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DEPARTMENT www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JULY 2017 spare was invaluable because there was no interme- diary to muddy the waters. "It also comes down a little bit to how you pres- ent your work," he adds. "You have to make sure you get the right things in front of him in a mean- ingful fashion and you get the answers you need, because his time was so limited." THE DEEPEST CUT After the shots are constructed and programmed, and the VFX houses have gone on to their next gigs, it's over to the editors. As you might expect of a Michael Bay film, it's way too big a job for just one pair of hands. Adam Gerstel, Debra Neil-Fisher, John Refoua and Mark Sanger worked closely with Bay to lock down the final cut. Mark Sanger, whose next project is the Andy Serkis-directed live action Jungle Book redux, says the rule of thumb on a big, successful fran- chise is less about wanting to break out and do something original and more about not mess- ing with what's worked before. "None of us had worked for Michael before or on this franchise, so we were plugging into a very big and powerful machine," he says. Simply because the task of an editor is to work with the director to assemble the final cut from the best possible shots collected on the day, it's no surprise to learn that more to choose from makes an editor's job easier. And that made Transformers: The Last Knight manna from heaven — Sanger estimates Bay shot and delivered the equivalent of three million feet of film (equivalent to about 550 hours of footage). "Every scene is just take after take, setup after setup and they're all great," says John Refoua (The Equalizer, The Magnificent Seven). "I've never been on a movie where so much of the dailies just look great. There are so many different ways you can put these scenes together and he's always pushing us saying, 'What can you do here that's different?'" "Pretty much every single frame of film is usable in one form or another," Sanger agrees. "You could make six movies out of the material we've been given every single day." TOO MANY COOKS Editing is a creative, as much as a technical skill — Steven Spielberg was famously miffed when Verna Fields won an Oscar for Jaws for editing while he went home without the Best Director award. So there's a very delicate and balanced relation- ship between a director and his/her editor that re- lies on trust and respect, one you'd imagine has little room for ego or posturing. So how is the final film affected when you throw a team of four editors into the mix? Isn't there a danger that the single vision of the creative lead (the director) could be diluted through too many authorial voices and styles? Debra Neil-Fisher (Fifty Shades of Grey, The Brothers Grimsby) says even though the team was cohesive, each individual bought something Director Bay shot roughly 550 hours of footage. The latest film is the first time Transfomers was shot natively in 3D.