Editor David Checel on Managing Acappella Dance Sequences
In terms of music videos just the volume of footage they shoot and how quick you have to cut them. Since I’ve been doing that for so many years I’ve become accustomed to that pace of getting 4-5 hours of footage, having to go through it in a day, day-and-a-half, and cut it together. Same thing with commercials. In commercials the ratio of the footage they shoot for 30 seconds is almost ridiculous. You don’t get that in features. So that too was helpful in going through dailies, going through takes, the method I approach music videos and commercials I am able to bring into the feature world and I think it helps streamline the editorial process.
There were four huge step dancing sequences an there were probably 4-5 hurs of footage for each sequence. The routines were 5-6 minutes each. It was a logistical headache. I thought that if I hadn’t cut music videos before it I would have been screwed.
Obviously the dance sequences without any accompanying music track present many technical challenges, how did the production approach it?
We had meetings about how we were technically going to do this film. On the one hand there are a lot of choreographed dance sequences to music. On the other hand there are a lot of a cappella dance moves because it is all step dancing with no music and the dancers are going to an internal clock in their head. So for the choreographed dance moves to music it’s easy, just like a music video: they striped timecode on the song and have a playback slate so you could just synch up all the takes.
For the step dancing sequences, and there were quite a few, it was very difficult because there was no way to synch up the tracks. While these dancers were really good, over the course of time from take to take the dance sequences were off [time] so that made cutting a challenge. They were the most challenging dance numbers I’ve ever cut.
It forced me to approach it differently that I normally approach a dance number. I ended up having to take a base take that I would use to set the rhythm. Then I would have to cut according to that tempo. And so a lot of times things fell out of sync so you’d have to cut them a little shorter than maybe you wanted to. It was just difficult because the choice was: if you cut between different takes and they are at a different rhythm then it becomes really obvious sonically. So there had to be a choice that the dancing would either be sonically off, which is unacceptable, or visually the cuts have to be a little tighter than normal. And I think especially in this because it was step dancing it was crucial for the dancers to be as tight as possible sonically.
What attempts were made during production to try and tackle this problem?
This was a low budget movie. So we didn’t have all the tools we needed during production. There were a lot of conversations I had with different people about how to approach it but I could never get a definitive answer because I do think filming this a cappella-type dancing is kind of unusual. Usually they use something called a thumper but they couldn’t use it because it was the same frequency as the stepping and so they couldn’t use that and then EQ it out.
So when the footage came to you, what was the process?
You can’t get caught up on a dance sequence in a movie when you have to keep up with dailies. Sure ultimately you can go back when the film is done but I tried to make my first pass tight, I didn’t just make it an assembly cut. We did go back but I knew if I just did an assembly we wouldn’t make our deadline.
[In the dance sequences] there were around 40 takes. Now on an Avid there were only 24 layers of video. So I would pick whatever my master take and put it on video layer one and would lay down the audio. And then each other take I would put on the other layers. Then I would go through each take and synch them up and when they would fell out of synch I would mark that point and then synch up the next point. It was just a process. You’d be lucky of a piece was in synch for 10 seconds, most of the time it would be in synch for four seconds. And then you just determined what worked. And sometimes I did cut into this master audio track. I tried it out and it work. And then I could shift the takes that fell out of synch so they fell back in synch where I needed them to.
The other thing that threw a monkey wrench in the whole thing is the dancers didn’t do the routine the same way every time. And when that happened I started pulling my hair out. Ultimately the director and I decided that we needed to get the best performance possible from the dancers and for that we just had to let them do their thing. You can’t start throwing down rules. I think it worked because these dancers gave it their all on each take and it shows.
I ended up having to make two sequences to accommodate all the takes. I assigned auxiliary timecode to my master audio track and then I would pull selects and organize it that way. If I had a string of selects the timecode corresponded to this auxiliary time code on the master audio track and I could drop stuff in.
Because of this I was also pretty involved in the sound and the mix. In the Avid we actually sound designed the thing and when we handed it over to the sound house we told them to used the rough cut as a map of what we want and they did.
What about the other scenes? What was your approach to the dialogue and dramatic scenes, which are obviously different than editing a commericial.
I think my background in commercials helped because 30 seconds forces you to go right for the essence of the scene. And that’s what I did when I cut these scene. That I my taste: tighter storytelling.
I think my music video background where so much of it is making sure the artists look as good as possible came into play on this film because this is still a dance movie for teenagers. So you have to make sure that beautiful actress or actor looks good. Commercial and music video guys have to deal with this image stuff all the time so for this I could use a lot of that experience.
Was there anything different about editing a project destined for the big screen rather than a television project?
That’s the one part of it that I still have a lot to learn. While the fact that this will be on the big screen you are still watching a TV screen while editing. We had screenings in theaters during the process but you are watching an Avid output. An Avid output is a lot more forgiving for some reason. When we finally saw the final cut on film in the theater there were a lot of things I hadn’t seen before and that was a little shocking because had I seen it that way I would have cut some things differently.
We never got prints of anything. All the dailies were done to DVCAM. I knew when we were cutting that maybe we were pushing it too much, but then I saw it on the Avid output on the theater it looked fine. So in the future if I come across some things where I am not sure I would get at least a couple rolls printing.
In particular we did a lot of stuff with a skinny shutter that when I saw it printed and in the theater I thought this stuff is crazy. They shot it with a skinny shutter which gives you the effect like in Saving Private Ryan or Gladiator where everything is super-crisp. And of course with dancing it is a great idea because everything is that much sharper. But when you get it on your dailies you don’t see it. So when I got some scene I cut them maybe a little too quick because I wasn’t seeing the shutter. The shutter makes rapid cuts unnecessary because it creates all this energy within the frame.
But on the other hand – this is a discussion I had with the director – I think the life of this film is going to be seen on a TV. It will be in theaters for three weeks, a ton of people will see it but more people will ultimately see it on the TV. So you want to be a purist when you are making a movie you have to be realistic too so it’s a fine line.
What were you editing on?
We cut on Avid Adrenaline. We were originally working on a Unity and it was terrible. There must have been a wrong connection somewhere because it was extremely slow, so we ended up moving to a SCSI drive, which was great for me but it was difficult because I had two Avids, one for my assistant and everyday she’d have to update her Avid with any new media I’d uploaded.
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