It was a perfectly acceptable pastime until it became more modish to watch things on a tiny screen. To cut things together yourself and anatomise the image on Photoshop.

Here are two projects that might excite the old-fashioned film fan with a digital eye.

The Art of the Title Sequence is a wealthy resource and lets you unpick those dense intros. Often the best or most memorable bit of a feature film. I've been watching a few intact. You pick up a lot fast, because the best ones are so tight.

Brendan Davies' Cinema Redux takes it in the opposite direction. Each of his painstaking works captures an entire film in evenly spaced screengrabs. I found this just as enriching. You can tell so much by a glance at one image.

By training the eye to deconstruct moving pictures, you learn how to build them better. Or it's just an excuse to peer in close at expertly good cinema. Either way - get these sites up on your little screen and enjoy.

Maddin and his editor John Gurdebeke's work is worth checking out. They really understand constructivism and cut sequences how we see them with our mind's eye, rather than our physical one. It's like Eisenstein on speed. There are only a handful of other filmmakers who understand editing as well and are willing to push it as far as they do. It's proof there are great editing style's yet to be done.

If you haven’t seen Guy Maddin’s work before, check out his short film “The Heart of the World”. It’s on the disc for "Archangel" and "Twilight of the Ice Nymph's". You’ll feel like you’ve seen the entire history of silent film by the time the six minute film is over.

Two editors could bring in equally good films, when one of them turned a horrible pile of footage into a watchable movie and the other hacked quality material down to mediocrity.

Unless you know what footage an editor was working from, you can’t really be sure of his talent.

“The best edited film of the year is some film that you may never have heard of, which was unreleasable, but some poor soul of an editor struggled with that material and got it to the point that it could find some kind of life in the cinemas.”

- Walter Murch

Since Current TV picked up “10 Minute Date”, I have been hired to do another short
doc called “Big Sister” that I have completed and delivered. I will leave a link as soon
as I get the finished project uploaded. “10 Minute Date” and “Big Sister” will be airing on Current TV in August.

I have also been commissioned to do another short doc by Current TV called “For Richer
or For Poorer” (working title). I will be uploading the treatment and production notes in a week or so.

“No End: Short Story”

This is my first (real) production; it is a short film, with only ambient sound and no talking, about a woman who has a ritual that she does each and every day. My wife and I actually wrote the script, scouted locations and took photos, created a storyboard, a shot list, and a production schedule and financed the film.

The story takes place in the center of Paris in the Bois de Bologne, so I had to get ambient sound the night before because of high traffic. This short story is an exercise
in sound effects, sound and foley as well as shot selection and composition. Discipline and time management are also part of this production.

In this post, I will show a film budget for a typical independent film that has a 500 thousand budget. Most Independent films or small budget films have a budget between 500,000 and 7 million. If you are just starting out, you can study this table below to find out what are typical above the line costs and below the line costs. Usually, the director makes the most amount of money, but most A-list Actors would make more than a B-List Director, because he is hungry to get their name on the screen to market the film around that actor.
For the most part, above the line makes less than below the line when you combine it together, only because of the very few above the line and the many below the line technical staff. In a film budget, everything is guestimated and cannot go more than the guestimated amount. Then, the budget is re-written to show on a film distribution memorandum to show actual costs. I cannot stress this enough: The budget is your most important investment and marketing tool to show to a distributor. Here is the budget below :

BUDGET TOP SHEET

Please reply to the post for any questions or comments or at moviedistributionfacts@gmail.com

As you can see above, articles with the term "film editing" in them have consistently beat out ones with the term "film directing" in terms of number of searches. What this MUST prove, of course, is that more people are interested in editing than directing. Right?

Well... I suppose there is another explanation. Like more people use the term "directing" than "film directing" in their searches? Sure enough, look at where the orange line is in the graph below.

Statistics don't lie. People using them do.

