The Invisible Art

(x)

Today’s post isn’t so much about Post Production as it is about things that happen to women in all forms of production, including myself, that people outside the industry don’t experience.

This week was SDCC, which I attended. During SDCC, there’s a film festival that includes several independent films with panels but it also ends up including all of these panels focusing entirely on film production that anyone can attend, which is really cool. I remember seeing this particular panel on the schedule and wanted to attend but didn’t end up going. However, after hearing about what happened afterwards online, I’m not sure if I wish I could have gone just to scream at someone or glad I didn’t go because sometimes this shit is just too much and I’m sick of dealing with it.

I encourage you to follow the link and read the rest of her tweets on what happened at the panel, and just know that this shit isn’t unusual. Men talk over women in the industry ALL THE TIME! They assume things about the women they’re working alongside or even under and not only does it sometimes make working in this industry aggravating but it actively drives women away from working here. I have read far too many stories of women who were good at their jobs but couldn’t take the harassment from male coworkers and just left. 

As a woman in Post Production I’ve been talked down to, I’ve been talked over, I’ve been told I don’t know what I’m talking about (by the way, every single time some guy has an issue that I could fix and then tells me I “don’t know what I’m talking about”, EVERY SINGLE TIME the issue has been something I could easily fix that the guy can’t fix and then he proceeds to spend way too much time trying to fix the problem himself). 

If I’m working with a team of editors, I’m expected to not only do my job, but also the job of all the males’ secretary. In a group of 10 editors, I’m lucky if there’s one other woman there with me. And, despite the fact that I am often the youngest in the group by years and yet was able to get the same job as men more than 20 years my senior, I’m talked down to and told I have “no idea what I’m talking about”. 

This stuff is so much more prevalent and frustrating than anyone not in this industry could realise. And so often, like in the case of the Women in Film Production panel, men who insist they are our allies are sometimes the worst offenders talking over us. 

#TimeLineTuesday is a hashtag from Twitter started by editors to show off their current projects. Here’s some examples that I’ve pulled from Twitter:

It’s a way for editors to show off their current projects and see other people who are also working in the industry. 

The long weekend has thrown me off and I have a lot of projects I’m working on right now, so I’m very sorry the post this week was late.

Please feel free to post in my Ask Box about any subject you would like me to cover or any Film Editors you would like me to write about.

Thelma Schoonmaker has been editing films for decades, especially for her good friend and long time collaborator Martin Scorsese. Martin and Thelma have spoken several times about how important collaboration between a director and an editor is, and how their relationship and mutual respect of one another is what makes their films work. 

Thelma grew up around the world, with her parents traveling for work from country to country until Thelma was a teenager. Originally, Thelma went to school with the intent of getting a job in the State Department, but she was (and still is) incredibly liberal and specifically her outspoken disapproval of South African apartheid made her an unlikely candidate and eventual rejection for a job. It was at this point that Thelma then decided to go into art.

“While doing graduate work at Columbia University,Thelma Schoonmaker answered an ad that offered on-the-job training as an assistant film editor.” (source) Thelma then went on to be accepted into a six-week intensive at NYU’s film program, where she was paired up with a young Martin Scorsese to help edit his student film that had been butchered by his last editor. This started a lifelong friendship and partnership that has now spanned decades. 

Thelma’s first Academy Award nomination was a for a music festival documentary called Woodstock (which was not directed by Scorsese but he did work on the film). Thelma has gone on to be nominated for 6 other films that she edited, winning 3 (Raging Bull in 1981, The Aviator in 2005, and The Departed in 2007). Anytime you’re watching a Scorsese film and thinking about ways in which that is “quintessential Scorsese”, you should also be thinking of Thelma, because these films would be nothing without her.

Thelma is highly respected, not just for her amazing work, but for how long she has been in the industry and consistently putting out amazing work time and time again that far exceeds the skill of her peers. 

"You get to contribute so significantly in the editing room because you shape the movie and the performances. You help the director bring all the hard work of those who made the film to fruition. You give their work rhythm and pace and sometimes adjust the structure to make the film work - to make it start to flow up there on the screen. And then it's very rewarding after a year's work to see people react to what you've done in the theater." 

IMDB

If you’re someone who has never been through film school, the term “lining the script” probably doesn’t mean anything to you. However, it’s an extremely important part of production that many student filmmakers even will overlook because it’s not emphasized enough. So I’m going to take a moment to explain to you exactly what it is and why it’s so important.

