Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538283
FILMMAKING www.postmagazine.com 15 POST JULY/AUG 2025 just to kind of make sure everything was working and moving properly, and to have some time with Joe (Kosinski)," Mirrione recalls. "But the plan was always that after that, I'd be coming back to LA, because what would happen then is, all the mate- rial that would get to the UK editing room would then be cataloged, organized, set up in a way so that I can cut with it, so that when I'm waking up, that editing room is going to sleep. My assistant in LA is then helping me when I wake up. The same with the VFX editor. So we were really 24 hours." During production, Mirrione only had limited time with Kosinski. "When a director's shooting, they don't usually have time to hang out in the editing room," he shares. "By the same token, I need time to hang out with the material, be alone with it, be in a kind of a focused space to really do the work that I need to do. So we were able to get both sides of this, that way when Joe would wake up, I'd usually have cuts ready, and I could go online with him and play them for him. And when he was finishing his day, I'd be waking up and we could do the same, so we were still working together every few days." Because of the enormous volume of material — the race broadcasts covered each event with 20- plus cameras — and the need to access footage via the internet, Mirrione work at just 720p resolution while cutting on his Avid, even though the feature would ultimately get an IMAX release. "Joe is just allergic to that resolution," he jokes. "It was driving him crazy, but I'm like, 'Trust me, Here's the plan.'" Within the week of the footage being shot, he could catalog it, cut it and find the high-resolution versions that he needed, which his team would then download. "You're talking about less than a minute or so of material, versus hours and hours and hours," he says of the workflow. The team relied on LucidLink, which specializes in allowing editing teams to quickly access material regardless of its format, size or distance. "Instead of creating media for the Avid, we could AMA (Avid Media Access) it, which means it's just pointing to the file," he explains. "And then I could view it. People could mark it up… They would put locators for me. Every time a car passed another car, they'd put a little note for me. There's no other way we could have feasibly gotten through it all. It just would have been so extreme, the amount of material." Some of the race sequences that he turned over to the VFX team wouldn't come back to him for as long as six months. But as the film's deadline neared, the floodgates opened, and he was receiving between 10 and 20 completed VFX shots each week. "Framestore and ILM, who did all the work, they were just on it," he notes. "Things came in really close all the time. They were very dialed in, and I suspect a lot of that came from them having already done a lot of the work on Top Gun and Ryan (Tudhope) kind of designing and guiding (the workflow). That was very smooth once shots started coming in." Hans Zimmer's score sets the tone for the film during the title sequence. "The whole opening sequence, with the Josh Pierce character doing his warm-up laps, that was cut and done, and there weren't very many visual effects with that because it's just the car on the track," Mirrione shares. "There were no fans or other cars that had to be comp'ed in, so that was a sequence that was done, and we gave that to Hans like two years ago." By the time they started shooting again the following summer, Zimmer had provided a number of tracks that were finding their places throughout the film. "What was really interesting to me is, a lot of the things that were rejected from the first few sessions that were done, when I started cutting Abu Dhabi, I was remembering those pieces," says Mirrione of the initial tracks being considered for the film's open. "One of the reasons they were rejected was maybe because they were too dark or too this or too that. And it wasn't right for the opening of the movie. But as I was cutting Abu Dhabi, I was thinking, 'You know, maybe those old demos could work here?' And as I started drop- ping them in, it's like, 'Oh my gosh!' They had to massage it. They had to make adjustments, but he had essentially written the score for Abu Dhabi a year before. It actually worked somewhere. I keep everything — all the little strands and stems — and we had a great music editor (Chris Newlin) working with us, who also had access to all that. We would just keep adjusting and reshaping, sending that back to them for reference. Then they would redo it, send theirs back to us, and just collaborate back and forth the whole way through." The final edit was completed roughly six or sev- en weeks prior to the film's June release. "I think we had to extend the deadline by like a week or so for a couple of shots," he recalls, pointing to a competitive race sequence between the fictional APXGP team and the powerhouse Ferrari team. "You're not seeing it," he shares of the initial edit's storytelling component. "I didn't cut a shot in, and it just feels so unsatisfying…He's passing and getting into second place, and I don't actually see it happen. So, my team and I went digging through all the material of Abu Dhabi we can find. A loose shot that actually shows the moment happening. And we found it! And VFX, they figured out how to get it done in time for us, and it completely, com- pletely saved that sequence, in my opinion." Stephen Mirrione edited F1 The Movie, which was shot by Claudio Miranda.