing reality. Fortunately, editor Katherine Skjerping, who had recently moved up from assistant on CBS’ The Good Wife (2009-2016), brought her on that show as her assistant. Then, Jamie Pedroza, who also had a background in reality, hired her as assistant for HBO’s Insecure (2016-present), and her AFI teacher Levy asked Davis to assist her on ABC’s Nashville (2012-present).

At the same time, the aspiring scripted editor was accepted by the American Cinema Editors (ACE) Diversity Mentorship Program with veteran Troy Takaki, ACE, as her mentor. “It literally changed the path of my career with the amazing access you get to ACE editors, the people who are trailblazing the editing profession,” Davis asserts. “You’re not only a ‘mentee,’ you’re a mentor, too.”

Just as a strong letter got Davis her first job in unscripted, another missive helped land her first full editing job in scripted on BET’s The Quad (2017-present), set at a fictional historic black university. The editor explains, “I told them I brought something to the job that others might not; I went to Howard.”

“In reality TV, you have more leeway, while scripted is more planned for you — but I don’t want to say it’s easier.”

Her work on The Quad brought her to Queen Sugar. Another editor on the BET show, Avril Beukes, ACE, had worked on the first season of Sugar and let Davis know that the show needed editors for its second season.

Now, with a three-and-a-half-year-old toddler, the editor is happy to have more of a regular schedule working on a scripted show like Queen Sugar. Davis is one of three editors on the show, with each cutting every third episode — and every director on the show is a woman. “It’s a special place to work,” she says. “This season, I have a lot of contact with Ava. She embraces every project like it is her first or her last. When you work with her, you want to have that same amazing energy.”

Insecure editor Pedroza, who was responsible for bringing Davis to Grown-ish as well, also was editing Black-ish (for which she won an ACE Eddie Award this year for Best Edited Comedy Series for Commercial Television). When Black-ish creator Kenya Barris started Grown-ish, Pedroza was asked to cut the spin-off and told Davis that she wanted her on the show. As the two editors on the show, they alternate episodes.

While both -ish comedies are shot and edited at the same time, Davis notes, “Kenya pays close attention to both shows. He wanted Grown-ish to have its own voice, to skew younger. Visually, they made an effort to make it look different. He taught me so much about cutting comedy.”

A scene from Grown-ish. Courtesy of ABC Studios.

Working as a scripted editor, she is especially pleased to be cutting both drama and comedy. “Having two very different shows, I personally don’t get bored,” she maintains. “And having them on my resume tells people that I’ll do what’s best, no matter what genre it is.”

Asked about the differences between scripted and unscripted, Davis responds: “In reality TV, you have more leeway, while scripted is more planned for you — but I don’t want to say it’s easier. When it first gets put together, it’s not there yet; you have to judge the performances from one scene to the next and from one episode to the next.”

Recognizing that the post-production politics in scripted are more complex, she offers, “Working with writers, producers and directors, you want to make sure that everybody is acknowledged — and then see how to plus it.”

Throughout her career, Davis has kept juggling projects as a learning process, not just to hone her skills but to establish relationships. This has included taking work on low-budget projects (ranging from podcasts to indie features). “When people are asking you to work for very little, generally they’re grateful and they don’t take advantage of you,” she reasons. “They realize they’re building relationships, too.”

While she was pregnant, the editor even managed to create a comedy web series called Colored People (2014), about a team of diversity trainers who rid clueless workplaces of prejudice (long before Starbucks knew it needed such services). Writing the five-to-seven-minute scripts with her husband, she produced and edited five episodes. “We wrote a half-hour series pilot that I’d love to see produced eventually,” she adds.

Davis sees continual busyness as “training for when you have a tough job that you have to put most of your time into.” Having reached that point, and looking to the future, she concludes, “I love TV. It’s doing phenomenal things, but I’d like to edit a big-budget feature. Still, the TV shows have my heart.”

by Michael Goldman • photos courtesy of National Geographic Channel

There probably isn’t a more iconic 20th century figure than Albert Einstein, given that his scientific work literally changed the course of world history and how humans view the universe. At the same time, until now, there may never have been a major historical figure’s life story harder to neatly package up and dramatize in a narrative format than Einstein’s. He’s been the subject of numerous books and documentaries, of course, but it took literally decades of studying his private correspondence before it finally became clear that his personal human story was even more dramatically compelling than his scientific story.

