Evan Schiff got a choice gig as assistant editor on Pan's Labyrinth largely by chance, rather than design. His early passion was for VFX – so he managed to score a high-school internship at Stan Winston Studio (Van Nuys, CA) that lasted him all the way through college and beyond. When Winston Studios went digital in 2002, they needed an editor – and it happens that Schiff was the only staffer who knew his way around an NLE. "Once I got into my first film production class, I found that I was enjoying spending 12 hours on Saturday editing picture and 12 hours on Sunday editing sound so that I could turn in my film on Monday," he tells Film & Video. "That's when I switched over to editing."

Working with editor Bernat Villaplana on post for the acclaimed Spanish film, Schiff had to organize an editorial process that involved assets moving between Spain, Mexico, and California – with a DI in Toronto. We asked him about keeping his head in a complicated situation.

How did you get the job on Pan’s Labyrinth?

Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll tell you what I think happened. I left Stan Winston’s to try and get into editing as a career. All of my interviews were in TV and no TV show would give me a job as an assistant editor since I hadn’t worked in TV before, only features. So I took a job as a post PA on Criminal Minds, but I was looking to get back into features. The Editors Guild Web site had just added a section in profiles for languages that you speak, and I updated mine to indicate that I speak Spanish. Two weeks later I got an email from a guy named Joe Fineman [post-production consultant on the film]. It was sent to 15 assistant editors and I didn’t know any of them. I think he did a search on the Editors Guild Web site for assistant editors who could speak Spanish and sent an email to everyone who showed up in the search results. I went in and interviewed with him, and he sent three people to interview with Bernat, the editor. I was the third of three they interviewed that day. The first guy didn’t speak Spanish and the second guy didn’t bring his resume – so I guess unless I really screwed up, I had the job.

What were your responsibilities?

There was an assistant editor who worked with Bernat while they were in production in Spain. By the time they got to L.A., the cut was pretty far along. My job started off being most of the VFX turnovers – just creating a VFX database, cataloging all the shots and seeing what they had turned over to Cafe FX, and doing new turnovers. Then we got into turnovers for sound and for the composer, and cutting time out of the film. That was most of the editing that I saw. They had a cut that was longer than what Guillermo wanted, so we spent a lot of time cutting things out.

Where were you working?

It was a two-bedroom house in Woodland Hills, CA. They put Bernat in one bedroom and the [Avid Media Composer] Adrenaline in the other. I’d show up in the morning, and sometimes Bernat had already been working for a couple of hours in whatever he slept in, and he’d be like, “OK, your turn. I’m going to take a shower.”

And after Bernat returned to Barcelona, you kept working with del Toro in California?

When Bernat went back to Barcelona for good we moved out of that house and into GEP [Global Entertainment Partners] in Sherman Oaks. From there, it was me and Guillermo finishing out the film, assembling the VFX, dealing with Cafe FX in Santa Maria, and going to their screenings. [Cafe FX did film outs at Efilm in Hollywood.] Half of our sound crew was working on Babel and they were based in L.A., so we had direct access to them. The composer was in Barcelona so we were emailing tracks back and forth, and I was sending VHS tapes in the mail. At one point, Guillermo went to Madrid and Bernat met him there and they rented a room in a post house in Madrid and recut a few scenes and I did the turnovers again in L.A. Our DI facility was Deluxe in Toronto.

Did you hit any snags in terms of moving all the media around among the locations?

The toughest part was that our sound department was working in NTSC and we were working in PAL. I would mail PAL DigiBeta tapes to Mexico City, and the sound crew there would take them to a post house that would convert them to NTSC and also digitize and create NTSC QuickTimes for the crew back in L.A. to import into their Pro Tools sessions. There were requirements about burned-in time code, so when the conversion was made, picture start had to be on the hour in both timecodes. That was our sync point. I tried to save some time and a little bit of money by going to a couple of post houses here in L.A. and having them do the standards conversion and create the QuickTimes so all I had to do was mail a package of DigiBetas to Mexico City and personally hand QuickTimes to the local crew in L.A. But I gave very specific specifications to the post houses I tried, and none of them were able to do it correctly, and they all took a lot longer than the post houses in Mexico City, who had done this before. So our method actually worked out faster and produced better results, even though it involved shipping a lot of packages back and forth.

And what were the issues that kept you from just transferring files electronically at 24fps?

Sometimes it’s a limitation of your sound crew and how they’re used to using their software, and sometimes it’s the limitation of a mixing stage that can only project 29.97. I’m setting up a film right now and the sound crew said, “We’re perfectly willing to work at 24fps, but depending on the mixing stage we get we might have to go to 29.97 anyway because their projector will only do NTSC.” Pan’s Labyrinth was a low-budget film. I went to the mixing stage for Babel, and our mixing stage was a quarter of that size and not as well equipped. They probably could only do NTSC.

Were there any other areas of workflow where you had to be creative, or just careful?

Most of what I had to be careful of was on my end. First I had made the PAL Digibetas, and the composer needed a VHS with audible timecode. I dealt all in QuickTimes with Cafe FX. Our negative was kept in Barcelona [at Deluxe’s Image Film facility] the entire time, so I would be calling or emailing them regularly and sending them pull lists to scan, and they would put the scans on a hard drive and ship them to Cafe FX. When it came time to do the DI, I sent two copies of the same list ‘ one to Deluxe in Toronto and another to Image Film in Barcelona.

Image Film actually preferred to receive EDLs from me instead of pull lists. They had a piece of software that translated my EDL time codes to key codes that they could pull. I never got the explanation for why that was better than me just giving them key codes, but that’s the way they preferred it. I never went to Toronto, so I was managing a DI that had assets in different parts of the world and was being assembled in Canada and I wasn’t there to oversee it. But it all turned out OK. I worked on Rocky Balboa literally the Monday after I finished Pan’s Labyrinth, and the DI requirements were different, with a different workflow – and I was able to supervise a lot more.

Did you stay in Los Angeles for all of your work?

I had a five-day trip down to Mexico City. I spent five days on the mixing stage and we stayed in one of the producer’s houses. I consolidated the final locked version of the film onto an external hard drive, and I brought my laptop with Avid Xpress Pro onto the stage. It was very useful for showing people, since a lot of the crew in Mexico City hadn’t seen any part of the film. The production designer got to see some of the visual effects and what the final assembly was going to look like. And we used it to try out little ideas for how to edit the sound or the music. While the sound crew was actually mixing a different part of the film, Bernat or I would be working on my Avid. What if we cut the music like this? Or what if we put this sound effect here?

Have you worked with other editing systems, or are you pretty much an Avid guy?

I’m definitely an Avid guy. I’d love to try out Final Cut Pro – and I’ve gotten some offers, but I wouldn’t want to take an offer when I have to learn the software. I need some small independent film that has no other choice to let me play around with it. But I’m happy with Avid – having my Xpress Pro dongle and being able to take it between my laptop and my home setup, which is a Windows box and is much nicer than my laptop. That’s something Final Cut can’t offer me. I was considering trying to use Cinema Tools as a codebook for the film I’m on now [John Rambo], but I ended up not going with that, either. It’s designed to work with FCP, and it’s not as easy to add things that don’t exist in it already as it is in Filemaker.