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47 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E Episode 8, which is where the six-year-old drowns. The drama and the stakes in this show are so much more relatable than other things I've worked on, which makes those days very tough. On the more fun side was Episode 11, the realistic birth sequence. I thought it was so cool that HBO was willing to go as far as they did to show the whole process. And in that particular episode, Robby is being pulled between the cirrhotic patient in one trauma room and the delivery in the other room. It's back and forth, and it's right before we go into the last chapter of the season, with the mass casualty and all of that. So Robby's already super-heightened. Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) is already gone, and the back- and-forth push-pull of those two traumas at the same time — you could feel the pressure. That stuff is really fun to work on be- cause I was cutting it almost like a music video or an action sequence. Everybody is off-book and on their game: The camera is on it, the direction is meticulously planned with the background action, and I get to make it feel overwhelming. And that is very fun to do. Parker: Sometimes I just get out of the way. Probably my favorite sequence is one of the quiet moments. In Episode 4, a young woman who unknowingly overdosed on fentanyl and had Narcan comes back to life, and she goes to talk to the parent of the kid who took the same fentanyl and didn't make it. There's a moment going into in that sequence that has real tension, and then the release of this slower pacing — "Hey, here's what happened with your son, and if you want to talk, here's my email address." And the dead kid's dad, seeing the young woman's parents maybe 20 feet behind her, says, "OK, well, thank you so much. I'm sure that your parents want to take you home." Then we see a long shot of the boy's mom and we cut back to the daughter, and man, it floors me.... It didn't have a lot to do with my department. I'm sure the background sounds fine, but we got way out of the way. Strand: What's hugely important to us is that we're allowing that temporal space to make room for that emotional space. For that moment to land in Episode 4, with the young woman apologizing to the father — which choked me up; even you describing it, Bryan — and then also the adult children saying goodbye to their father in the same episode, I would say I'm making my great- est choices within those scenes in order to make that all land. But really, it's landing because of all the work we did in Episodes 1, 2, and 3 — getting to know the people in a slow emotional build, getting to know these families, so that it really lands. The first season of "The Pitt" is 15 epi- sodes, each one depicting an hour within a single 15-hour ER shift. The whole season, binged, would run much longer than a feature film, but at this point, Episode 4, it's a four-hour story. Now these emotional pay- offs are coming, and that is a combination of terrific writing, great performances, strong editing and sound design, all working to- gether to tell the same story, which is: this is really happening. These could be your neighbors, and hopefully you're connecting with these people so that when the emo- tional plane lands, it's satisfying. Eifrig: My favorite episode to edit was Episode 13 because it was such a roller- coaster of chaos that ends in an extremely emotional breakdown [for Robby], so the pacing and intercutting of everything was the best dance. My favorite part of editing is finding the absolute breaking point of an emotional journey because it mirrors what we all go through in life. Grabbing a viewer and not letting them wiggle away from dis- comfort while still letting them know you're not going to abandon them in it... that's the stuff of my dreams. ■ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. potential. "One of the most important aspects of our committee is to educate our members and tell them about what's coming down the pipeline," so that they may be trained and ready to use the tools, said Koobatian. There is also the emerging craf t of synthetic dialogue recording and editing, using tools like ReSpeecher and Elevenlabs. "These tools are the gold standard for synthetic dialogue," says Klimek. "Re- speecher in particular has positioned itself as a company at the forefront of the field, having been used on multiple Lucasfilm projects and even going so far as to license James Earl Jones' voice rights, so that Darth Vader could live on in perpetuity. And these tools have landed firmly in the audio department." THE PATH FORWARD T h e G u i l d i s f o c u s i n g o n m e m b e r education and training. Classes have been created for understanding the basics of automation workflow and coding using Python software. And a class on Flawless and DeepEditor is in the works. Members need to be proactive about AI. Discussions within the ETC continue to reveal both deep anxieties and thoughtful strategies for facing a film business that could soon be drastically altered. "Maybe your job won't look the same in the future," Miller admitted, "but my job isn't the same as it was 30 years ago, either." U l t i m a te l y, b o t h t h e G u i l d a n d t h e ETC's messages are clear: the industry's heart beats through its people. AI may become a powerful tool, but the irreplace- able spark — the human connection that breathes life into every story — must be fiercely protected. "How long can we keep doing some- thing that we really love for as long as we possibly can?" asked Rodriquez. "It's the human touch that makes everything we do so magical." ■ A.J. Catoline is a picture editor and member of the Editors Guild board of directors. FUTURE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27