Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543327
COVER STORY www.postmagazine.com 13 POST JAN/FEB 2026 And then he would come in at 6am and we would cut for two hours. That way, by the time that the next shoot day started, if there was anything that needed to change, any modification he wanted to make or a shot he wanted to go back and get, he knew that. That was a very efficient use of time for him, to be able to just have this immediate feed- back loop of, 'I shot this Monday, and by Tuesday morning at 8am, I've got it already edited and put into the reels.'" Where was the shoot taking place and where was editorial set up? "So this movie, there were kind of two-and-a-half parts of the shoot. There was the part in Toronto, which was about four months, and that was all of our stage work, and a tiny little bit of exterior loca- tion work for the forests. Then, after that, we had a month-long shoot just outside of London for our miniatures. And we got a lot of editing time done during that actually, because a miniature shoot, as I've now learned…is very slow. "They'll take all day to set up a :15 shot. But that means that we've got all day to edit together. And then after that month-long miniature shoot, we went to Scotland and had a six-week road trip, where every week we were in a different part of Scotland, shooting in an estate house or a man- sion, or in the city of Edinburgh. "For Toronto, I had just a regular office in the production office. And then for the Scotland shoot, I had a trailer, and my assistant editor and I would drive around, and they tow the trailer from location to location, literally park it as close to Guillermo — as close to the set — as possible, because he would come in before set. If he had a free 30 minutes while they were like setting up the next shot, he would come in…He just always wanted us very close." What were you using for an editing system and storage? Were you using cloud storage at all, or was it all local? "No. We didn't have any cloud storage. We're cutting on Avid Media Composer. When we were in Toronto, we had a NEXIS that was on-site. And then it got a little bit more complicated when we went to the UK, because the visual effect vendor and the visual effects editor that worked at that vendor was still in Toronto, and we had to make sure that he could get the shots that we were turn- ing over. So we had a little NAS box — a Synology or a QNAP — that we would drag along with us in Scotland. And then, at the end of the night in the hotel, we would sync that back to the NEXIS in Toronto so that our turnovers and everything would all match up." The film is well over two hours and there are a number of chapters. Were you working across sections? "I remember…it was definitely like a little bit here, a little bit there. I think one of the most interesting things for me is when we have a cut that goes from like a location — a real house in Scotland — to a set in Toronto, that are supposed to be the same place. Or we go from the batteries falling down the shaft. That's a miniature shot when you're up top and you're seeing the batteries falling. And then it goes to a live-action shot in Toronto, which is the shot that Jacob is actually in when the battery crashes. It was not linear in any means. I just had a bunch of title cards that were placeholders until we got those scenes in. And by the time that we finished Toronto, we did have a good chunk of the 'Victor' section, and a good chunk of the 'Creature' section. We had enough to work on, but we were plugging holes right up until the last week of the shoot." You mention the 'Victor' and 'Creature' sections, which play as different chapters. Was there a lot of back and forth? "Day to day and week to week, we were bouncing from chapter to chapter. But the way that I had myself organized was, I had a sequence for the Victor section and I had a sequence for the Creature section. And only when we got into post did I divide that back up into the usual reels. I just found it easier ,mentally, to like be like, 'Okay, we've got Victor foot- age today, so let me open up the Victor section.'" You mentioned using placeholders. When did you start seeing visual effects? "So Dennis Berardi, a visual effect supervisor, (is) also is the owner of Herne Hill, which was our primary vendor, so they had a bunch of assets they had already created before the shoot started. We actually got temps back within 24 or 48 hours of shots that we had just turned over." Previs-type stuff? "Yeah, previs-type stuff, but very high quality previs-type stuff. I mean, they built these envi- ronments for doing the extensions at the top of the tower, and the creation scene, or adding the mountains in the back and the blind-man section. All of that stuff, they had assets ready to go. So then it was just a matter of how quickly can they do the roto or the keying? But they did it. The ben- efit to having the actual vendor that's going to be doing the shots working on doing the temps is that it's there, ready to go, and they've got a team of people, so all those shots got turned around much faster than if we were just doing it in editorial." What resolution were you working at? "I mean we still work in HD. I've done one show where I did UHD, but I didn't feel like it was worth some of the extra processing time that comes down the line. We still work with just Avid DNx115 HD dailies. Company 3 was our dailies vendor, so they would take the camera masters and they would transcode for us. And then in the morning in Toronto, they would just automatically down- load onto our server. And then when we were in Scotland, we had somebody from Company 3 that was driving around Scotland with us. I actually never met this person because we were on such opposite hours that while they were working, we were sleeping, and when we were working, they were sleeping. We would just like silently pass off a hard drive through the hotel reception sometimes or the unit drivers." Editorially, what are some of the scenes that you see as highlights? "I have a few that I'm proud of for different rea- sons. The one for me is the 'forgiveness' scene at the very end, which is the culmination of the whole movie that you've just watched. The whole history behind these characters and their relationship to each other. For me, seeing people's reaction to watching that scene. Oftentimes their reaction is to start to tear up. That's very satisfying. I feel like that's how we know that we nailed the emotion in that scene. Obviously, Oscar and Jacob did stellar work, and we just put it together. But it really is a sign of the movie functioning as it's designed to." You're right about that being such an important scene and them coming face to face. "That's about Guillermo putting his own spin on Frankenstein and making this really his version. Having the creature forgive Victor is a Guillermo del Toro addition to the story. I think that feeling is so cathartic when it happens. These guys have been pursuing each other. They've been at odds with each other, and now they get to reconcile in a very bittersweet way, but it's also a very heartfelt and emotional way." Which scenes were some of the more complicated to assemble? "The wolf-attack scene. That's fairly challenging simply because we don't have the wolves. We did actually shoot with real wolves, but never within the same shot as an actor. We had wolves come in and they took them through all the motions to provide lighting and texture reference and things like that, but you're not going to put Jacob Elordi in a house with six wolves. So there are just guys with like puppet heads, and guys in blue spandex suits running around. More so than any of the dialog scenes, that requires imagination, coordination and committing early to what that scene is going to be, because it takes so long to get the visual effects back. Editorially, we have to put it together with confidence that this is how we want the scene to go so that we can then get ILM to start working on it." What's next for you? "I'm on a small, little project right now, but I'm looking for the next full film."