Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1014407
27 Q3 2018 / CINEMONTAGE in a project. "Women were thought of kind of like, 'Yeah, they'll be able to find the heart in editing, but we don't know if they can do comedy,'" comments Knight, who was eager to prove her ability to edit more than just dramatic scenes. Her opportunity came with Madagascar, on which she worked initially as an additional editor before being asked to lead the project when the original editor left to work on another film. "The studio was having trouble on the movie, and I was given two weeks to get it in shape," says Knight, whose contributions included pinning down the heretofore-elusive tone of the movie, on which she shared credit with Mark A. Hester and H. Lee Peterson, ACE. "We couldn't figure out if the characters were going to be scary beasts or what," she explains. "Someone came up with the idea, 'Well, what if they're just party people?' So, at the last moment, I thought, 'Oh, I remember a song,' and I brought that to them. I set up a scene using the beat of Reel 2 Real's 'I Like to Move It.' The minute I saw Jeffrey Katzenberg's foot tapping, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I'm in — I'm all right.'" After pulling together Madagascar at the 11th hour, Knight was given the opportunity to guide a film from start to finish. "They had confidence then to offer me Kung Fu Panda," she says. The project began as a "very, very minor treatment" that evolved into a pitch, at which time the story team, led by Jennifer Yuh Nelson, became involved. "We would start with Act 1: 'How do we want to open this movie?'" the editor explains. As the film advanced through the development process, screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger were brought in; meanwhile, Knight assembled sketches of scenes. "We would use temp voices from the studio, temp sound effects, temp music," she says. "We were doing this on Avid. We could change it over and over again, but we were trying to figure out what the story and the character arc were." At six-week intervals, her edited scenes were screened for studio executives. Eventually, Kung Fu Panda was authorized to go into production, although a hiatus was taken while rewrites were completed. "When I came back, they had actually written a script, and we started for real," Knight remembers. "We sent our first scene into production: Po and Shifu in their first meeting. We had already recorded Jack and Dustin." Storyboarded scenes were cut together by the editor, who worked in collaboration with directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne. "We demarcated what the scenes were," she adds. "I might have a close- up, then it goes to a mid-shot, then it goes to a wide shot." During the layout process — which Knight describes as consisting of "just essential blocking of forms" — emotion can be lost, but it can be rekindled during the animation stage. "We can adjust the camera because we might say, 'Oh, no; we need a single on that. We can't have that be a two-shot because the emotion of the scene is lost,'" says the editor, who also is carefully attuned to timing. "Sometimes, we'll look at a joke and say, 'Why is this not working?' And it can be as simple as because it's a few frames off or it needs to be shifted just slightly." Knight says that she became a "full-rounded editor" on the project. After proving that she had a gift for comedy on Madagascar, the editor expanded her repertoire to include action on Kung Fu Panda. "The scene where Tai Lung [Ian McShane] breaks out of the prison is one of those things that I feel goes from one level to the next," she observes. "It took a lot of work to get it to be more surprising as it evolved. It was of that time when, particularly in animation, they thought that action could only be done by a man." But she did not discard her talent for editing emotional scenes. "I brought to it my own feelings of loss as a child," acknowledges Knight, whose mother died when she was young. "One of the most moving pieces is Oogway [Randall Duk Kim] leaving. I really felt that here was something I could show to other CONTINUED ON PAGE 70 MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM Kung Fu Panda. DreamWorks Animation