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the process. CineMontage: What other considerations came into play? Kissack: There were two other things I was always thinking about. One was tran- sitions. Normally, you have a crazy, wild scene and you can't just plow into the next scene. You need to let the audience take a breath. So you'd put in an establishing shot of a building, or create a couple of montages of people playing in a park — whatever — something to establish the rhythm. We couldn't do any of that because we had these rules: essentially, anytime we did a cut, it had to be a big time jump. It had to be the next day or that night. So, establishing cuts wouldn't work. I always had to say, "Remember, this scene is coming off that previous scene. We need a breath, so we can't just start the shot with someone talking. We need someone walking into the room, or we need to pan up from some- thing to allow that breath or that moment for the viewers." The third thing I was doing... well, we did very little improv on this show, but we did some. Like, Kathryn Hahn — you can't tell her not to do improv. She's a genius. And there were a couple of actors like that, where we just had to let them do their thing. But with improv, no single take can be used as is. You have to combine it with other things. So I would realize where the improv pockets were — like a moment where Kath- ryn could do something crazy — and I would work with the camera operators. I'd say, "Okay, before this moment, you need to swing off of her and then onto someone else and then back," so that in that swing, I could switch takes and combine different bits if I needed to. The swings are the easiest place to hide cuts. A five-minute scene with no visible cuts would probably have five or six (or more) cuts hidden in the swings. We got better at all of it as we went along. On the first day, I was nervous to say anything because we'd never done this before. But by the end, I was like, "This line sucks. Cut that. Mark, you've got to swing over there at that moment. Do that." We got pretty good by the end. There are some things I still see in the first episode, and I'm cringing because I'm like, Oh, why didn't we put the camera there? That would've been more elegant. But by the end, I was pretty proud of some of those scenes. There's crazy shit we do, but you can't really tell that there were any shenanigans. CineMontage: Were you glued to a monitor to judge it properly? Eric Kissack: Monitor was the only way to visualize it. Now and then, we would pop our heads onto set, which was always hilarious because the simplest thing you'd imagine was happening was always 10 times more complicated. There'd be a moment where the camera would move past a chessboard and up to Seth's face as he paced, and then you'd look over at set and there's like eight dudes standing there — one passing the camera over the chess- board, another one grabbing it, another one putting it on a Steadicam — all this stuff. But yes, the monitor was the only way I could track how all those things were working, especially the beats where I knew I needed potential stitches. It had to be very consistent, and the only way it could work was if our camera operator was a genius. He had to memorize the script for each scene because he had to move the camera consis- tently at all the same moments and all the same places on the set. And I had to change his blocking sometimes. So he would do it five times, and then I'd say, "Now this time you have to wait for her to say one more line, and then you have to swing the camera so I can use that as a cut point." And he would remember it and do it exactly as I told him to every single time. CineMontage: It seems the most collaborative of experiences. Eric Kissack: My favorite part of all of this — of film, of TV — is the collaboration. The fact that you're working with people who are at the top of their game, all coming together to make something great. Normal- ly, there's this weird break on film and TV where editorial is so removed from the set. Maybe you'll visit, but it feels like, What am I doing here? I don't really have a job on set. You collaborate with sound and music and all that kind of stuff, but this was just so great — to get to know everyone on set and really understand what they were doing, and maybe inform them a little bit on what we do and how it all interacts. Then getting it into post with our composer and visual ef- fects artist elevated it all. I got a wonderful kick out of the whole process. ■ Rob Feld, a longtime CineMontage contributor, is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. 24 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E MASTER SHOT: Martin Scorsese in "The Studio." P H OT O : A P P L E T V +