Re: [Avid-L2] Re: OT-Living in Emergency on shortlist

For the first couple of months we each worked on different scenes or
locations. The final film happens mostly in the Congo and Liberia, but
there was a lot of wonderful footage shot in Pakistan and Malawi as
well and those scenes had to be cut and then fought for/against as the
film structure developed. In the end they were dropped because even
though the footage was intense it didn't illuminate as well the story
of the doctors lives and the choices they made in difficult
situations, which was the center of the film. I learned a lot from my
fellow editors and the director, Mark Hopkins, about how not to be
seduced by the footage, and instead to keep the overriding goals of
the film at the center of every discussion.

One of us would take a section and build a chapter around a particular
issue or individual. Everything worked well as long as we kept good
track of which person had the most current sequence of each section.
As the film started to take shape and we started to intercut what
really was most important was an old fashioned board with index cards
laying out the scenes. Using a different color for each location
helped show the flow of the film as a whole. Mark would lead a
reorganization of the chart meeting a couple of times a week, we would
divvy up the scenes that needed work, sometimes staying with one
section for a week or two, sometimes trading so that we could get new
perspectives. One of the ways that it became clear that we couldn't
keep the Pakistan footage in was that the cards for Pakistan kept
getting moved further back in the story till they were finally hanging
off the end of the board. A board is a great tool for visualizing even
without three editors.

Towards the end of the project, when we had big sections pretty well
laid out, we broke the film into thirds and each worked on a section.
The opening was particularly hard and that got passed around quite a
lot. Bob and Sebastian are two really great guys to work with and
while there were, of course, differences of opinion, we found
solutions that worked for all of us. I would attribute our ability to
do that to the very strong and well articulated goals that Mark would
set forth.

It was a pleasure working on this film.

Doug

> Congratulations for that!
> How does it work to edit with 2 other people? How do you share the
> work? I seem to see more and more of that and I'm curious to know
> how it's done when it happens.
> I could do with having some help on the film I'm cutting now... 100+
> hours of footage for a feature film. ;-)
> Pierre
>
>
> --- In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, Doug Rossini <rossini@...> wrote:
>>
>> Living in Emergency, a film I co-edited with Bob Eisenhardt and
>> Sebastian Ischer, has been put on the shortlist for a possible
>> Academy
>> Award nomination
>
>
>
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>
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