That personal story was comprehensively told in the 2007 book Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, and a couple others. But still, the puzzle of how to encapsulate such a titanic existence — balancing the personal and the scientific in a way that would allow the layperson to understand the science without losing focus on the human drama — confounded many contemplating the thought of bringing an accurate depiction of Einstein to screens large or small.

The National Geographic Channel, in search of its first scripted narrative project, finally took up the challenge by hiring feature film producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard to produce a 10-episode series based on Isaacson’s book. Entitled Genius, the series stars Geoffrey Rush as the elder Einstein and Johnny Flynn as his youthful incarnation and premiered April 25, with the Oscar-winning Howard directing the pilot. National Geographic has announced that the series has been picked up for a second season.

Helming the show’s creative path, the director initially planned to partner with his longtime co-editor, Dan Hanley, ACE, to cut the massive project, which was shot entirely on location in Prague. The idea was to tell the story in a way that could organically weave the parallel stories of Einstein’s rebellious beginnings as a young man on the cusp of discovering both his genius and his intense romantic passions, with the elder Einstein, now a celebrity, suddenly thrust into European politics as the ugly specter of Nazism began to rise, forcing him to flee to America at long last.

The Genius editorial team, from left, Derek Stricker, J. Kathleen Gibson, Debby Germino, Beth Conley, James Wilcox and Agustín Rexach.

Editor James Wilcox was picked to partner with Hanley on the project, but early in development, he discovered that Hanley had suddenly decided to retire. “Ron had always traditionally worked with Dan and [the now retired] Mike Hill,” Wilcox explains. “Dan was coming off Ron’s 2016 movie, Inferno, and we were getting ready to start, heading into Labor Day. But Dan expressed to Ron that it was time for him to retire. So, the next thing you know, I had inherited the project.”

What Wilcox initially inherited was the chance to collaborate on a pilot for which Howard was shooting feature-film-level amounts of footage, and which quickly got a direct-to-series order, meaning production was going to continue unabated through 10 episodes. Thus, editor J. Kathleen Gibson, ACE, was added to the team, and then Debby Germino followed shortly thereafter. Gibson and Germino both started immediately helping Wilcox cut particular scenes for the pilot, and then Gibson moved on to cut episode two, while Wilcox finalized the pilot. He then went on to cut episode three, and Germino episodes four and five. Gibson then cut episodes six and seven, Wilcox episodes eight and nine, and Germino episode 10.

“They allowed the pilot to go long, and probably, the season finale and the next-to-last show, will get some variance in time, while the others will run about 50 minutes,” Wilcox elaborates. “So we are talking about more than 10 hours of television filmmaking, editing and storytelling. No one person could handle that on this kind of schedule. It is like 10 works of art, 10 movies really. So a three-editor rotation, with three editors and three assistants, worked best. That is kind of standard at this point for the density of the material and the schedules. So, even now [at press time], we’re still challenged to meet deadlines.”

With production on location in Prague and such a huge volume of footage, along with the need to work around schedule limitations of actors — particularly Rush — and the need to build in key visual effects sequences, there were many technical and logistical challenges involved (see sidebar, below). But from an editing point of view, the biggest challenge was always creative: What form of storytelling to utilize?

A scene from Genius.

“How were we going to avoid a dusty portrayal of Einstein?” Wilcox continues. In his view, the answer came by riding what he calls a growing trend for deep period work these days — “the modernization of storytelling with traditional or historical subjects.”

By that, the editor means using state-of-the-art techniques and camera work, but married to historical images. “We wanted to be in the point of view of the character,” he says. “And when Ron shoots, he shoots in great detail. If you look at the pilot, where people pick up things, you know what the object is — a piece of chalk on a chalkboard — and he brings us so close to the chalkboard that you almost feel like you are the one writing on it. So we had lots of tight close-ups, all those things that really convey emotion and detail.”

Indeed, Germino adds, one of the goals was to emphasize or highlight “the stunning locations of Prague” and the stylized cinematography used throughout the series, in which lens flares, natural light, color desaturation, wide vistas and so on are utilized to move the story back and forth narratively between flashbacks to the younger Einstein’s life from the later, Nazi-menaced life of the older Einstein.

“The cinematography was beautiful work,” says Germino. “One of the definite goals of the storytelling was to do a lot of extreme close-ups and extreme wide angles. There was definitely an effort to use those types of shots, and to really be able to highlight some of those beautiful locations. As long as we didn’t sacrifice story, we would do it; most frequently, it was useful for advancing story. But there were some beautiful shots we had to take out, because in television, you have to stay within 50 minutes.”