Let me back up. This flash-and-grab brouhaha everyone is paying $11.25 to sit through was supposed to feature yours truly. John Favreau approached me early on, but it wasn't until Robert Downey personally took me out to lunch at Sardi's that I was swayed to play a part that I had grave concerns about: a goose. You know how in movies where something that shouldn't be able to fly—a killer whale, an Oriental rug carrying a monkey wearing a fez, Robin Williams—is flying? And then they fly past, say, a flying V of geese? And one of the geese maybe does a double take and makes a face like BRAWWWK?! I THOUGHT GEESE WERE THE ONLY THING THAT COULD FLY BOY WOW AM I SURPRISED TO SEE YOU UP HERE WTF?

The only thing America can agree on: punching the ground is awesome.

Well, I was supposed to be that goose for Iron Man. He would fire up and go careening through some CGI'd clouds, and I would be there to feign shock, thereby degrading my species, when he did. We did fourteen takes despite having a keeper on the third. I always say there are no small actors, only small wingspans, and I left everything on the table. I became my role, forsaking my responsibility to defy the stereotype that geese are small-minded and easily bewildered.

And I paid dearly. Didn't even make the final cut. "A little cartoony," Favreau said as my shot at the big-time landed on the cutting-room floor, I guess to save time for his cameo.

—Nero

Have you ever felt that in these well-resourced facilities the workflow is not exactly conducive  to the creative process?

We like to think that OutPost is different in these respects. You and your project are at the center of our operation: Everything we do is designed to support you.

You will find a relaxed and friendly space where its easy to work. Its quiet and secluded yet conveniently situated near anything you might need - and parking is a breeze.

*a- Intro , *b -verse 1, *c - verse bridge, *d - Chorus 1, *e - Solo, *f -verse 2, *g - verse2 bridge, *h - chorus 2, *i - end solo

When filming, I had preceded each of the audio parts of the arrangement with a one bar (four beat) click. Working on the intro I shot four angles simulating a four camera shoot using the built in mic of the camera to capture the audio. Because I shot it in the music studio I was able to use Logic to play each part of the song back, alternatively on location I could have used a CD Ghetto blaster (or Ipod with speakers) with each track on the CD being a part of the arrangement as outlined above.

Once I had recorded my four angles for the intro I was keen to see how it worked in Final Cut so I captured the takes as seperate clips and edited then down using the last of the 4 clicks as a cue. I created a film sequence on Final cut named Intro to correspond to the audio clip. I then imported the same chunk of music, again editing it to the last of the 4 clicks. Using a great function on Final Cut called multiclip I was able to view all four clips at the same time, doing some fine editing to make sure they all synced up. Then while reviewing the clips I clicked on each clip that I wanted to see in the master editing window until I had a complete take of the Intro I was happy with.

To cut a long story short I then repeated this process for each seperate segment of the song/film arrangement and at the end I bounced each part into a master programme with the full version of the song,  I then stitched the edited (bounced) film parts together for a seamless end result. The only thing to watch out for here is to make sure your film clips slightly exceeds the length of the audio part. This way you have the necessary cross fades into each subsequent part of the arrengement. If it's too tight the edits will be too short and you will have to go back a few steps to sort it out.

Keeping each segment of the film as a seperate sequence makes it easy to go back and re-edit any part that needs adjusting though, just re-bounce the file and place it back in your master programme.

1. Creative Construction is a delightful group blog, dedicated to helping women (mostly mothers) reach their creative goals. Miranda, one of the bloggers, posted recently and reported on a new goals site, Stickk.com, which provides a place to publicly state one’s aspirations, but provides a twist when it comes to additional incentive.

If you want, you can wager an amount of money on whether or not you’ll accomplish the goal, and if you fail, the money will go to a charity you dislike. Since its launch two months ago, the site (whose name refers to a stick, as in “carrot and stick,” and K, the legal shorthand for “contract”) has attracted some 13,000 registered users, 5,500 of whom have signed contracts.

I tend to think of positive rewards for challenging goals as being more motivating, but the one of the co-founders of the site argues that the specter paying out to those you despise if you fail amounts to “raising the price of bad behavior” and can be a powerful tool for keeping work on a project on track.

2. Two unrelated thoughts about productivity, both of which have merit for working artists and innovators.

Lifehack.org beat me to an entry on Gregory Martin’s concept of a “treadmill journal,” popularized last year in an article he wrote (“Want to be productive?) in the April 2007 issue of The Writer.

