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October 2013

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With dialogue-based scenes, Bluming can take cues from the writing. "The blueprint is there for you," he says. "But that's not always the case with action scenes — especially when the story is supposed to span 30 minutes, for example. So every time I encounter those situations I have to figure out what music I should use prior to cutting." Take the last scene in the season finale, where Detective Fales confronts Sheriff Walt Longmire about the continuing mystery surrounding the death of Longmire's wife. After Fales leaves, Longmire flies into a rage and destroys his office, his best friend is taken into custody by Fales and Longmire's deputy is shot by an unseen gunman. "It was 30 minutes of movement and very little dialogue," Bluming says. "There was no way to cut that in realtime without it becoming boring very quickly — nothing would be driving the cutting pattern. "I need the rhythm of the music to tell me where I need to cut; there's sort of a subtext in the right piece of music that says, 'This is what happens and this is how long it should last.' Although a fantastic composer, Dave Shephard, scores the show (and music editor Michael Alexander creates the temp scores), a lot of times the choice of needledrop music comes down to something I simply need to find. "The finale needed something that felt like Walt's world was crashing down, that everything in Seasons 1 and 2 came to a head. So I looked for music with no actual lyric but where the artist's screaming or chanting — like in the Marilyn Manson track I found — would take on new meaning when juxtaposed with the right imagery. It's as if the music became an additional actor." Once Bluming cut the scene to the music and mixed in sound design it Bluming's assistant, Matthew Gilna, was "key" to him picking up the Avid quickly. "He was my talking bible. Now, Final Cut feels like I was on training wheels. I've even installed Media Composer on my home system." Longmire is shot on Red Scarlet. An on-set dailies system from MTI takes the camera masters and transcodes them to a ProRes proxies and uploads them to MTI in LA with the sound files, where they are synched and color timed. "In the morning we get the dailies synched in Avid bins with temp color," says Gilna, and each editor and his assistant receive duplicate media. The process is really fast." Bluming and his colleagues cut on Apple iMacs connected to Panasonic plasma displays through Blackmagic Design Intensity Extreme, which interfaces to the iMacs via Thunderbolt. Media lives on Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAIDs. Instead of Avid Unity, the editors use a gigabit Internet network for file sharing. Bluming says the "burden of cutting a show as good as Longmire" is the pressure to maintain the quality of all the work that's done before he gets to the edit room. "I'll get a beautifully-written scene shot in a spectacular setting with fantastic performances. If you blow it at that point, you're clearly the weak link." MODERN FAMILY Five seasons into ABC's popular Modern Family, editor Ryan Case explains how the show has evolved. "The storytelling has become more complex.  In the beginning it was very basic introducing the characters. Now, we're juggling more and more storylines at a time and there are more complex dynamics. In some episodes, the whole family is together throughout." Case, who won a 2010 Emmy Award for cutting the show's pilot and has received nominations every year since then, has concentrated on comedy throughout her career.  She edited a Funny or Die Web series with James Franco, and cut pilots for This  Might Hurt, Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23 and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  "To cut comedy you have to have a strong sense of humor and a strong knowledge of comedy," she says. "There are many ways to cut a joke.  I'm always thinking about what makes something funny. I'm a big comedy nerd!" Modern Family switched to single-camera Arri Alexa last season, but the changeover didn't make "a huge difference" to editorial, she says.  "They shoot cross-coverage, so we're not bombarded with footage. It's very efficient and great for continuity since we get the actual reactions of the other actor.  I can find the natural rhythm very easily."  Case and one other editor work next to the stage where the series is shot at Fox Studios; she cuts every other episode for a total of 12 per season. She likes the proximity to the set, which enhances her involvement in the show. "If we need to fix a story Longmire was cut in FCP for Season 1, but has since switched to Avid Media Composer. point and do a pick up or shoot a new talking-head interview, I can be present, which is very valuable," she points out. became "my new blueprint for how the scene would work," he reports. "And She says the writers keep the show fresh and give her "lots of different chalwhen I showed it [to the executive producers] the bell rang with thunder." But lenges" every season. "Last year, Danny Zuker wrote a Valentine's Day episode, the tricky bit always comes when a temp track that really sells the scene has to where every family had their own act; they'd never done that before," she be swapped out for music that's readily available. "At best you get a Muzak ver- says. "And the entire family showed up in a roller rink for a whole episode with sion of what you really liked," Bluming says. Fortunately, the Marilyn Manson temp six or seven storylines." track could be licensed for the scene. Her favorite episode last year featured the birth of Jay and Gloria's Although Longmire shoots in New Mexico, Bluming and fellow editors Vikash baby.  "They wrote a really funny episode with a lot of heart," she Patel and Russell Denove work in offices at Raleigh Studios in LA. "We're exactly recalls. "When I got to the end we wanted to make sure it had the impact one day behind the shooting schedule," he notes. "In a perfect world, at the end it needed, so they wrote a new voiceover for Jay and I got my assistant to of our day we're up to camera and have scenes borderline broadcast-ready. We record it as a temp.  I cut it in and went back to previous seasons to find have four days to absolutely perfect the show after they're done shooting." benchmark moments and cut them with music. It made for a very rich endAbout two weeks before the start of Season 2, the editors switched from ing.  The writers just tweaked the dialogue then Ed (O'Neill) recorded it.  I cutting on Apple's Final Cut Pro to Avid Media Composer. Bluming learned to was really proud to be part of shaping a special episode." edit on FCP and had never cut on Avid. But he says that Apple's seeming lack of Case learned on Avid and uses Media Composer 6.5 on Unity for Modern support for the professional editorial community with the release of Final Cut Family. "The new upgrade works very quickly and smoothly, and has fast render Pro X prompted the change. times," she says. Case favors Avid's ScriptSync and the asymmetrical trim tool, the www.postmagazine.com Post • October 2013 17

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