CineMontage

November/December 2014

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32 CINEMONTAGE / NOV-DEC 14 and the amount of material, having Jay and Geoff also bought back time for David to be inventive in the editing room." The larger space also allowed the film's visual effects department, headed by visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen and producer David Robinson, to be housed under the same roof with editorial. This proximity helped to facilitate Bonz and O'Brien's reworking of the big battle scenes while the effects for those scenes were being designed and revised. "The challenge was to integrate the functional tanks — shot in difficult, muddy locations — with the interior tank action and the many visible and invisible effects," Dorn adds. "Rob and Geoff both worked at different times on all the battles, but we split the final battle at the crossroads into two parts, and each took half. But even that division of labor was short lived, because David came up with some last-minute restructuring that shifted the parts around." She also praises Fury's sound designer and supervising sound editor, Paul N.J. Ottosson, MPSE, and credits "his stellar crew for rolling with the demands of the accelerated schedule without compromising quality. Music editor Del Spiva was also an indispensable member of the team from early on," she says. Dorn herself spent more than a decade in sound editing. She was sound editor or supervising sound editor on five of Alan Rudolph's films, including Choose Me (1984) and The Moderns (1988), and on Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Powwow Highway (1989). She won an MPSE Golden Reel Award for Best Sound on James Cameron's The Abyss (1989) and also formed a sound company, Sonic Kitchen, with sound designer Blake Leyh. Coming from a movie industry family — her father was a set builder — she originally found work as a production assistant in her late teens and learned picture editing as an assistant. "I fell in love with the magic of film through picture editing," she says. Returning to picture editing in the early 1990s, she worked on shorts, documentaries, TV movies and series, and features — receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Editing on Christopher Nolan's breakthrough film Memento (2000) and an Emmy nomination for Best Editing on a miniseries for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001). Other feature credits include Nolan's Insomnia (2002) and three movies for Ridley Scott: Matchstick Men (2002), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and A Good Year (2006). Dorn also edited writer-director Mike White's feature debut Year of the Dog (2007), working with him again as editor, co-producer and later producer on two seasons of the HBO series Enlightened (2010-2012). She cut her first movie with writer-director Ayer, End of Watch, in between the two seasons of Enlightened, followed by her back-to-back features with him. A good part of working on Fury, Dorn feels, involved learning to understand "the job of each member of a Sherman tank crew — how they collectively functioned as parts of a unified machine and how one man's action affected the others, like the muscular ripple of a snake. It was especially thrilling to help create that feeling and rhythm in the battle scenes." In conclusion, she says, "This film is a dyed-in-the-wool David Ayer film; the wonder of it is in its DNA. The essence was there in how David wrote and shot it. Every iteration of the film has been exciting to watch — from first assembly to our early screenings to the final cut and right through to the playback with the mix. It's fresh every time I see it." f CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30 Dody Dorn.

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