James Wilcox, left, and Agustín Rexach.

In any case, all along the way, the goal was to keep the focus on Einstein’s personal story. His first love, his first and second marriages, his affairs, friendships and moral dilemmas in the face of great hostility in both the scientific and political communities, all intersected with major scientific achievements in his career. Wilcox calls this a portrayal of “a complex and somewhat difficult person.”

This was yet another reason why the story is told in nonlinear fashion. The pilot introduces both stories and moves between them using a variety of cutting techniques to wind them together seamlessly. Then, episodes two through five focus on young Einstein, before both versions appear again in episode six, and then the older Einstein’s story fully takes over in episodes seven (with a brief cameo from young Einstein) and eight through ten.

There were some logistical reasons for some of this, in the sense that Rush was not immediately available to filmmakers, so they started filming sequences with Flynn as young Einstein, and then, “once he set the mold for young Albert nicely in terms of the mannerisms and eccentricities he carried into his life, that helped influence things the rest of the way,” Wilcox adds. “So when Geoffrey came on board, he looked at what Johnny had done, and they kind of made it one.”

The bigger influence on the nonlinear structure, however, was the simple fact that it fit with a story about Albert Einstein. Given that the great scientist’s theories and breakthroughs involved the nature of time and how it is not as rigid or inflexible as had always been presumed, moving around through Einstein’s life fit the way that he thought about and approached life, according to the editors.

J. Kathleen Gibson and Derek Stricker.

“Obviously, we had a lifetime condensed into 10 episodes,” offers Gibson. “The scripts tried to stay true to his life narrative as much as possible, but making it fit within 10 hours. From a physics approach, time is fluid, of course. So we move back and forth and around in time, not always in a linear way. But we tell it in a way that people can follow. Sometimes, we have chyrons giving a date or a place. But we also have certain looks for certain periods. What would be present day in the show has a more realistic look; the colors are not saturated in terms of being dense, but just sort of real. If we go to a flashback in an earlier time period, it’s desaturated, with red coming through a little bit more. But everything else is kind of combination of a sepia, gray, black and white look — a visual cue that we are shifting in time.”

Gibson adds that this nonlinear structure, combined with the wealth of material with which the editors had to work, permitted the editors to experiment liberally en route to fulfilling their obligation of making sure the story flowed correctly.

“Frequently in editing, you shift things around — even intercut things that were not initially meant to be intercut — to make the story flow better and tell it in a way that works better,” she says. “We were going to shift in time anyway, being that this is a story about Einstein, but we were not married to any one rigid way of telling the story. If I had to shift things around to make a scene or an episode work better, then that is what I did.”

Another big challenge for editors involved correctly utilizing a methodology for illustrating what was going on in Einstein’s head when he went into a state of visualizing a major new scientific idea, and how to do it in a way that would not lose the viewer in the scientific details, take them out of the narrative, or be over-the-top. The solution the filmmakers innovated came to be referred to as Einstein’s “thought experiments.”

Beth Conley, left, and Debby Germino.

These, essentially, are modest CG representations of the way Einstein might explain such concepts to non-experts back in his era. As such, the editorial team mocked up crude versions of the various effects for the thought experiments to start the cut and figure out timing and pacing, while waiting for the final visual effects to drop into the final cut. With no visual effects editor on the show, the technical aspects of this chore fell to the assistant editors (see sidebar, below), but nuancing them just right was among the most complicated parts of editing Genius.

“It was really fun grappling with that aspect,” says Germino. “We had to keep it scientifically accurate for the time period, and yet we couldn’t take viewers out of the story and go over their heads. So we had to find a way to do a simplification of it for a general audience that was interesting. We worked with our VFX supervisor and science consultants on set on the thought experiments; every episode has one. We basically go into Einstein’s head and try to see what he was seeing when he was visualizing one of his theories.”

Episode two features a typical thought experiment as young Einstein is daydreaming in class, tuning out his professor and visualizing pieces of his Theory of Relativity. We see the ceiling give way and simply travel into space. On another occasion, we see light beams emanate from his mind to outer space to the sun as he gives a university lecture. None of the CG is particularly ornate or elaborate; indeed, it was all designed to fit what was known to have been conceptually comprehensible to Einstein at that time in history.

In keeping with the theme of the material, editors also played with the movement of people and elements in frames to represent time speeding or slowing for Einstein as he either entered into deep thought or, at times, deep anxiety. At one point, while taking entrance exams to get into university, young Einstein is overcome by anxiety when he realizes he has not bothered to study anything but mathematics and physics. For him, time slows, while for everyone else in the scene, time speeds up.

