I’ve decided that my website could do with a bit of a revamp, so I’ve created a Carbonmade portfolio, which will simplify the site and get rid of some of the waffle in favour of a firm focus on examples of my work. The current, WordPress-based site will continue at neillenthall.wordpress.com, but neillenthall.co.uk will switch sometime this week to a video-led showcase.

I seem to have found myself in a position where people look to me for editing and post-production advice (how did that happen?), but although I’ve talked about how good being an Editor is for learning how to be a better filmmaker, I don’t think I’ve said much on here about the role of the Editor and how you can go about actually becoming an Editor. There’s an awful lot of advice online about making (ie directing) short films, but there isn’t a whole lot about editing, and neither are there many books on the subject.

I got my first break by being in the right place at the right time, which is often what it comes down to, but you do need to be prepared for that opportunity if it does come along. I’d cut a few student projects as a TV & Media Production student, and had taught myself FCP, but when I graduated I still didn’t really know an awful lot of what it entailed being an Editor.

The job is too varied to give a typical “day-in-the-life”, but a working day generally involves sitting in an edit suite, sometimes on your own, sometimes with a client/director. Increasingly the job involves not just editing, but a variety of other roles that a few years ago would have been separate jobs. Depending on the job (and the budget), you may have to capture and organise footage yourself, do the graphics, mix the sound, and colour grade the picture, as well as actually cutting it; basically five jobs in one. Most of those changes are down to the advent of digital technology. All those different jobs can be done on one machine, so surely you the Editor are capable of doing them all?! A lot of employers also look not just for an Editor, but often a Camera Operator/Editor, an Editor/After Effects Artist, or a Producer/Editor (a Preditor).

My advice if you’re interested in becoming an Editor would be to learn Final Cut as a minimum, because there are so many smaller productions companies running FCP. Broadcast is still dominated by Avid, so you really need to learn that too at some point. Some people get work as an Assitant Editor in a Post House and work their way to becoming an Editor from there, others build up a body of work doing bits and pieces of projects the way I’ve done. The industry is changing so fast with developing technology, falling budgets, and increased expectations that you have to keep pace with where things are heading. Broadcast still seems to be difficult to get into (especially broadcast drama), but in the non-broadcast sector (and in some areas of broadcast) there seems to be a lot of clients who are happy to hire someone 6 months out of college/uni to do a job, which makes it difficult to justify your rates if you’ve got a few years experience. In non-broadcast you’ll also be expected to learn a plethora of programmes in order to do the five jobs I mentioned earlier. In any given week I might use Photoshop, Motion, After Effects, Color, DVD Studio Pro, Compressor and perhaps something like Adobe Media Encoder. Because so many clients are looking for multiple roles to be filled by as few people as possible, unless you’re at the top end of the industry, specialisation, and the role of the Picture Editor, is disappearing pretty fast.

If you’re looking to take those first steps, some people take Final Cut training courses, but if you have access to a Mac, then you’re better off spending the money on Final Cut Express and a few books. The official Apple training series is pretty good, and comes with DVD’s that give you sample projects that you can cut yourself. While you’re starting out, you’ll really need to cut as many things as you can, you need to network, network, network, and don’t give up the day job until you KNOW that it’s the right time. Oh, and good luck too. You’re going to need it.

DRAMA - Concerning Heaven and Hell

CORPORATE - Mamas & Papas Buggies

If you would like to see additional projects, plus full versions of the short films, my DVD reel is available on request.

All material is owned by the respective copyright holders.

The guy who ran it has done umpteen hours of TV over the past 30+ years so it was very TV focused, rather than looking at how to make your feature stand out (as the Raindance site suggests). He was very comfortable leading from the front, entertaining to listen to, and had an amusing amount of confidence in his own abilities. The course covers the fundamentals of camera positioning, shot selection, and screen acting, with a mixture of talking through clips, practical exercises, and hard-won real world nuggets of advice. We shot scenes on both days which were played back and critiqued in front of everyone, probably the most useful and interesting part of the weekend.

A concern I had beforehand was whether it would be a course for those completely new to directing, covering only those areas you could pick up yourself from books and a bit of your own practical experience, and whether I was going to get enough new stuff out of it to make it worthwhile, having already done a bit of work in drama. Although chunks of it were at quite a basic level, there was plenty of useful stuff.

