Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543327
struggles as a Mexican-American in the United States. I felt compelled to edit a film that could honor and celebrate his life." Chávez-Ontiveros has edited six feature-length documentaries to date — all while using Adobe Premiere. "For this project, we used a Premiere feature called Productions," he recalls, "which allowed us to work on the film remotely. The assistant editor, Claudia Ramirez, was in LA, organizing and classifying all of the materials. I was cutting the film in the Bay Area. And David was in New York reviewing the scenes and cuts. Productions made this workflow fast and seamless." Chávez-Ontiveros points to a strong sequence that recalls Valdez's suc- cess with the Chicano play "Zoot Suit." The play was already a success in Los Angeles when it premiered on Broadway in New York City. "Luis was excited, but also nervous, about taking his original work to Broadway," Chávez-Ontiveros says of the footage. "On opening night, the au- dience was blown away by the play; their response was excellent. But while the production team celebrated, they began reading the reviews from the major newspapers, and the critics destroyed the play. This scene never fails to move me. It's a whirlwind of emotions, and you feel Luis's pain so deeply: 'They didn't understand the Chicano experience at all.'" Carousel In the rom-com drama Carousel, a divorced doctor's life in Cleveland is upend- ed when a past love returns to town, forcing him to confront his own choices. The film stars Chris Pine as Noah, a doctor running his family medical practice while also looking after his daughter. Jenny Slate plays old high school girl- friend Rebecca. Abby Ryder Fortson, Sam Waterston and Katey Sagal also star. Rachel Lambert wrote and directed the project, which was shot by Dustin Lane. Ryan Kendrick edited the film and says Lambert sent him the script three years ago. "She had written it in between the time that we locked picture on Sometimes I Think About Dying and our premiere at Sundance," he shares. One fall, Lambert and DP Dustin Lane went to Cleveland to shoot 35mm film of spaces and seasonal elements that would serve as inspiration. "I cut together a companion film with music scored by our composer, Dabney Morris, that would be passed around with the script," Kendrick adds. It was two years later that principal photography actually began, with Lane shooting on 35mm. "We did all of our processing and scans at FotoKem in LA," Kendrick ex- plains. "I was editing in Nashville, so FotoKem created ProRes files of our scans and sent them to me digitally. We created dailies at Open Water Post using a LUT created by Mike Howell with the DP." At Open Water Post, the team uses mostly Adobe Premiere, so the film was set up as a Premiere Production. "This allowed my AE, Andie Bradley, and I to work simultaneously without any hiccups," says Kendrick. "A super helpful tool for us during the syncing process was the 'Scene Edit Detect' in Premiere. When we receive scans from FotoKem, they are all the length of the full mag that was shot. That was usually anywhere from 11-minutes to six-minutes long, with multiple takes or setups on each one. We were able to use that tool to automatically find each point that the camera cut and create at edit point at that instance so that we could log and sync much faster." Kendrick says one of the film's most challenging and interesting scenes to cut was the fight towards the end of the film. "It's around 10-minutes long and was shot from a very voyeuristic perspective," he shares. "There is probably a strong instinct from an editor's perspective to want to highlight and accentuate that scene by cutting in to close ups or moving time around, but we wanted the fight to feel real. We wanted it to feel like the viewer was being let into something that they shouldn't be seeing. It becomes ambiguous. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is telling the truth? So, as an edi- tor, my role in that scene was to get out of the way and let the characters speak for themselves, rather than have me impose my perceptions of them." Chasing Summer Chasing Summer stars Iliza Shlesinger as Jamie, who retreats to her small Texas hometown after losing her job and boyfriend. There, friends and flings from a fateful high-school summer proceed to turn her life upside down. In addition to appearing on-camera, Shlesinger also served as screenwriter for the film, which was directed by Josephine Decker. For editor David Barker, the film marks his sixth collaboration with Decker, sometimes working as the main editor, and other times coming in to rework an existing cut. "We've had great collaboration — an approach more like documentary editing in that we quickly move past trying to 'make the script' to focusing on what the movie we see in the footage is," Barker shares. "On this film we used a combination of LucidLink and Premiere Productions to stay in sync across the cloud and let several people work on the film simultaneously." Julie Cohen handled additional editing duties, and the experience went off without any complications, despite creatives being in different locations. "Because the script was written very quickly on a deadline to shoot the film the following month, there was not really an ending to the film when it was shot," Barker explains. "Over a few weeks of intense work trying to meet the Sundance deadline — which was six weeks after our assembly — we got clear about what the film was about: a woman learning to experience pleasure and have it all. With that in mind, we were able to construct an ending for the film by moving things around, repurposing some material and adding a bit of ADR. I like this ending quite a bit because it is very true to the character and story, and came out of the re-writing aspect of editing, which is very central to how Josephine and I work together." Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center for Feeling Therapy Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center for Feeling Therapy is a new doc- umentary short from filmmaker Joey Izzo. The short looks at the Los Angeles therapy collective of the 1970s and its utopian promise before devolving into a business-minded cult built on control and abuse. Gabriel Patay served as director of photography on the project, and says he met Joey Izzo through mutual producing friends Adam Ridley and Jordan Londe. "I was instantly a huge fan of Joey's experimental Sundance short film You've Never Been Completely Honest when I saw it," says Patay. "I loved his use of unconventional techniques, such as using animation and actors in a documen- The documentary Going Sane employs nontraditional filmmaking techniques. Chasing Summer was edited using Adobe Premiere.