A scene from Genius.

“We kind of embraced that idea of going back and forth in time as something that was part of Einstein in a sense,” says Germino. “We would ramp time up or slow it down to get you into his head a little bit and mimic the idea of a flow state — in which he gets an idea and ramps up and goes really fast. Or something forms in his head, and everything slows down into slow motion, kind of where time even stands still at one point. We embraced that idea and used it to our advantage.

“We used other techniques for going back years in his life also,” she continues. “They would write it really beautifully where one thought would jump into the next thought, so we would use a lot of pre-lapping to connect different time periods, meaning dialogue from the next scene underneath the end of the preceding scene to create connecting tissue between the different periods.”

Gibson adds that, in keeping with the free-flowing, free-thinking, rebellious nature of Einstein, the editors on Genius felt liberated to ignore “typical rules of cinema” in terms of their cutting techniques when it came to bringing these elements together seamlessly.

A scene from Genius.

“There were times when we were on a macro shot, and then we jumped wide,” she said. “According to a theory book, that would not be appropriate, but it felt right for this. We have some shots that are huge vistas across snowy landscapes. They are absolutely stunning, great production value, and it looks very rich and suits the story. Sometimes there would be a camera move that would have to be cut short, or a shot that did not quite look the way we wanted it, even though it was beautiful, so we would make a compromise and do it another way. The beauty of this show is that we had so many choices. But as an editor, you have to pick one; you can’t use them all.”

These issues are what Wilcox was talking about when he referenced “the modernization of storytelling.” To keep up with with strong scripts, Howard’s creative leadership and contributions from directors of other episodes, Wilcox suggests the editors were ultra-concerned about making Genius a “textural” piece in order to tell us what Einstein was going through.

“When Albert plays the violin, we were tight on his face, and we could see Geoffrey’s fingers up close, the bowing of the violin, all that kind of stuff,” he explains. “These were all the real things about Einstein. He was a genius, after all, and to me, that was the real story: how did he overcome those obstacles, including ones of his own doing, and continue to pursue the things that were important to him in life? That’s how he became a genius in the end, and that’s the story we are telling.”

A scene from Genius.

A ‘Genius’ Workflow

Genius was shot on location in Prague using a combination of three Arri Alexa camera systems: the Alexa XT, Alexa Plus and Alexa Mini, with some GoPro and Canon 7Ds work thrown in. Therefore, the post vendor was kept busy during production, transferring dailies and transcoding them to the Avid DnX36 codec. Each evening, those transcoded dailies were prepped and uploaded using Aspera Connect Server technology, so that the production’s trio of assistant editors — Agustín Rexach teamed with Wilcox, Derek Stricker with Kathleen Gibson, and Beth Conley teamed with Germino — could begin working on them each morning at the show’s production offices at Sunset Gower Studios.

Rexach says that each editorial team more or less operated in a self-contained manner, with the assistants copying dailies to their shared Avid NEXIS Storage system (22TB) each morning so that dailies prep could begin. Each editor and assistant worked on his or her own Avid Media Composer (8.5.2) workstation throughout production.

“Each editor liked to organize his or her material differently,” Rexach says. “In James’ case, he hates clutter and liked his bins to reflect that. Production would shoot between two and four cameras with each setup, and James initially would only want to see all his printed takes with all cameras grouped together in single grouped clips at the top of the bin. He starts there and takes great care to go through script notes, incorporating any notes the director made on set. I also prepare non-printed [B-Neg] takes, but I keep them hidden from view until James specifically asks for this material.”

Rexach also points out that since the production did not employ a separate visual effects editor, each assistant shouldered that responsibility on his or her respective episodes.

“Once we determined what shots needed visual effects, we would generate an EDL of the pertinent shots,” he explains. “Encore Hollywood, which handled our online and color correction, would pull the selected plates and upload them as ProRes 4444 files to United Production Partners VFX in Prague. Once they completed the effects shots, they would send us DnX36 versions that we could drop into the cuts. Feedback sessions would be conducted via conference call using cineSync [review and approval] software, enabling our cutting rooms to share the same video files with UPP in Prague.”

Rexach adds that he and Wilcox frequently did preliminary sound design work while cutting, because doing so made the cut “more cohesive and strong” and helped provide a template for sound designer Daniel Pagan and the sound team for when they later launched into the final sound design process.