Editorial is by it’s nature a function of finding pieces and putting them together in a (hopefully) aesthetically interesting way. Sometimes the way the pieces go together is more obvious than others. Sometimes the obvious way is in fact the only way.
That certainly was not the case with the Cox business spots I recently worked on for Periscope. Terry Windell, the director had a very clear vision for what he wanted to accomplish and he designed some really great and elegant gags. However, given the amount of work to be done with the relatively short shooting schedule the clarity of the vision as provided in script notes or director boards was somewhat… lacking.
Like most editors it’s important to me to have a few days to rough together the spots to get a sense of the feel and find what appeals to me in terms of performance, composition, pace, whatever. So after I loaded and organized the dailies I started building spots. At Terry’s suggestion I started with “Acrobat” since this was the most straight forward and had the least amount of compositing necessary to tell the story. That said I still ended up with about fifteen layers in one of my first comps, but I digress. ”Acrobat” came together pretty quickly and in fact the air version did not veer that far from my initial edit. That was not the case with the other two.
The other two spots were huge collections of green screen elements and backgrounds. Even after they were organized they presented a daunting array of possibilities. Now don’t get me wrong, lots of options are what you want as an editor, but then there would be other pieces that were in the boards that just didn’t seem to be there. After several days and WTF?!? moments I did have edits that were working (barely) but I kept feeling like I was missing something, which in fact I was.
Anyway, long story short…
As any good editor will tell you, working with a director can be a great or a miserable experience. When Terry came in, it was like the lights came on. He was all like, “See here I wanted you to take this guy from “Trapeze”, flop him and blow him up and then see he’ll match for that part of “Jumps” …” The amount of stuff he had in his head was stunning. We had a great time together and as his process became clear to me we could practically finish one another’s sentences. So this was one of those cases where it really was collaborative, and the spots are better because of it.
