The Pursuit

For the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to delve into some in-depth job hunting. Thanks to one of my mentors, I have a list of places that I've been scouring every day for updates on new jobs and opportunities. My goal has been to gain enough hours as an Assistant Editor to enter the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and hopefully find work in Animation Editorial as a result.

But that's getting ahead of myself. I still have to graduate after all!

So far, I've been able to talk to a Director of Post Production and an Editor about potential work and any advice they have for a budding editor. They've been so kind and I truly appreciate the honesty they've shown towards me, laying out the nature of the industry and instructing me on where would be good places to start out.

This Friday, I am going in for an interview for a post house that does trailers for feature films and documentaries. The reality of going in to talk about an actual position versus an internship is slowly starting to sink in. No longer am I going to be a student searching for experience, but an adult looking for a place to apply the knowledge I have in a professional setting.

This search can be a bit daunting at times, but I'm keeping my head up and praying God brings along a job that I can use to glorify Him.

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.