The idea is simple: everyday, take out your journal and write an entry consisting of the following information--the time and date, how much writing (or other artwork) you plan to do that day, what specific thing you plan to work on, how it went, what you plan to work on tomorrow, and when and for how long you’ll work tomorrow.

Martin says “it’s hard to romanticize a treadmill,” but his idea reminds me of the running journals I used to keep in the 1980s when I ran in track and cross-country in high school and competed in road races. The greatest benefit to keeping a treadmill journal is that it provides a good diagnostic tool if your project isn’t going well, because it allows you to track patterns in your approach to your work.

On the other end of the productivity spectrum, we have tech blogger Robert Scoble, who has finally reached the saturation point on the number of online gadgets he remains hooked into as he travels to Israel and elsewhere:

“Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10. What’s the difference? I’ve been on lots of airplanes in the past month….That taught me an important lesson.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.”

The comments that follow this post are wide-ranging and fill in the gaps that such a one-pointed pronouncement will inevitably leave. Some commenters out the value of Twitter, blogs, Flickr, et. al., to provide insights into work projects, make essential personal connections, etc. Some assert that those diagnosed with attention deficit disorder are actually more productive in an environment with multiple sensory inputs and what writer, speaker and consultant Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention” to a number of things.

I know from my conversations with artists that nothing works for everyone, but I find Scoble’s disconnection confession interesting, given his profession. As a writer and editor, I find myself alternating between single-tasking and traveling the vast sea of Internet-facilitated information (inbound or outbound) for inspiration or research. When I’m trolling for ideas, nothing but multiple inputs will do; when it’s time to finish a project, focusing exclusively on the next step is the only way for me to get it done.

What have been your experiences with productivity? What works for you when it’s time to generate ideas, get started on your work, or get it done?

3. Finally, a post from film editor and media expert Norman Hollyn about an emerging content form—mobile phone public service announcements.

Hollyn will be working this week as a remote producer with a group of students who will be out in the streets of Atlanta, creating content for a PSA (public service announcement) for AIDS Awareness Day.

There will be five teams altogether, and students will spend an all-day session with representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and armed with this background, the teams will develop PSAs to be shot the next day. As the PSAs are being shot, Hollyn’s team of students will send their work back to Hollyn and a student editor, who will begin editing them together. The hope is to have two to three PSAs from each of the five teams.

The clips will be called Personal PSAs (PPSAs) because of the intimate nature of their capture and their cell phone distribution mechanism. Hollyn is excited about the potential for mobile content to provide local views of events that mainstream media outlets have struggled to provide in an era of budget cuts:

“The ability to migrate news and entertainment capture into the mobile arena is pretty exciting, and though it will inevitably raise the number of piano-playing cats out there, it can also raise our ability to see local events happen more immediately…the technology to do it with great visual quality is here.”

Do you have any concerns about the direction that this technology is going? Are you excited about the potential it offers you as an artist? Are you collaborating with other creative folk in any artwork for mobile distribution?

]]> http://indie2zero.wordpress.com/?p=232 Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:44:26 +0000 Dan Carew http://indie2zero.wordpress.com/?p=232 FreshDV has a good roundup of free NLE software. As in, you have no excuse not to make that movie now! To assist you, check out Making Short Films, by Clifford Thurlow, which I just received today from amazon UK. Looks great. Now all you need is a Red Scarlet camera, (which I've speculated on previously) which will be "introduced" at NAB starting next week (and possible go on sale, for advanced orders then?)...

And where you can get the same talks as downloadable podcasts (so you can watch on your iPod or Apple TV, etc.).

EXCELLENT RED INFO NUMBER 1: I'm about to wire transfer the balance for my complete Red order. In finalizing what exactly to order, I found these 12 excellent videos to be invaluable, as they show in clear detail the parts of the Red camera, how to use them, how they work:

Learn All About the Red One, on WonderHowTo.com

EXCELLENT RED INFO NUMBER 2: Adam Wilt's excellent posts at ProVideo Coaltion on the nitty gritty of Red workflow (including his realistic appraisal that Red workflow is "bleeding edge" stuff, without any comprehensive aggregated up-to-date documentation on best practice):

• Working with Red Footage
• Red? or Cyan?

