Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532181
me on as his assistant, prompting my entry to Local 700, and teaching me the best practices for scripted projects, which per- manently changed my work-life balance. Thanks to him, I found my way to NBC's "Chicago Fire." After Megan D'Arco and Tim DeLuca took a chance on me, I managed to weasel into an editing seat where I greed- ily absorbed as much of their expertise as possible and learned to take ownership of offline editorial decisions. After the pandemic, remote workflows enabled my return to New Orleans where I'm attempting to get a Channel 101-style l o ca l s h o r t c h a l l e n ge u p a n d r u n n i n g. [ C h a n n e l 1 0 1 i s a m o n t h l y s h o r t f i l m festival in which participants submit a short film in the format of a pilot under five minutes long, and audiences decide which submissions should return with a follow-up episode for the next round. – ed.] This event keeps me actively learning: in post, it's pushed me into DaVinci Resolve's Fusion (and even Fairlight — eep!); on the production side, it's proven that a camera operating on a boat will unfailingly induce my motion sickness. D e s p i t e a l l t h e w a t e r, m y f l o o d - prone hometown gave me zero sea legs. Go figure. ■ Christine Yoon is lately an editor as well as an au courant resource for New Orleans restaurant recommendations. She can be reached at see.why@cynematics.com. some instrument isolation, but the percus- sion players were all in the same room. So there was some bleed. And obviously, on set you have the same problem: everybody was in this giant set and you have microphones picking up everything. It helped us in the mix to have control over the instruments that were closer to any given mic, but you still couldn't just mute something. When they recorded on set in Atlanta, Jon would build out long stretches with Jason where it would be 16 bars of just shaker, or a shaker and bongos, allowing for layers and differ- ent dynamic structures we could then use in the edit. CineMontage: How were those sessions built into the score? Newlin: Between myself, Nathan, and Shane, we started cutting and rearranging the tracks to picture under Jason's direc- tion. The challenge was figuring out how to take this amazing music Jon created and shape it to picture without Jon having to come back and re-record it without the magic of being on set with the free improvi- sational feel of it all. It was important that it felt live and spontaneous and you didn't necessarily know where it was going. It also had to drive the story and the picture. I started building these toolkits from the material Jon had created. Essentially, it would be anywhere from one to two bars to 16 bars of material that Jon did. I made it so the picture editors could also pull that into their Avid and use it as they sculpted scenes. That's why our temp score was also mostly our final score. That, combined with a few overdub sessions with Jon that were mostly piano-focused, was how it all came together. Butler: Chris was vital. I told him on a couple of occasions that it's one of the top two music-editing jobs I've ever heard. "Elvis" was the other one. You can't tell with Chris where the score ends and the needle drops begin. It's seamless. CineMontage: Will and Tom, can you talk about what you were trying to achieve in the mix? Will Files: At any given moment, you have no less than a dozen people on screen 52 C I N E M O N T A G E UNION CONTINUED FROM PAGE 18 SNL CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23 WOMD CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12 Q: What advice would you offer someone interested in pursuing the kind of work you do? Learn to use the BCC plugins (Boris FX Continuum Collection — visual effects software plugins) and FileMaker Pro (a database application). If you're competent at those two things, you'll be an attractive hire for a busy visual effects editor who can mentor you in the rest. The cutting room politics for a visual effects editor are different from that of an assistant editor, and you'll learn that only if you work under someone who has expe- rienced it. Since you're positioned between the visual effects department and editorial, you need to act as a buffer of sorts and navigate priorities and opinions that can often differ between the two departments. It can be challenging to remain somewhat impartial and know how to best serve the film while maintaining everyone's trust and confidence through open communication. Although visual effects editorial tends to work as a kind of semi-autonomous sub-de- partment, we ultimately work for both the editor and the director, so while you do everything you can to help the visual effects department, you have to do it without compromising what the editor and director want. It can be a bit of a balancing act. Q: Was there ever a circumstance when you had to rely on the Guild for help or assistance? In Season 1 of "The Man in the High Castle," they didn't honor our deal memos correctly. Production was trying to pay us for fewer hours than specified in the deal memo they had drafted! One of the other assistant editors got the union involved to help resolve it. Q: Any words of encouragement you'd like to impart to your fellow Guild members? I recently saw a post from Guild mem- ber Richard Sanchez that struck me. To paraphrase, the intent was that calling the Motion Picture Editors Guild "the union" makes it an entity of others, whereas calling it "our union" makes it something we build together as a community. I thought that was really on point. ■ Compiled by David Bruskin.