Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1124770
41 Q2 2019 / CINEMONTAGE PART 2 Averick and DuVernay have worked together for over 10 years, since her This Is the Life music documentary about the hip-hop group scene in South Los Angeles. "It was a personal documentary for Ava, and I really love it," he says. "It was a great first project for both of us." Once DuVernay signed on to When They See Us, "Everyone was excited and grateful that we were able to tell this story," he stresses. "This injustice is common. Pulling back the curtain on how it happens is important for people to see and understand institutional racism." Part 2 focuses on the trial, which creates its own structure for the edit. "But there are a lot of perspectives we needed to keep alive: the boys, their parents, the legal teams," he explains. "So there was always a lot of juggling. But we stayed away from making it feel like a typical courtroom drama. We also made it feel chaotic in order to feel the boys' perspective. They didn't understand the process and things were happening so fast for them. Bradford Young is a master at shooting people's faces, capturing nuances that you wouldn't normally see." With regard to Part 2's temp track, Monnar reports that although she worked on all four parts, she didn't have the time to temp all of them due to the tight schedule. "For the first pass of Part 1, I had eight days to temp 50 minutes of music, mostly starting from scratch," she says. When she first started the project, she assembled a temp library for the show from which the editors could pull music. That came in handy when Averick and his assistant Eisenberg temped most of the second and fourth parts, using pieces of music related to what Monnar was doing in Parts 1 and 3. PART 3 Tesoro notes that When They See Us was a "complicated, serious, heavy" story squeezed into four parts. "You're talking about four bona fide indie movies, each with its own feel and complicated storyline," she says. "These aren't 43-minute TV parts. With Ava's aesthetic, it leans towards bold, risky cuts, a documentary feeling and a lot of music." Part 3 focuses on the boys as they become men in prison. The editor's connection to the project was executive producer Jonathan King, who produced Tesoro's last feature, On the Basis of Sex (2018). "We pick up the boys while they're incarcerated and spend some time with each one when he's still young," she says. "They all have a conversation with their parents, and we see scenes with their parents and other family members. My part focuses mostly on Antron McCray [Jovan Adepo] and Raymond Santana, Jr. [Freddy Miyares]." Her part underwent some major restructuring, according to Tesoro. "Initially, there was a lot of going back and forth in time, and Ava felt she wasn't spending enough time with each boy," she explains, adding that up to that point, DuVernay had been focused on the first two parts of the When They See Us. Netflix