In the next few days I'll add a Red Camera Resources Roundup post (and tab)--divided into "Camera" and "Workflow" sections. I'm keeping track of this ever-growing body of knowledge in a text file. But I figured I'd share (which makes it easier for me to find for myself + you all might have some good tips).

Always use split edits. The split edit separate the professional editor from the amateur. The way I define a split edit is that you want to hear the person before you see them. Split edits, also called L-cuts really make your video flow smoothly between a-roll and b-roll. Just watch a video where a person appears and starts to talk. It can be jarring to the viewer. You can fix it by unlinking the video and audio track, roll the talking head video back about four seconds, then tuck the exposed audio on a separate track under the outgoing b-roll clip. You now have a smooth transition viewers will hardly notice. There are a half a dozen ways to do a split edit. Find the way that works best for you.

One of the best things about L-cuts is that they tend to smooth out cuts. In fact, I always make my sound cut happen at a different place than my picture cut (except at scene transitions or when I want my audience to feel my cut). Even if all that means is extending the outgoing track ten frames until the next word of dialogue begins.

This time we took on the task of creating a "commercial" to be shown to administrators and faculty members throughout our district about the importance of forging personal connections with students, especially students of color who often struggle in our educational system.

The data shows that Latino and Black students rank lowest in standardized testing. With No Child Left Behind, standardized testing is the norm, and schools are judged on how well the students perform on these tests. There are lots of acronyms like API, AYP, etc., that most of you wouldn't understand -- unless you're teachers or parents who know about such assessments. The bottom line is, there is a racial achievement gap in California (and schools around the country), and teachers aren't doing a great job of reaching our lowest performing students.

So, our commercial is all about how to form C.A.R.E. (Collaborative Action Research for Equity) groups with students in order to raise their achievement and let them know that teachers care about them. Not just about their academic performance, but about them as people, too. We interviewed other teachers from around our district who explained how much they got out of leading C.A.R.E. groups. We also got footage from students who explained how much it meant to them both personally and academically to know that their teachers really took the time to get to know them and how to better serve their needs.

We've spent over 8 hours editing this 15 minute commercial. Editing is fun, sort of like piecing a puzzle together. The frustrating part is how long it takes to do simple things, but we kept at it and now have an amazing commercial that we are really proud of.

In doing this iMovie and the other one we did last year, CTLB and I asked ourselves how those film editors in Hollywood do it. If it takes us this long to do a simple 15 minute film, how long must it take to do a much more complex, feature-length film? It makes me appreciate films so much more.

I just hope our message gets a warm reception from the teachers and administrators, and they decide to spend the extra time and effort on students who just need a little more care and consideration to succeed.

What, then, are we to make of the deaths of both Arthur C. Clarke and Anthony Minghella today? There is no cosmic joke here, just a sad realization that the man who gave us the book of 2001:A Space Odyssey and the man who gave us TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY and THE ENGLISH PATIENT will create art no more.

Ben Kuchera, in a column in Ars Technica today, quotes the three laws that Clarke was famous for.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The last of the three is famous, in and of itself. I often wonder, imbued with the good ol' sensawonda, just how someone merely 100 years old can hope to internalize all of the changes in his or her lifetime. I know that when I emerge from the editing of a film and look around, it seems like the editing technology has drastically changed. A mere five years ago, a mention of the acronym DI would have gotten you stares of incomprehension (unless they thought you were talking about drunk driving). And that's just in my small little neck of the woods, and in five years time.

Clarke (who has written "Against The Fall of Night", "Childhood's End," "Rendezvous With Rama," and "Islands In The Sky" in addition to the novel he wrote with Stanley Kubrick) has been writing since 1937 and, in that time, has created some remarkably detailed and plausible future worlds. Remember, when he started writing, the concept of launching anything into space was incomprehensible. The Internet? Not even a gleam.

