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Workflow Cloud Atlas' lofty editing and effects H OLLYWOOD — Cloud Atlas, the award- winning multi-dimensional narrative written by David Mitchell, has been By DANIEL RESTUCCIO dansweb451@aol.com rendered into an epic, visually-stunning movie experience by three renowned directors: Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix Trilogy). This unique collaboration reportedly earned the film a seven-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. The movie's editor, who is based in Ger- Three directors, one film, six stories. many at Digital Editors Postproduktons GmbH, Alex Berner, had never worked with the Wachowskis before but edited Tykwer's 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. "He sug- gested me as an editor, " Berner notes. The Wachowskis didn't ask about his approach or philosophy of editing. "They watched my mov- ies, and we had a dinner to see if the vibes basically the way the script was." Berner had to cut two units worth of footage a day. The Wachowskis directed one unit and Tykwer the other. "It was really a challenge. Twice the material you would usu- ally get every day." Contrary to some of the descriptions of the film, Berner says, "It's not six stories that are interrelated; that's not quite right. That was something we discussed very early. I know it feels like this, I know it seems like this, but like the book, it's not intended to be six stories interwoven. The idea from the very beginning was that this whole thing would play as one movie, which involves that certain emotional story parts that would be missed in one story would be delivered through the other stories. It does take a moment to realize this is what makes the movie so interesting." emotions, (and then) add them to the end of the scenes. So we tried that for a week and we said, 'This looks really great.'" This intriguing style has less to do with plot per se and more to do with emotional continuity. "It could be how two people get to know each other, get more involved," describes Berner. "We would start off with a scene that tells you this is going to happen. These two people have this kind of relation- ship, we would cut to two other people, to another story basically, and show how things evolved there." So the relationship contin- ued in the next scene, it was at a different stage, "but emotionally connected to the previous scenes." The collaboration between the directors, according to Berner, was virtually always in sync. The overall understanding was that all Editor Alex Berner used Media Composer V.6 to cut the film, which features 1,056 visual effects shots. were good, and to see if we could go though such an intense production." Berner says they all knew immediately that Cloud Atlas was going to be something very special, and that it might be "very tough" due to the budget, schedule, ambition of the proj- ect, and the fact that there were three direc- tors on the movie at the same time. There were 60-plus shooting days, mostly in and around Berlin, in addition to a few weeks of shooting in Scotland and Majorca. Berner, working on an Avid Media Composer V.6, started on his first assembly at the end of August 2011. Longtime collaborator Claus Wehlisch assisted with post during the early stages of editing the movie. "Because it was such a difficult script I decided to edit things 14 Post • October 2012 EDITING After principal photography was complet- ed, and Berner finished his first-pass assembly, he and the directors looked at the movie reel by reel. They found that "the scenes as scenes were in the right shape, and that things flowed the right way and that it had the right sort of cutting pattern." They started immediately to "fiddle around" and try things out. "Because we knew that when we did go to the cutting room it would be a big puzzle, the script was a great guideline." Yet they knew they would have to "play with the scenes and see how we would put them together. If you knew one story needed these emotions, we would check around and see where we would have those www.postmagazine.com three directors had the same idea, the same vision, and "we all participated in the same game from day one. It was as if 'we' have done this." VISUAL EFFECTS As might be expected Cloud Atlas, dazzles the viewer with intricate visuals supervised by visual effects veteran Dan Glass, who is based at Method Studios in Los Angeles. Glass says the VFX work was pretty focused. "There were a few sequences that we knew were going to be predominantly or very heavily CGI." What was more relevant is the variety of things that had to be imagined. The movie, he says, "is very rich in ideas and visual invention," not just the visual effects, but