After 15 years in the business of cutting episodic TV, editor Farrel Levy has figured out a thing or two about getting inside someone's head. That's her job – making sure an audience understands not just the narrative, but the psychology behind the story. At NAB, Levy took time off from demonstrating cool editing tricks at the Avid booth to chat with Film & Video about the expressive capabilities of the NLE, and how TV has changed over the last decade.

Describe for me, briefly, how you see your responsibilities on Criminal Minds.

I help to create the visual style of the show as well as, obviously, editing the show. The producers are very open minded about how they want the show to look. Each show is unique, and we, as editors, are given the creative responsibility for setting a visual tone for each show.

So you’re saying there would be a different tone from episode to episode.

Sometimes. There are certain things we do that are common to a lot of the shows, but there are certain shows ‘ depending on the content, the location, the tone ‘ that might call for another type of editing interpretation.

When you say “editing interpretation,” or “setting a visual tone,” what kinds of things are you talking about? Is it the timing of cuts? Shot selection?

Shot selection is really determined by performance. However, I’m doing a show right now which is the season finale. It’s a two-part show and the first part aired earlier in the season. It was shot as a Western – it took place in a western town, and the visuals were reminiscent of a western. There was a dustiness. The pacing was slower and more deliberate. My mandate from the director [for the second part] was, “This is more urban. Take a look at Man on Fire and Natural Born Killers." He wants me to interpret what he’s doing with a kinetic, urban, vibe.

What’s your workflow like?

We get our dailies on a hard drive. Those are digitized in by the assistants, who prepare them for us. You look at your dailies and think about how you’re going to cut your scene. Because it’s a psychological-profiling television show, a lot of scenes are shot and therefore cut in a way that might evoke how someone is thinking and feeling. It offers a lot of opportunities for editors to be nonlinear in the way we conceive of the scenes. We can use jump cuts. We can use visual effects. We use the visual effects tools in the Avid a lot – everything from 3D warp to resizing and colorizing , superimpositions, slowing things down and speeding things up. We use the audio tool and Audio Suite to enhance sound effects. The Avid is a great tool for editing, no matter what you’re editing, because it’s so organic to the way our hands move and therefore the way we think. Prior to this I worked on a drama that did not call for a lot of visual effects. However, now that I’m on a show that says, ‘Go ahead and use these things as creative avenues into our characters,’ there’s a huge palette of tools there for us to play with.

That’s got to be a way your job has evolved, as the technology available to you on your workstation has expanded.

Well, the technology has been there for a long time, but in my case, dramatically, I didn’t have a call for it. On a show like Criminal Minds, the producers are very excited about taking advantage of the visual effects that the Avid helps us create.

Can you give me an example?

Sure. There’s a scene I just showed here at NAB that involved a soldier who has PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. That’s a psychological disorder that occurs when you’re in a wartime situation or another extremely stressful situation where the horror of that event recurs. The director shot footage where you saw the SWAT guys surrounding this character, and then he shot the same positions with Mogadishu soldiers [in place of the SWAT team]. When I was developing the scene, I tried cutting straight from the SWAT guys and then immediately replacing them with the Mogadishu soldiers, cutting it very quickly and then going back to our main character. But I knew I wanted to play with this using the VFX tools in the Avid. In working on the scene, I slowed some of those things down. When you’re in somebody’s head, time can be really be flexible. Sometimes time is really sped up, and sometimes time stretches out in a painful way. So some of those images I slowed down. Some of them I dissolved into one another. Some of them I superimposed on top of one another so this guy was seeing three things at once that reminded him of the horrors of the way he had just left. Some things I used the capacity the Avid has to slow sound down, or to echo sound so it reverberated in his head. It offered me a tremendous amount of flexibility to experiment and come up with an effective scene that was about what he was seeing and hearing but allowed the audience to imagine the horror and fear that he had been feeling.

So you could quickly try all these ideas, visualizing the emotional state and figure out how you wanted to go.

That’s right. In that case, I was supplied the dailies and I just enhanced them with visual effects in the Avid. A lot of times we’re given dailies that aren’t enough, and we have to create something with them. They might want the end of an act to be dynamic, and the footage that we’ve been given, in itself, doesn’t lend itself to that. That’s when the Avid comes in, too. We can take this footage and blow it up. We can colorize it. We can twist it and we can turn it. We can speed it up and create something out of nothing. The fact that the show allows for us to take those editorial liberties is a really perfect match to what the Avid special effects palette allows us to do.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how the quality of television programming has increased over the last decade or so. They always used to say it’s a writer’s medium, but it’s become more visually sophisticated. In the time you’ve been doing this, would you agree that what you’re allowed to do now is more expressive? How have you seen the style of cutting of television evolve?

I started working in television with Steven Bochco, and there was a real question about the future of hour-long television at that time. They weren’t sure whether it was a dying breed or not. The second year I worked for Bochco, they started using Avids. They were one of the first television shows that used Avid. As an editor, I loved it. I took to it immediately. I loved how fluid it was, and how easily I could conceive of something and execute it. The year after that, I started working on NYPD Blue. It was a very well-written show. But conceptually, they wanted something that was going to stand out visually. That show – and Homicide, another show that came out around the same time – really started turning things around as far as our visual vocabulary, and what we expected on television. And I think it influenced movies as well. So yes, TV is a writer’s medium, but on shows like NYPD Blue people began to see the possibility of telling stories by going outside of the box visually. And audiences were, at the same time, watching music videos and commercials that incorporated a lot of that. It was a real confluence of all those things, and I believe digital editing played no small part in that because you could put those cuts together and see them so quickly and not have to manipulate single or double frames of film and play them back in a Movieola. It made that kind of storytelling become more popular ‘ for better and worse. In fact now, 15 years later, you can step back a little bit. Yes, a lot of shows are using visual effects and doing fancy cutting, but shows can step back from that and be more simple. Look at The Sopranos. From a visual point of view, that is very classic storytelling. They don’t use a lot of snazzy effects. But it tells a really good story. Now we’re in a place where there’s room for everything. People do it all kinds of ways, and the audience is happy to look at a story that’s well told, whether it has all the fancy visual components or it’s told in a classic way.

In terms of how you work, what’s been the biggest change over the last year?

More people are starting to work outside of the editing facility. Last year, I spent a certain amount of my editing time working out of the house. This is becoming a more accepted practice, and I think because of the flexibility of the software, whether it be Xpress Pro or the new Media Composer software package, it allows people to be more mobile. When I started working on the Avid, we had these huge, removable RMAGs [Avid’s term for a removable magnetic disk]. You couldn’t view a whole show at one time. We had to stop and put in a new RMAG to view the next part of the show. Now, everything is on a small hard drive. When I finish a cut at home and want to take it to work, I put it on a flash drive ‘ of course the media is in both places ‘ and plug it in and I have what I already cut at home, now in my Avid at work! As far as my workflow, that’s where things are headed. I think more editors are taking advantage of that flexibility.

And do you think that’s a positive creative influence on your work?

Anything that helps you get comfortable at what you do is a positive influence.