Yet Clarke, and a few other science fiction writers at the time, managed to conceive of all of this, at a time when the magazines that published science fiction were more concerned with Bug Eyed Monsters and women in the clutches of monsters.

Now, that is a visionary.

Still, I'm particularly entranced by that second law, that one needs to go beyond what we consider possible in order to discover reality's true limitations.

Speaking narrowly, there are two types of directors in the reshaping process in editing. There are those who will make big, broad changes early on and see what breaks. They will remove entire scenes, rearrange whole sections of the film, drop favorite moments and excise great lines Then they'll see what absolutely needs to go back to the way it used to be (or, to be more precise, go back a little ways to what used to be).

There are also directors who will work in smaller incremental changes, slowly chipping away at problems until they arrive at a comfortable resolution.

Neither approach is right. Both of them work (though the second method takes longer).

My own preference is to make broad changes -- to push past the possible into the impossible -- and to see what works. It is axiomatic that once you take a scene out of a film, no one misses it. When you do, you know you've got to keep it in the film in some form. So, plenty of things that I've resisted changing for what I thought were very good reasons, turn out to be quite expendable in the long run. You never know what is going to work and what won't (within reason). It's a cliche, but, really, you never know.

So, Clarke's second law has ramifications everywhere.

Anthony Minghella didn't have Clarke's same speculative fiction side of things, but he managed to blaze a few paths in storytelling and character development. The people in TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (the awesome Alan Rickman, years before the caricature he plays in the Harry Potter series) felt blindingly real. The story of a woman who cannot let go of her husband, after his death at an early age, the emotions that Juliet Stephenson portrayed were touching. Not because they were telegraphed, but because they weren't.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT was a different canvas altogether. Those of you who have taken my Intermediate Editing course know that I play the Caravaggio interrogation scene to demonstrate the use of silence and sound contrast. Walter Murch is given credit for the concept but, as we all know, nothing gets put in a film without the director's permission, and I'm sure that Minghella enthusiastically was aboard the beautiful use of sound and music to create the horrifying mood of the scene.

It's that kind of collaboration that we all seek in this business. I know that Walter Murch admires Minghella almost as much as Thelma Schoonmaker admires Martin Scorsese. That comes from a respect for talent, of course, but it also comes from a realization that their directors allow them to do good work. These directors have the ability to step back and let their collaborators come up with ideas.

Not every director can open up that easily. The ones that do are worth their weight.

I will certainly miss the art that Anthony Minghella and Arthur C. Clarke created, even though it will live on -- past my own death, I'm sure.

A great example of just what it is that we do can be found on Paul Vitois' blog, in which he documents the creation of a show called The Odyssey, and adventure-fantasy series from way back in 1991 that he created for the Canadian Broadcasting System. Vitois, who describes himself as "a creative writer who has also worked as a bureaucrat and copywriter," talks about how he and his co-producers had carefully hired a group of award-winning documentary editors. The first cut was:

composed of excellent editors who had come from documentary-making. And the first cut of the episode was proficient, correct, followed the script, used the excellent footage shot by the director Jorge Montesi--but the story came across as flat and slow-moving. I recall watching an early rough cut of the episode, my excitement at finally getting to see the result of our efforts on a TV screen, and my growing feeling of unease and letdown.

Their script didn't seem like their script, even though it followed the instructions in the script quite well.

Now, we all know that a film is "never as good as the dailies or as bad as the first cut" (I believe that Francis Coppola said that and, if he didn't, he should have) but this was something else indeed. In fact, after they hired a dramatic editor, they watched the film again.

I was intrigued to see how Jana had handled the material. She cut frequently, most often to show characters' reactions to what was happening or being said in the scene. It created a fast-moving feeling in which the characters were involved with the story. Next time you watch a drama, pay attention for awhile to how it is edited: notice when the camera cuts to characters' reactions. The characters may simply be watching what's going on, but their involvement in the scene brings the audience's involvement.

He says that he saw "a whole new show" and it's no wonder. Our job is not simply putting pieces of film together, it's putting both a story and a set of characters together.

