Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545302
www.postmagazine.com 15 POST MAY/JUNE 2026 that said, within an episode, we can do that, so we streamlined as much as we can within episodes. We shot the episodes mostly in order. I can't remember why, but for some reason we flipped episodes five and six. It was just a logistics thing." Jim Flynn: "To Jonathan's point, I think as far as shooting Episode 1 and then shooting Episode 2 and Episode 3, it probably was frustrating at times because you probably have 28 scenes to do in this house. It would be nice to light it, do it, be done with it, and put the location behind me. "From an editorial perspective, it was kind of nice because you'd have the whole first episode, and then you'd have three episodes while they're kind of doing rewrites on the later episodes. So sometimes I could tell how they were making adjustments, writing wise. You started to get new scripts coming in for the later episodes, and that was probably based a little bit on how the earlier episodes were shaping up. So I think, as frustrating as that might have been, it did have its benefits." What were you cutting on? Jim Flynn: "The show was on Avid, mercifully, be- cause that's sort of my muscle memory software. I do stuff in Premiere, and lately I've been doing some Resolve, but Avid is the first nonlinear system I learned. It's just a workhorse and the way the project share is so efficient now because at some point, some stuff that was shot for Episode 2 end- ed up in 1. Some stuff that we shot for Episode 7 ended up in 8. So we could share between editors all the media and all the cuts…We weren't having to shuffle drives around. It was all sort of internal, which is really, really nice. And it's just a very pow- erful tool." What was the storage setup? Jim Flynn: "There's a main drive. It's a copy of all the media with a LUT already on it. The system in my room doesn't have any drives attached at all. It just has a cable that goes to the other room next door. You can also remote in, and the other editors did more remote than I did. I prefer to be in the room with people, and since we are so close to set, I like to be there in case someone wanted to come over and take a look at something. Jump Desktop, I think, is what we used to get into the systems, and that was extremely efficient." This isn't a VFX-heavy show, but I would image there are effects sequences. How did that affect your process? Jonathan Furmanski: "Well, from a shooting per- spective, as you say, every show has VFX these days, whether it's rig removal or something. We didn't have anything like what you would con- sider for a Star Wars or a Marvel kind of a thing, but Stephanie Johnson, our post producer, was a superhero in taking a lot of that stress off of my shoulders. If we had something where, 'Oh, there's a light there. We could move it, but it'll take 25 minutes.' She would just say, 'Don't worry about it. We'll just take care of that later.' And that provides a lot of relief on shows like this, where you just want to go, go, go. There is a danger of interrupting momentum that you'd never really want to do." Jim Flynn: "From a post perspective, there was a handful of shots we knew were going to have effects, and my awesome assistant, Jeff (Castelluccio), would sort of mock stuff up for me. An example I remember at the end of [Episode 1], Samira is looking off sort of in the middle distance and there (are) fireflies in the foreground. Now, we didn't shoot fireflies. We just had a sort of a plate. I would just give him a plate of a certain length — three-and-a-half seconds or something — and he would put some fireflies in, so that was really, really helpful. We would cut an empty plate — raven's taking off from the house or something — we put the sound effect of the ravens and the wings flapping and stuff like that, so you can kind of get a sense of ultimately what it's going to be." What would you each point to as a highlight of your work? Jonathan Furmanski: "There were several sequenc- es that I was really happy with how they came together. The one that really stands out to me is at the beginning of Episode 2. There's a dream sequence that Samira has where she thinks her baby has been kind of supernaturally kidnapped by some evil spirit in the Victorian house. That was really fun to shoot, but it was also really fun to see when it kind of fully came together. And then something that Jim and I did get to collaborate on was the end of 107, which actually bleeds into the beginning of 108 — the reveal of who the murderer is, and the subsequent chase through the Victorian home that turns into a whole thing in this under- ground bunker. It was a lot of pieces and trying to make it all work. That was directed by Yana Gorskaya, who did a fantastic job keeping it all making sense, and keeping the train on the tracks. But those two, when I saw them finally come to- gether, I was just like, 'Wow!' They were not just fun to, do but they were really fun to watch." Jim Flynn: "I agree. Yana is fantastic. She's an editor, so she knows how to get those pieces. That was a really fun sequence. "The sequence I might be most proud of was near the end of the pilot. The show is fun and it's silly, and it has a lot of elements, but there's a series of events that transpire, sort of the tail end of Episode 1 where Samira decides, 'I'm gonna get my damn plate.' "She walks across the street and then there's these horror elements, so right there, now we're in a sort of scary moment. And we do this wide shot from behind of this looming house. She turns around, heads back, is locked out, and as she's sit- ting there, the police arrive…This all happens within three minutes. She's back at her house. She's sad. She's a little scared. And she is broken hearted, because she's losing this place that she's come to love. But the characters, who are wonderful people, come in. They sort of help lift her up, and at the end, she is outside feeling like, 'I wanna stay here. I wanna be part of this!' "To get through those gymnastics was really difficult. I think it's a credit to Jonathan's work on all of those scenes, and Nzingha's as well. In the script, I was like, 'Boy oh boy! Are we going to be able to do all of this back to back to back?' Three scenes from three completely-different genres that play really well to wrap up the end of Episode 1." The editing team was located close to production on the Universal lot.