To start, let me give you an example of what a lined script looks like:

At the top of each line is a shot designation. We can tell that this is scene 8 because every shot starts with the number “8″. Shots are then lettered using all lettered of the alphabet except I and O (because they look like 1 and 0), occasionally even being doubled (I’ve been on lots of sets that go into AA or AB). Each letter represents a different shot, which could mean that the camera moves or changes angles or movement, ect. As you can imagine, shot lists tend to be extremely long. The way to keep everything organized and make sure you’re getting the coverage you need is to then take the script and literally draw lines through it.

What is coverage? Well, coverage is basically the sum of all shots you have for one scene. When you have sufficient coverage, than you have footage of every character saying all their lines, probably from a couple different angles, and you have shots of every important set piece and also a Master Shot (meaning a wide shot of the entire scene).

In the script above, you’ll notice that there are straight lines and then also squiggly lines. When there is a straight line through an action or dialogue, that means that that action or spoken dialogue is being seen on camera. If there’s a squiggly line through an action or dialogue, that means that the camera is rolling while that action is happening or that line is being said, but that it’s not currently on camera (which is important for reaction shots). 

Proper coverage is extremely important. Even if, as the writer or director, you have a specific idea of exactly what shot you want at a particular moment, you still make sure you have lots of coverage because you want to give your editor options. You never know exactly what’s going to work when the footage gets to post production. You also never, ever as a writer put specific shots in your script, even if you are the director. You never want to limit yourself or your editor. 

Marcia Lucas is one of the women of post production that Hollywood history has written out, but she’s the reason Star Wars became what it is today. Marcia (who was born Marcia Griffin) married George Lucas and worked on all his early films, including Star Wars episodes 4, 5, and 6. Marcia even won an Academy Award for editing Star Wars (George has never received an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars).

In her early life, Marcia did not have the privileged upbringing that her future husband was blessed with. Her father was in the military and they moved often, until Marcia was 2 and her parents divorced. Marcia was raised with her sister by her mother with very little support from her father (who remarried). When she was out of high school Marcia worked to help support her family and took night classes in chemistry. Completely by accident, she ended up working for a film library where her job was to order film footage that producers needed for their films (a job that is now regulated by computers through stock photo and video websites). She took to the job immediately and quickly understood all the technical work involved, opening the door for her in Hollywood and leading her in to a career in editing.

She worked her way up to being an Assistant Editor in the 60′s, an extremely technical job that was almost always men-only in that time period. The pay of a commercial editor ($400/week at the time) was definitely a selling point for someone like Marcia who had grown up with money problems but, “I would have edited films for free I enjoyed it so much,” she has said. In 1967, Verna Fields (one of the only high ranking women editors) hired her as an Assistant Editor for a government project. Fields has hired several USC graduates to cut the project and Marcia was paired with one such graduate; George Lucas. Working together for several weeks, they enjoyed each other’s company and complimented each other well and eventually started dating. 

After they were married, Marcia and George Lucas moved to Mill Valley, CA and helped Francis Coppola start his production company, American Zoetrope. They both worked on Coppola’s film The Godfather to give them funds while George tried to film a film to work on that he loved and Marcia kept their head above water. The film was THX 1138, and Marcia tried to tell him that the film didn’t make any sense and was completely unenjoyable but he insisted on making it. Marcia was right, and the film appealed to approximately no one (except that really annoying guy in your film class). George was upset that no one “understood him” and people (including Marcia) tried to convince him to make something that people would actually enjoy so, out of spite, he wrote what he thought was a “dumb feelings movie”, which was actually the now classic American Graffiti, which Marcia took the helm as Lead Editor. On the first pass of American Graffiti, with Marcia taking all of George’s advice, the film was unwatchable. It wasn’t until Marcia took over and completely re-edited the piece on her own that it became the film that is still known today as a classic. After American Graffiti won praise across the film industry, Marcia was hired by Martin Scorsese to edit his next film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. While working on the film, Marcia relocated to Arizona and George followed her so she would help him with the script of his next project, The Star Wars.