I remember, years ago, I was asked to recut a film that had been originally edited by a very competent commercials editor whose largest asset was that he came with a free Avid. The producer and director were unhappy with the version of the film that they had personally supervised with this editor, and the lead actor (who was a director himself) recommended that they ask me to take a look at it.

I looked and immediately saw that it was very competently cut -- nothing popped in the editing, there were no mismatches. But there was no character, and it WAS a character piece.

When I went into the dailies I was able to figure out what was wrong. Usually, if I ran the film ten or so frames later, I'd find a reaction from an actor or actress that spoke volumes. I'd often find that if I cut out slightly later or earlier than in the cut I was given, you could feel what the character was feeling Sure, a lot of my cuts didn't match action, but there are lots of ways to disguise those mismatches, if necessary. What the first editor had done was work from the script to give the story an overall shape, but his individual edits didn't bring out the humanity and emotion in that story.

I had told the producer and director to leave me along for a bit, until I completed re-editing the first twenty minutes or so of the film. If they liked what they saw, we'd go on from there. If not, everything was cool. They could keep looking for help, and I'd move on -- with a bit more money in my bank account.

Of course, when they saw my initial recut (though they weren't convinced that everything worked) they were blown away by the difference. It wasn't the cutting that had changed, I felt, but the editing.

Remember that, the next time you want to farm your film out to the lowest bidder.

[UPDATE, 27 Mar 2008, 13:00: Ian Bloom, Crimson's creator, has posted a good video explaining what Crimson does and how it works.]

Mike Curtis on ProVideo Coalation alerted me to the availability of Crimson, which I had wrote about earlier. The goal is to make it a lot easier to work with files coming out of your Red camera, specifically, getting your edit from Final Cut Pro into RedCine (for color grading) and back to Final Cut. According to Ian Bloom, Crimson's creator:

Crimson Workflow™ is a tool for transforming sequences created in popular Non-Linear Editing Software, such as Final Cut Pro, Avid and Premiere. It allows proxies, and offline material to be replaced by higher quality material, by efficiently managing the use of two software products distributed by the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, namely Redline and Redcine.

Crimson Workflow™ leverages many tools for troubleshooting less than perfect metadata and file structures giving the user tools to properly reconnect to original material. It also facilitates the use of Redcine after, rather than before editing a project....

Crimson Workflow™ currently works on Macintosh computers and supports XML sequences from Final Cut Pro. I am planning support for Avid and Adobe Premiere in the near future. I am also planning a Windows version that will be sold seperately....

If you buy this software today, you can expect the following features to be enabled in the near future:

• Loading and Saving Workflow Templates
• Undo and Redo enabled
• Support for AVID XML sequences
• Support for Premiere XML sequences
• Support for CMX 3600 EDLs
• Blind Color Correction Tools Completed
• Blind Framing Tools Completed
• Support for GlueTools™
• Support for the application formerly known as RedTools
• Proper handling of speed changes and reverse in XML sequences.
• Trimmed R3D Intermediates (as soon as a tool is available)
• Timecode and R3D Metadata awareness.
• Python Scripting Enabled

If you buy a serial number today, you are buying incomplete software still in development. Updates listed above will be included with this serial number and bug fixes will be for life.

Sounds good! I just got my "your camera is ready to ship" email from Red an hour ago, so it's all starting to come together...

One of my pet peeves, as an editor, is the director who decides to cut his or her own film. I rarely see that work. Most of my students at USC do it because "only I can really understand what I want for my film." There's so much wrong with that statement. On almost every level.

First, that word understand. I've worked with directors who can't understand their own films on levels that differ from their original conceptions. But the key to having the film accessible to many people, as opposed to a masturbatory self-involved work, is to realize that the best films appeal to people on multiple levels -- levels beyond their author's original conceptions. In order to do that, the filmmaker needs to be challenged. He or she needs to be helped to see other points of view. In classical terms, it's the thesis/antithesis/synthesis flow. An original thesis, when challenged by an antithesis, creates an idea which is better than either one individually -- a synthesis of ideas that can bring the film to a higher level.

