Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1501110
EDITING www.postmagazine.com 15 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 with sound. Absence of sound. Music. Absence of music. So long story short, I have a ton of creative freedom in that initial stage." You talk about challenging yourself and not falling into clichés of the genre. Has Yellowstone evolved from Season 1 to Season 5? "It's a good question. I'm sure it has in a way that I'm probably not entirely aware of. I don't think of Yellowstone as a 'Western.' I mean, that's going to sound silly when I say it, but just because I don't. It is a story about people. It is in that genre, unmis- takably — undeniably in that genre — but it's just a story about a certain group of people with certain conflicts and relationships — love, life, death, all of those things. I just simply engage with the material on that level. "When you're talking about pacing, I think the show is paced in a way that modern audiences are accustomed to. When you look at a Western like The Searchers (1956), for instance — you're going to go back in history a little bit — the pace of that movie is very, very different than anything in the past 20 or 30 years. I think film and TV, as an art form, evolves from a pacing standpoint. I don't think it's specific to the genre, at least not for me. I don't think of it that way. The footage comes in — what is the pace and the rhythm that it is telling me to provide? I am open to that being whatever it needs to be for the scene that is in front of me, whether it's Yellowstone or Lioness, which is a modern story about the mili- tary. I don't try to take the footage or put it into a predetermined rhythm or a template that we have for Yellowstone." What kind of resolution are you working at and delivering? "I work at DNxHD 36, which is like the low end of the Avid codec, but it works well for us. We shoot a ton of footage, so just from a storage standpoint... The show shoots at 4K, we're like 3.8, I think, so I have latitude to punch in if I need to, to get rid of crew or a camera or boom, obviously, here and there. I don't know what it delivers at or what it broadcasts at because I am spoiled by some phenomenally thorough and talented people, who keep me shielded (laughs)." Is there a scene or episode in Season 5 that you would call attention to? "Sure! Episode 1 of Season 5 has a lot of really fun, cool stuff going for it in my mind. It opens on just Kevin's face — John Dutton — and you don't know where he is or what's happening. There are some people in the room, and you realize, 'Holy hell! He has been elected governor.' Then he's got to go out and give a speech. I thought that was a really-inter- esting way to start the season — just slowly pulling out and trying to figure out what's going on in his mind. That was a lot of fun to put together. "His swearing-in ceremony. This is one of those places where I talk about experimenting with sound. What I did in the offline is, just as the people are talking, and there's a girl singing the National Anthem, I just sucked the sound away where there's almost nothing, and he's just looking around, trying to process what he has done to his life. Seeing these faces...and we just stop hearing any sound. Then you start hearing this little bell in the distance — Father Time, as it were. "That episode also has a really-fun action sequence with Kayce trying to find some horse thieves, and then a standoff with the Canadian Mounted Police. That is just a straight-up action sequence. It was really fun to put together. We had a picture helicop- ter and a chase helicopter — a bunch of cameras. I love that stuff. Yellowstone has some really wonderful action pieces in it. Every season we get a couple big ones, and then the show ends." Back to your editing set up. You mentioned they shoot a lot of footage. Do you have the footage locally, or are you working in a cloud scenario? "We do it every which way. In my home studio here, we use Jump. And we have a post house in Toluca Lake that has all of our computers and servers, and all of our footage. It's a very secure environment, so I have nothing here. When I travel, there is no choice but to use encrypted drives. There is no other way to do it because these areas that we shoot in are so remote, you cannot access your footage on the inter- net and have it be functional in any meaningful way. When I'm going to travel, we have 10TB drives that are enough. I can actually hold an entire season of the footage. When I'm traveling to work with Taylor, it's for a specific episode or two, and we can certainly get enough for that — maybe one drive for one show, one drive for another show." Talk a bit more about your home set-up? "We work with Pivotal Post. They've been our partner for years. Pivotal has all of our stuff. We have access to their incredible technicians. They come out and set up the system that I work on every day. But there's no local storage here. I pay for a more expensive internet. It's actually a fiber line. You have to do a few things tech wise to make it functional here, but it works really, really well 98 percent of the time." What are you working on now? "(Yellowstone) Season 5 is done. We've aired that. We did 1923, Season 1. That has aired. Right now I'm working on Lioness, which is Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman. It's Taylor's next big show that's coming out in July. We will start making 1923, Part 2, very soon. And Yellowstone, Season 5, Part 2, very soon as well. For me, my year is consistently filled just working for Taylor on his various shows." What do you think of the success Yellowstone is seeing? "It's a show that happens to be popular, but we didn't know that going in. You do your best work. Be the best person to work with. You (may) accidentally meet someone who's going to put you in a position to work on whatever it is. That all happened to me. I'm a very lucky person who works hard. And there are thousands of people like me…There's a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work." Pivotal Post provides the show's editing systems.