Grand Finale

Link: Prism Facebook Page
Prism (2015) Copyright by Jackson Miller, David Reynolds, & Chris Purse

This past Thursday, May 14th, the third and final thesis film I edited this year premiered. It was the first VFX film I have ever cut, and I am pleased with how it eventually turned out. Our visual effects team did a great job at creating a believable world within the time they were given, and our audience seemed to appreciate their efforts. It was the film I spent the most time with this year, and served as the biggest learning curve in terms of communication and designing a workflow that accommodated both Editorial as well as the visual effects artists.

As this film enters the festival circuit, I am interested to see how it fares. I hope to stay in contact with the team I worked with, especially the director, as I feel given a story that we have more time to develop, we can create something even stronger. Working on this film was an experience I will truly never forget, and I am glad to have been given the opportunity to be a part of it.

Premiering

This past Friday, April 17th, the first film out of three that I had the pleasure of editing this year premiered. Doppelgänger was a success and played well for our audience. I received some compliments from viewers commenting on how eerie the film was. I was worried as to how the short would be received as I had been with it for so long and wasn't sure if the scares in the film were landing. Sure enough though, there was an audible gasp throughout the theater during the reveal of our title character.

With the film completed, I am able to take a step back and reflect on the timeline of creating this short. Our director did an excellent job communicating with each department, inviting their perspectives and collaborating in a way that allowed for creative freedom on both ends. Seeing the final piece colored, with a sound mix, and score in a full theater was surreal, and I'm so very proud of our cast, crew, and director for bringing this psychological thriller to life.

Link: Doppelgänger Facebook Page

Doppelgänger (2015) film Copyright by Carly Lambert

Certified Fresh

For the past month, I've been attending my university's Interterm session where a semester long course is compressed into an intensive four weeks. This year, I decided to enroll in Avid Certification Prep, a course that would allow me to become an AVID Media Composer 8 Certified User.

The first half of the class focused on AVID's hotkeys and audio mixing features, with the second on visual effects and compositing. What was probably the most interesting aspect of the class for me was getting exposed to AVID's AMA linking, as I had never truly understood or used this feature. Basically, AMA linking allows someone to edit footage of a file type other than AVID's DNxHD codec without having to import it into AVID. One can simply point to the footage they wish to use on their drive, and voila, it appears as usable media in AVID. The downside is that AMA linking only works if the drive with the footage remains connected. Otherwise, the dreaded "Media Offline" title plasters itself on the screen. Also, cutting this "foreign" footage can put a strain on the system, causing frames to be dropped, and slow scrubbing. It could be useful if someone needed to quickly cut a short string of clips together, but a whole film this way would be painstaking and ill advised.

While taking the course, I was relieved to find that I was not as stressed or overwhelmed as I thought I'd be. Even though I was being fed a large amount of information, I realized that over the course of my time at Dodge College and at Pixar, I had come to discover the hidden gems AVID had to offer, either through cutting shorts or mentorship. I had been wanting to take AVID Certification for quite some time since I was a Freshman, but in hindsight, I'm actually glad that I waited until now to do so. Getting to first learn and see AVID's features be used in a practical way allowed me to gain an appreciation and understanding of why certain aspects were added to the software and how they were helpful to editors and their assistants. For instance, Markers were included to organize notes as well as indicate where a new scene begins.

Now officially certified, I want to go back through the books that I used for this class and try to determine why each feature was designed and how I can adapt them to my own workflow. The pursuit of learning never ends!

Find the Solution

As part of my Editing Emphasis for Dodge College, I am required to cut a handful of Senior Thesis short films. Wanting to challenge myself outside of my comfort zone, I decided to sign on to a Digital Arts VFX Sci-Fi film, a psychological thriller, and a drama. As of now, the VFX and thriller films are in post-production, with the drama scheduled to shoot near the end of February.

The VFX film entitled, Prism has led me to dive deeper into AVID's effect and compositing features, as well as learn how to collaborate with a director to creatively restructure a story. One of the main characters, LARS, is a completely computer generated flying robot who interacts with the film's lead and the environment. As I did not receive any pre-vis from the VFX team, I needed to create it manually within AVID. Using various 360 degree views of LARS, I would keyframe his image to simulate floating. In handheld and tracking shots, I made use of AVID's tracking tool, mapping LARS to the camera movement. With the addition of dialogue, this temporary LARS worked nicely for screenings and also allowed my director to communicate more clearly to the VFX team of how he wanted LARS to move around the screen and be animated.

Following a screening for the Dodge Thesis Committee, my director and I received a handful of notes regarding the logic and overall tension of the film. While moving around various scenes and beats was familiar to me to address the notes given , what came as a surprise was the option of actually creating entirely new shots out of the footage we had. For example, in the first scene we wanted to establish that the main character, Dan, is trying to hide his pastel drawings from LARS. In the original scene, we had an over the shoulder of Dan drawing and then jumping back when LARS comes up behind him. However, the papers can still be seen on the desk in front of him. We decided to make use of Dan's backwards movement to imply him pushing away his drawings, having the VFX team then comp in a blank table top from a different set up. The process reminded me of David Fincher's approach to editing. A few months ago, an Assistant Editor who worked on Gone Girl came to visit my Editing Thesis class. During his presentation, he showed us a short shot comprised of performances that were comped in from different takes. It had never occurred to me until that moment the true power the editor had to directly mold the performances and images presented on screen.

Recently, I have been working closely with my director on my second thesis, Doppelganger. The film was shot and written in a way that relies heavily on the cut hiding or presenting specific information to the audience. As Doppelganger is comprised of three constantly shifting perspectives, I had to follow the script's writing to a T. Each line of prose dictated a cut, proving to be a bit more challenging than I had originally anticipated. My usual approach to editing includes analyzing the script to determine which setups I should make use of to evoke an emotional response from the viewer, and in turn, best tell the story. However, with Doppelganger, I quickly realized the cuts were less motivated by connecting the viewer to the characters, and more showing how one character's actions influenced another. This is definitely one of the more experimental shorts I've cut, and I'm looking forward to seeing how people react to it during screenings.