Editor David Michael Mauer spent nearly a year working on the horror film Splinter, which hits theaters today and is also available On Demand. This started on set creating dailies and rough cuts, back in the editing suite experimenting with the 120 hours of footage to get a maximum fear quotient and then overseeing the digital opticals to add that extra punch to the scenes. We spoke with Maurer about how he went from cutting reality TV and a dramedy feature (Four Sheets to the Wind) to editing a horror film, testing out different techniques for getting the most fear for the frame and how a smart decision on set made their post workflow a breeze.

You came from reality TV and then cut the feature Four Sheets to the Wind, which was a dramedy, how was he transition going from that background into an horror film?

I come from a performance background. I took some acting classes to help my editing so I tend to zero in on the performances. I approach editing, even for a horror film, from that lens. On the visual side, [director] Toby Wilkins and I used Bourne Ultimatum and Bourne Supremacy as reference a lot to see how they treated action and to put you into the moments. So that was a guide and then just a lot of experimentation to find what was the most terrifying. We played with how we gave a scare. If we did a regular jump scare once we would try to do something different the next time, mix it up and play with the audience expectations. Toby is a phenomenal horror, short filmmaker and I learned a lot from him. We talked about point of view, not only placing the characters in a setting that was scary but also placing the audience into a scene so that they would have a scary experience.

In production they got lots of options so in post we could play around a lot and find what was scariest. We could play around with having things happen in a big wide shot, or a long lens with a voyeuristic quality to it. So we tried to make it about placing the audience in the scene rather than just watching the screen.

Why use Bourne Supremacy for a guide as opposed to another horror film?
Toby is a big action guy and there’s a lot of action in this movie. So we started from an action standpoint. It’s really an action film that when you combine it with this creature becomes horrific.

You had around 120 hours of footage shot? How was this achieved on a 20-day shoot? And a lot of times having a lot of footage shot on a modest budget is not necessarily a good thing.
[Cinematographer] Nelson Cragg comes out of a television background and has shot a lot of features so he shoots a lot of great stuff, really fast. As long as the actors are ready to roll he able to get an incredible amount of setups in a short amount of time. A lot of the camerawork is handheld and that aesthetic lended itself to the film. If things were shaky or out of focus in some points it worked well with the vision that Toby had. It was all embraced in the edit.

Tell us about the workflow on set and how that fed into your post workflow?
They shot with the Arriflex D20 and recorded to HD SR at 23.976. Then we cross- converted to an HDCAM as a backup clone just in case using the F500 HD CAM deck. The F500 finds the A-frame coincidence and then from there we downconverted to DVCAM. So SD masters had a 30-frame timecode that coincided with our original 24p footage and we were able to use that to digitize into the Avid. That was the key to stitching everything together all the way to the film out because we were able to generate lists that were frame-accurate and had minimal problems with EDLs all the way through sound and final conform.

The downconvert process was a big money-saver to do in the field. We were in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. Shipping tapes out to LA or Dallas would have taken time and we wanted to see feedback on shots and scenes as quickly as possible. So we were able to flip the downconverts, get them into the Avid, my assistants could synch the audio very quickly and I could start working on cuts.

Was there any thought of recording in data mode with the Arri D20?
Arri has a data mode but we went with a tape workflow for this. When we were working this out we needed to be absolutely sure about the workflow and tapeless workflows at the time were so new that we decided to go to tape to make sure we had a solid backup.

So you just digitized from the DVCAM decks into an Avid on location?
We had three systems and a couple DVCAM decks. We had a G5 Mac with Media Composer and to other laptops with Xpress Pro, so we could digitize on any of the systems. Every night we got the dailies out and shipped DVDs out to our financiers straight out of the Avid every night. I took the big carjack sequence and dumped it to my iPhone and brought it to set and showed Toby and the crew.

After you wrapped how long was the post process?
We came back to LA and we were cutting for a solid eight months. Then Toby had to leave to direct another feature (The Grudge 3) so he went on that for a few months so I stayed on for another few months and helped bring it through the film out, getting the effects done. We had about 250 opticals, some of it was alignment issues or pushing into a frame to make it pop and get that energy. And then another couple hundred visual enhancements to the creature itself, which was shot practically on set. Quantum Creation FX handled the on set creature effects.

And audio post work was being done while you were editing?
Audio was a big deal. We used Fury & Grace, Jon Johnson’s company that won the Academy Award for U-571. We would send things to them and they would prepare different elements like how the creature sounded and send them back to us so we had those things to work with in our edit. Then we’d work and send another cut back to them and they would add a few more things so there was a real back and forth workflow during editing. Then when we were locked they spent a lot of time adding and enhancing the sound design. Having those elements really helped the editing process.