After Alice Doesn’t Liver Here Anymore, Scorsese wanted Marcia on Taxi Driver as well. Marcia worked as Supervising Editor on the film with two other editors, Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro. Marcia’s success annoyed George, who had come from a family where women did not work independently. She was often in LA since that’s where Scorsese filmed his projects which left George with the housework while he waited for his film to be greenlit by a studio. While editing for Scorsese, Marcia still helped George with rewriting what would become Star Wars, since she was one of the few people he still listened to. He even would acknowledge that she was much better with characterization than he was. “She was really the warmth and heart of those films, a good person he could talk to, bounce ideas off of,” Mark Hamill remembers. And only Marcia was brave enough and vocal enough to tell George if he was headed in a questionable direction and get back on track. When the film was greenlit and went into production, Marcia became Lead Editor, and she stayed on the Post Production team for the original Star Wars trilogy (she’s not credited on The Empire Strikes Back but many people believe she was still very much present in the studio).

Marcia was instrumental not only in the original Star Wars trilogy (as she was of course the lead editor) but in every film George worked on while they were married. She helped him through Indiana Jones as well, helping George through drafts of scripts and helping with ideas that would eventually make it into the films. 

After this it seems, Marcia slowed down in her career. She got many offers, but turned them all down. After being Scorsese’s partner for years, he asked her to edit Raging Bull but she declined, saying she wanted to start a family and settle down (Scorsese’s ended up hiring Thelma Schoonmaker who has worked with him on all his films since). However, George was now managing another project entirely: Skywalker Ranch. LucasFilm became a powerhouse and Marcia found herself a reluctant businesswoman for the production company. She put her editorial career on hold to help George build the Ranch, exercising her creativity by helping design the complex. Their personal life became strained but Marcia desperately tried to save her relationship, trying to convince George to take a step back as he was literally working himself to death. Eventually he agreed and, in 1981, they adopted a daughter, Amanda. It didn’t last, though. After years of building a studio upon Star Wars including Skywalker Ranch and LucasFilm studios, Marcia had finally had enough. The two divorced, which blind-sighted George who came from a conservative family where divorce just didn’t happen. 

The divorce was ugly. George didn’t want anything to do with Marcia, and effectively wrote her out of his life. He downplayed her involvement in his early works and even would insinuate that he raised their daughter Amanda on his own in interviews (the couple had shared custody and Marcia was very present in Amanda’s life and raised her alongside her new daughter, Amy, with her new husband). The last testament to her incredible influence on editing so many decades ago is the building at USC that has her name: The Marcia Lucas Post-Production Facility.

Marcia never went on to work on more films, though she got several offers to both edit and direct after the divorce. Her circle of friends that she had while she was married to George stopped calling her and inviting her, because they were loyal to George first and he no longer wanted anything to do with her. The last evidence I have of her existence is a property listing in 2013 in Los Angeles (there are several properties that seem to have been bought by her across the US that she then leases). She has basically disappeared since 1983. 

The women who helped make the classic Star Wars trilogy and helped Indiana Jones become the classic that it also is has basically disappeared off the face of the planet. It’s the wrong Lucas that ends up being remembered and credited for our childhoods. And if you’re wondering why the prequels were so awful, it’s because George was given complete control and Marcia wasn’t there to reel him in and actually make sure the movies were watchable. Somewhere in an alternate timeline George wasn’t a complete ass and they never divorced and there is a watchable prequel trilogy.

If you’ve been on Tumblr longer than ten minutes then chances are you’ve seen a post about how some movie or TV show is so well done and looks so good because of the Golden Ratio. 

However, 99.9% of the time I see these posts, they aren’t actually utilizing composition correctly. So I’m going to tell you how to properly find composition:

 1) so that you can be smug to your friends so you can gain more knowledge and spread it wide

2) I can stop wanting to rip my hair out every time I see the Golden Ratio on literally anything now

Lets start with what you’re doing wrong. 

There’s a popular post on Tumblr about Mad Max: Fury Road. Here’s a sample of some of their photo evidence:

That’s not how the Force composition works

And it’s definitely not how the Golden Ratio works.

See the thing about a ratio and composition is that it has to be uniform. The Golden Ratio works when it takes up the entirety of the frame. Neither of these (nor any of the photos in that set) are actual examples of good composition through the Golden Ratio because the ratio itself has been warped to conform to prove a point that didn’t actually need proving.

That’s not to say Mad Max isn’t an example of good composition, it definitely is, but y’all are hung up on the Golden Ratio so much you don’t even realise there are a million other composition rules that you didn’t even realise that you’re seeing. 

