Film editor Scott Hill is settling in for post-production after wrapping principal photography on Evan Almighty, a follow-up (but not exactly a sequel) to last year’s Bruce Almighty from the same director, Tom Shadyac, and starring Steve Carell. Hill is a Lightworks editor who lauds the console’s ease of use – he edited Bruce Almighty on the Lightworks Touch and recently upgraded to the Alacrity. “It’s quicker,” he says. “I’m always trying something different – let’s experiment with a scene, let’s try this and that – and I never want to tax a director’s patience waiting for me to put stuff together. I want to be as fast as I can, and this, I think, helps me to be faster.” We asked him about cutting multi-camera shoots, playing nice with VFX houses, and editing in the age of the DI.

F&V: How does the Alacrity affect your workflow?

SCOTT HILL: It’s a much more powerful machine and has a lot of capabilities the Touch didn’t have. There’s one simple example. On the Touch, I’m always working with directors that seem to shoot multiple cameras all at the same time, so I like to lock up all the cameras and watch them all synced together. I like to cut that way because I can get through a lot of footage really quick. On the Lightworks, I could lock up to four cameras. Well, four was problematic in terms of viewing, but it could really handle two capably. On the Alacrity, I can lock up nine cameras. That, to me, is the best example. And all nine run at speed. None of them chase. I have locked up, just as an experiment, 20 cameras. Nine run at speed and 11 will chase and update when you stop. It’s very powerful.

What’s the largest number of cameras that might shoot a single take?

There were a number of sequences on Evan Almighty where the director, Tom Shadyac, had four cameras rolling, so I’ve been locking up four quite often. God tells Evan to build an ark, and there are many scenes with a ton of animals. Instead of trying to recreate what happened in multiple different setups, it was better to throw a ton of cameras at it – because, odds are, it was only going to happen once. I work with Tom a lot, and that’s a recurring thing with him – a lot of cameras. In just about every scene, I’ve got two. Very rarely is he shooting one camera. The bigger ones, the trickier scenes, will get three and four cameras. In one scene I think we had five cameras rolling.

How did you watch dailies on location?

We actually didn’t. Tom’s not much into looking at dailies every night. Usually he’s too tired. We were on location in Virginia for about three months or so, and he would come in every weekend ‘ we would cut on the weekend ‘ and he would review all the dailies from the week and see what he missed or what he needed. We were at a huge location where the ark was being built for quite a while so it wasn’t imperative that he see dailies every night to see if he wanted any additional shooting. He would just come in on the weekend and go, “How did I do? What does it look like?” I’d show him the cut, we’d go through the dailies, and start cutting. I was trying to keep up with him so when he came in on the weekends we could just look at the cut and see how it worked. We could start tweaking and finessing from there.

Was there anything unusual on this shoot?

There’s an ark that’s 50-some feet tall and 400 feet long! (Laughs.) Actually they only built about half of it, the front half, out in Charlottesville. It’s a huge boat out there in this housing development we found just outside of Charlottesville. And the epic scale is amazing. The DP on this is Ian Baker [Queen of the Damned, Japanese Story], and he shot a beautiful film. Every shot seems to be an epic shot.

What else do you do on set? You’re obviously there to cut, but do you go and take a look at the set and say, “Well, these angles aren’t going to cut together”?

Yeah, every so often I get the call. “Tom wants you on set.” We’ll discuss how it’s going to cut before he shoots it so he doesn’t miss an angle. Maybe he has some action covered from the wrong side or something. It’s great being on location. We’re all eating, drinking and sleeping the movie. I was on pretty much seven days a week the whole three months we were out there.

You’ve cut a lot of comedy. Is that something you learn or something you’re good at in the first place? Is there a trick to it?

Well, if you don’t cut the set-up properly, the joke’s not going to work. Timing has a lot to do with it, in terms of the pacing of a scene or building up to a joke. I don’t know if you learn it. I’ve talked to many editors, and everybody seems to refer to the fact that if you don’t have a sense of timing or pacing to begin with it’s very difficult to learn. Most of the guys I have talked to have said the same thing. It’s a feel.

It has to help to collaborate with the same director.

Yes, it’s great working with Tom so often. And I’ve done a couple of films with Robert Luketic, who did Monster in Law and Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! It gets to be a shorthand. We finish each other’s sentences when we’re talking about a scene and how it should cut. I like to think that, once they wrap, I’ve gotten the picture real close to what they’ve envisioned. And in that case, our work in post is merely finessing to get it closer.