Peter John Ross, over at sonnyboo.com, wrote a piece in American Movieworks which tackled this issue and started with this introduction:

If you are one of those director that can look at the raw footage, or even edit a scene together, look at it in the context of the movie & make a decision to cut out one of the best moments the actor gave because you realize that the scene is erroneous THEN SKIP THIS ARTICLE. Or if you have what you thought was one of the funniest jokes on paper, and even if it’s not 100% great delivery, but you choose to use it anyway because it “might” be good, then please READ ON.

I could argue that John Sayles' best movies are those in which he did not edit. I think that James Cameron is a better director of editing than he is an editor (when I worked with Milos Forman I was always impressed with his editing acumen, but equally impressed that he worked with other editors to get the best picture). I certainly feel that Robert Rodriguez has long needed an editor (and a cinematographer, but I'll let people better versed in that art to take up this arguement).

And, even though I really liked the film NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I continue to feel that the Coen Brothers would have done better work if they had had someone to work with.

Now, I've never felt the strong pull that most people feel towards the Coen brothers' films. I have enjoyed a few of them -- BARTON FINK and THE BIG LEBOWSKI -- but I normally found them too clever by half and, even in FARGO, more distanced from their characters than involving. I've enjoyed the laser penetration of Peter Stormare in FARGO, but I can't say that I found any of the characters in their films worth spending much time with, aside from John Turturro's tortured writer character in FINK, and the fun of The Dude in LEBOWSKI.

Now, NO COUNTRY comes along and I'm almost ready to jump over to their side, thanks to some amazing performances completely in tune with the story and filmmaking of the piece. But there is enough holding the film back that I doubt that I'll ever jump over to the side of director/editors.

The shape of the lead characters in NO COUNTRY is particularly fine. Javier Bardem, well-deserving of his Academy Award, plays a character who is consistently driven, but seems well-understood by the filmmakers. Josh Brolin, while much more enigmatic and slightly drawn, manages to build a steady, interesting performance, even against Bardem's juggernaut of a role.

I'm less entranced by Woody Harrelson's and Tommy Lee Jones' performance, however. I don't believe that I need to have everything explained to me in order to like a film. Far from it. But I like to have characters who, in the words of a director I once worked with, "earn their moments." To put it in another way, I want a character's behavior in a film to grow out of what we know about him or her, not just because it says so in a script.

But that is one of the hardest things for writer/directors to do. They live inside their characters heads for so long, and have had so much discussion and interaction with the actors playing those characters, that it is extremely to see connections when they don't really exist. It is way too easy to ascribe more to a look or a body movement then a normal audience would.

Even editors are prone to falling into this trap, though it's one that we train ourselves to fight. In order to freshen our view of our films we use preview screenings. They help to ground us. When I worked on the movie HAIR, we had a screening in which someone, in the discussion group afterwards (we didn't call them "focus groups" back then, and we didn't have NRG Research to run them for us), mentioned that he "really like the part where Claude's sister watched Treat Williams dance on the table."

The problem was that Claude didn't have a sister in the film. This audience member was confused. And while we'd never recut a movie based on one comment, if enough people can't follow plot or character, then it's time to look at what we know about our film.

The real problem for writer/director/editors is that there is precious little opportunity to have someone say "Wha??" There is less day-to-day input from the world outside the director's mind.

And, even with some preview screenings and good producers (Scott Rudin may be the most interesting producer in the world today, along with Christine Vachon, in terms of the variety of projects he brings to the screen), the world of filmmaking just gets too insulated. Where was the person who asked the Coen Brothers to step back and see if Harrelson's character went for caricature and plot, instead of real contrast to Bardem's? Where was the person who discussed the shaping of the Brolin death scene, and how it impacted the rest of the film's energy and emotion?

[As an aside, even though I didn't like the choice, I'm not going to fault the film for its choice to hand off the film from Brolin to Jones two-thirds of the way through. But I am going to note that, the way in which was done, replaced one character's more interesting search with another less developed one. It was an imbalance that the film never recovered from.]

In the best of all worlds, who would have been able to ask those and other questions about the choices being made? Who would have advocated for the audience's side?

It would have had to been an editor. And that is what a good, honest, direct editor can bring to a project, that a director cannot. Not possible, not even close. Even with really really great directors.