We were set a bit of homework for the Saturday night, which was to block a scene with three people sat (and moving) around a table, which is quite a tricky set-up. By the time I volunteered to go up to the front and walk through how I had planned it, half a dozen others had already made a mess of it and I, having mentioned earlier that I was an Editor, was under pressure to get it right. And I almost did, until two-thirds of the way through when I made one little error that threw the end of the scene out of whack. It’s easier when you’ve got the footage in front of you.

Although I wasn’t able to speak to everyone on the course, it was interesting to see that there was a range of people from different backgrounds, some from inside the media industry, others from other spheres. It was interesting too to talk to a few people living and working in the industry in London.

It feels like all I’ve talked or thought about over the last couple of months is redundancy and freelancing, so it was good to spend a weekend dedicated to talking and thinking about directing. Definitely the kind of experience that fires your enthusiasm.

music: “Memories” by Granlab

The problem I’ve found with getting feedback is that people don’t usually give you the type of feedback that you really need. What usually happens is that people will come back to you with plenty of suggestions for changes, solutions, things to try. But often these suggestions are changes the other person would make to make the film fit closer to their image of what the film should be, not necessarily changes to create a better version of the film the writer’s trying to make.

What’s most useful to a writer is the thing they can’t get without other people’s help, namely, a first-time reader’s response. It is this which is vital to a project’s development, people telling you how they’re interpreting what you’ve written, letting you know if you’ve written what you thought you had. A writer can never look at a new draft afresh, that’s what they need other people for, but everyone’s natural response is not to simply talk you through what they were thinking and feeling, and understanding or not understanding as you read through the script.

It’s a Producer’s job to directly guide and shape a project, what a writer needs from other people is a first-time reader’s perspective.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is now online at Signed Stories. It’s the first time I’ve seen it with the music and audio added and I think they’ve done a pretty good job with it. The aspect ratio’s wrong (they asked us to deliver it 4:3 and it’s been stretched to 16:9), but overall I think the film works well, it’s got a nice pace to it, and the animation is clean and simple, but still effective.

This is what happens when you keep flogging your film.

At the recent Weiterstadt Festival in Germany, Litterpicker was picked by audiences to appear at the ‘Best of the Filmfest’ screening.

The film has also been screened at the Kino Klub Festival in Serbia and the Workhouse Festival in the UK. It is also in competition for best short film at the Munich International Film Festival in October.

Although in many ways this was a simple film to cut, even simpler than the last animation, there were a couple of factors which made it a little tricky. All the audio (music and reciting the nursery rhyme) is going to be done by ITV after we’ve locked picture, so I’ve been cutting a film completely without sound which lends a very unreal air to the film, and makes it difficult to engage with the film as an immersive experience.

I also find animation quite difficult to cut anyway because you don’t have all those subtle movements which you often use as rhythmic markers, instead you have shots in which the movement often finishes to leave you with a static, so finding a cut point that feels right (ie not too long and not too short on the shot) is particularly challenging. Obviously at the higher end the level of animation is often incredibly complex so I would imagine this is less of a problem, but creating realistic movement is pretty difficult. The music is also going to be added by ITV without either of us having heard it beforehand, so that may well completely alter the whole tone of the film.

Wikipedia Article of the Week: Jane Taylor

As I’ve mentioned on here before, I still believe that the edit suite is a great place to learn how to be a filmmaker, and any editor who has cut a few shorts can be a valuable aid to an inexperienced short film director. Working on shorts by new directors, you also see the same basic mistakes made again and again, so as a director, surely having someone involved who can make up for your own lack of experience is a no-brainer.

Because the work of pretty much everyone involved in the earlier stages of the production is funnelled through the editor, the editor gets the almost unique opportunity to analyse the successes and failures of many of the people involved in the film. A big part of an editor’s job is to refine the structure of the film, get the beats in the right order, and get all the narrative and dramatic elements in the right places, which means that in many ways, they act like a Script Editor.

So, if one of an editor’s key jobs is to help get the structural fundamentals of the film right, then why not let them help you do that before you shoot, rather than waiting till after?

Link of the Week: Script Editors

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