As an editor, what technology issues are facing you?

People start looking at me funny when they find I’m working on a Lightworks. How is my cutting room going to interact with sound editors, music editors, and ‘ especially on this one, where we’re dealing with ILM and Rhythm & Hues for our VFX shots ‘ how are we all going to talk to each other? Sharing files and passing information back and forth, that’s really tricky, and I’m sure everyone will agree that that still needs a lot of work. How do all the different cutting rooms talk to each other?

They’re worried because they’re not accustomed to working with material from a Lightworks?

Well, that’s one thing. We deal in OMF files, and that’s how I deliver sound files, and that seems to be working really well for the sound editors. But we’re just now dealing with ILM. How are we going to give them information? The Alacrity has a lot more capabilities in terms of exporting, whether it be QuickTime files or whatever, so we’re playing together nicer. That’s one of the advantages of the Alacrity – being able to talk to a facility like ILM or Rhythm & Hues. They have Avids in order to look at cuts, so how would you take an edit off of Lightworks and put it in their Avids? How do you make it so they can see the edit and all the different picture layers in different shots? It’s still a bit cumbersome, and that’s where the work needs to be done.

There’s a whole different issue visually ‘ making sure the VFX guys are on the same page as far as how the picture is going to look, and if it’s being tweaked in the DI.

Exactly. We are going to do a DI, and what we’re doing now to help smooth that out is scanning everything right now – all the negative for each of the visual-effects shots – so the scan is the same to everybody. The DP is working with a color timer at Efilm and balancing it the way he wants it before they actually deliver the files [to the VFX facilities]. That’s one way we’re trying to get it balanced right to begin with.

Does that have any effect on what you do as an editor?

It isn’t changing how I cut anything. It helps knowing I have this capability ‘ that this shot, which needs to be overcast but was shot really sunny, will work because of the DI. I’m using stuff that, if I knew I was going to time it on film, I probably wouldn’t use. Now I know I have a little more latitude in the DI, so I can say, OK, I can use this take. You would think it would never match the other shots in the scene, but we can get it balanced better now.

Are you doing things like compositing in the Lightworks?

We have a lot of green screen where things like animals are coming by, and we’re comping in all that sort of stuff. I do it on the fly. That’s the nice thing about the Alacrity,
I can do all those green-screen and blue-screen comps, any sort of digital visual effects, and I don’t have to render anything.

That’s an interesting change in terms of what the film editor is expected to do. Ten years ago …

Essentially you would take one element, cut it in with your principal actor, and go, “Ok, fine.” Then you’d ship it off to an effects house and hope to see something two weeks later. And then you go tweak it when you get it back. And now I’m doing it on the fly, and because I don’t have to render, I’ll work on something and go, “You know what? That background element is a little funky. I’ll adjust it a few frames.” Or, “Some bird flew through the shot that I don’t want, let me just roll this a little bit.” I can do it right there, instantly, because I don’t have to render any of the comps.

I interviewed Robert Hoffman, the editor of Art School Confidential, earlier this year, and he told me about doing split-screen composites where he’d pull an actor’s performance from one take and drop it into another to get the shot he needed.

I haven’t done too much of that. I’ve been fortunate enough – knock on wood – that the performance that Tom has wanted or Robert has wanted has worked out. (Laughs.) If you have the means to do that, you can ultimately get the performance the director wants. It may be slightly cheating in terms of how the actor feels about it, but if it works …

At what point do you have an obligation to the original performance?

I think it’s more about the film as a whole and the story you’re trying to tell. If it helps to tell the story better, I generally won’t hesitate to do stuff like that. We’re doing what you could regard as disingenuous things already, without that technology. I can take a performance of an actor that I like from take two, and put that audio in his mouth in take five – because I like the inflection better in take two but his action was better in take five. And then it’s got the perfect inflection on the line, but the action is what I was looking for. And that’s been done since we started sound. It’s the same thing, really.

The influence a film editor can have over what ends up being the performance is amazing.

Right. Tom and I were just laughing about it because we were doing some of that yesterday. And he’s like, “Oh, if they only knew, they’d be so mad!” (Laughs.) Tom would just sit in the room and go, “We’re evil. We’re just evil.”

Cinema is a beautiful medium.

It’s a fun one, let me tell you. We have a good time.