Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1262492
32 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E sentence, like he's psychic or something. You're still talking and his fingers are already flying across that keyboard." Zimmerman joined "Stranger Things" on the recommendation of executive producer and director Shawn Levy, with whom the editor had worked on a spate of successful comedies, including "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" (2009), "Date Night" (2010), and "The Internship" (2013). "He is an invaluable career-long col- laborator of mine," Levy said. "In fact, I think the very first piece of big-brother producerial advice I ever gave the Duffer Brothers was, 'Hire this editor Dean, because he is going to be a core franchise player for us!'" Editing plays a crucial role on "Stranger Things" in establishing and main- taining the overall feel of the series. Scenes are not re i m a g i n e d w h o l e s a l e o n " S t r a n g e r T h i n g s , " b u t i n s te a d f i n e ss e d , f u ss e d- over, and made just so. "Our episodes tend to reflect the Duffers' writing, with very few scene omits or restruc- turing," Levy said. "But, in the same breath, I would add that our post-production pipeline is immensely critical to the DNA of 'Stranger Things' in several key ways. Our episodes are so performance-cen- tric, rhythm-based, and pace-reliant, and tone is everything." The Duffers call editing their favorite part of the process. "It seems like almost anything is possible in editorial," the brothers said. "It never ceases to amaze us how much you can reshape a scene with the right cut, the right music, and the right sound." Zimmerman added: "This is where they really love to dig in, spend the time, and polish the material." From the beginning, Zimmerman instituted an editorial workflow that merged processes from the worlds of feature films and episodic content. In tandem with his fellow editor on Sea- son 1, Kevin D. Ross, ACE, Zimmerman devised a system that involved locking individual episodes early on but holding off on finishing work until the season could be viewed in totality. "All the sound and music and color timing and all the technical aspects that happen to the show, we do at the end," Zimmerman said. "It yields us the time to be able to go back into other episodes earlier on to fine-tune them." For example, during the shooting of Episodes 7 and 8 on Season 1, Zimmer- man and his then-assistant editor Fuller realized that those episodes could benefit from the addition of a new scene in Epi- sode 1. "We talked to them about it, and they were able to shoot that for Episode 1 while they were shooting the last couple of episodes," Zimmerman said. "We were allowed to play in the sandbox and get as dirty as we wanted to without any repercussions because they just wanted us to be as creative as possible and tell the best story." While Fuller, who moved up to picture editor on Season 2, divides episodes with Zimmerman, the colleagues often scrutinize each other's work in an at- tempt to create a single, unified body of work — not just a random grab-bag of episodes. "Dean will be cutting half the episodes, and I'll be cutting half the epi- sodes," Fuller said. "Once Dean has it into a place where the brothers have watched it, I'll sit down and watch just his epi- sode and I'll be like, 'Oh, that isn't quite paying off as well because I need to go back into my episode and maybe set that up a little bit better.' . . . We're always working as a whole." Early in his tenure on Season 2, Fuller was responsible for cutting one of the most talked-about sequences in the his- tory of the series: a montage depicting members of the young cast posing in their proton-pack-laden "Ghostbusters" outfits as they gear up for Halloween. " W h e n I w a tc h e d i t , I re m e m b e r calling Nat and going, 'You killed it, man — knocked it out of the park ,'" Z i m m e r m a n re c a l l e d . "I literally was flashing back to 'Ghostbusters.'" Yet, Fuller said, the scene was already ultra-nos- t a l g i c a s w r i t t e n a n d directed — his job was just to make it sing. "In that particular montage, I was just like, 'Let's just m a k e t h i s f u n ,' " s a i d Fuller, who, like the rest of the team, is a fan of 1980s movies, but who never seeks to emulate the film grammar of the era in his cutting. The nostalgia is baked into the original footage. "I can't recall ever feeling like I'm purposely trying to make it a certain '80s style," Fuller said. Indeed, both editors say they are f re e to l e t t h e fo o ta ge ta ke t h e m i n u n ex p e c te d d i re c t i o n s. S o m e t i m e s, that has yielded important discoveries that have influenced the direction of the storytelling. When cutting Episode 1 of Season 1, Zimmerman sat down to work on a dramatic scene in which Mike — one of Will's friends — is seen at the dinner table with his family. As the discussion between Mike and his parents pivot from 'My guilty pleasure is watching those people who videotape themselves watching the episodes on YouTube.'