Firstly, this is how the Golden Ratio actually works:

And here’s an even easier way to look at it:

Because the Golden Ratio itself is all about numbers and math more than anything. Which is why this is pretty much where my understanding of how it works technically stops because I majored in film not math or art history. Here’s some actual examples of how that translates to film, though:

It’s not so much about the spiral as it is about the composition of the image and the ratio on the screen. 

“But wait” you’re saying “you said there are other rules in composition we’re not taking into account. What are they?” The first rule of composition you learn in film school and the most common rule followed is called the Rule of Thirds. Here’s some examples of it:

You’re literally breaking up the frame into nine equal segments to draw the viewers eye to the places you want them to go and you’re offsetting everything from the middle because putting anything in the middle of the frame just doesn’t feel right to the viewer (although obviously this rule can be broken for several different reasons). In these two images, you’re giving your subjects breathing room and following their line of sight to a logical place. 

“I thought you said there were a million composition rules. How come you’re only talking about two?” You’re right, I did say that, and it’s absolutely true, but this post is already way longer than it should be and there’s no way I could cover all of them right now. However, the Rule of Thirds is the most common and now you know how to look for it AND now you can stop misusing the Golden Ratio and really take a look at the Fibonacci Squares and how they work to a film makers advantage.

Thank you to everyone who has reblogged my post and decided to follow me! I’m so happy to see people interested in Post Production and what it entails. :)

As it stands right now, I have a few posts queued up and I would like to schedule a new post every Monday. If anyone has any suggestions for what you would like me to write about or any part of film you would like me to talk about, please feel free to send me an ask and let me know! 

 This conversation happens to me all the time:

“What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m an editor.”

“Oh so like you were an English major?”

“No, I mean a video editor. Like I edit movies.”

“Oh that’s cool.”

And then a blank stare as I try and explain what it is I do.

Most people know what video editing is, or at least have a vague idea that it exists, but don’t really know what it entails.

I used to do this exercise every time I got a new batch of editing students: I show clips of three different types of editing (the corridor scene from Oldboy, the hallway scene from Daredevil (2015), and the elevator scene from The Winter Soldier) and I tell students to tell me how many cuts there are in each scene. 

With Oldboy I’m kind of cheating, because the whole point of that scene is that there are no cuts. What makes it brilliant is that it’s one, long 3 minute scene. It’s not the editing that’s remarkable about this scene, it’s the choreography, the camera movements, the lighting, and all of them somehow working together so that not a single cut was needed.

With Daredevil it’s a bit different. The point of editing is that it’s the invisible art; the less you notice it’s existence the better the editor is. Even when I point out to my students where the edits are they sometimes still can’t see them (and, to be fair, I’ve watched this scene now more times than I can count, and even I’m just using my experiences to guess and there’s a good chance that I might be wrong on a couple of them). The point is that it’s supposed to seem like it’s one continuous shot, but it’s not: there are several places where either they did cut or they at least could have to give their camera crew and actors more room for error. In a scene like this, you look for any instance of the picture going completely black, even if it’s just for half a second (in film editing, a second is actually a very long time because we work in increments of frames and there are largely 24 or 30 frames in one second but that number can go up to 60 and can get to 240 if you’re working in slow-motion).

The Winter Soldier is always where I get them. I ask them to count how many cuts there are in just the fight scene. I’ve gotten 10, 15, 5...one bold student in his first day said none. The closest was a student who guessed 50. 

There are upwards of 80 cuts in just the fight scene alone that lasts about a minute (starting at 1:50 in the video and ending at about 2:50). On average, they last half a second, with the longest being when Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo) says that “this isn’t personal” because it’s a break in the action that’s amping up the stakes. 

That’s editing. It completely changes depending on the movie, the mood, the genre, the director, the editor...there’s a line I’ve written on the board in my office, “Writers manipulate characters. Editors manipulate audiences.” Every time you are tense in your seat in the theater, every time you’re crying at a characters reaction, every time you find out something new with the plot that didn’t have to be explained and just shown, that was all us.

Recently, a lot of people have been paying more attention to editing, thanks to Margaret Sixel (Mad Max: Fury Road) and more and more people realising that the reason the original Star Wars trilogy is so great is because of the brilliant work of Marcia Lucas. In this spirit, I wanted to start a blog that highlights different aspects of Post Production (or aspects of Production that end up helping Post Production) so that even more people can understand the kind of work that goes into a movie long after the cameras have stopped rolling.