“There are three main stages of film production,” explains Alrick Brown. “In the film industry, there is the pre-production, the production, and the post. You might think that planning and pre-production are the most important things, and you’re right. But when it comes down to the practical time of filmmaking, people rarely put enough time into the pre-production, getting the script together, the casting, and the location. You do that part right, and your life is much, much smoother in the production.”
On set, the actual shoot may last a day or a couple of days, depending on the length of the script. In Hollywood, it could last anywhere from a month to three months. That part of the process is the meat and the bones. Before you get to the meat and the bones, you’ve got to get the recipe, organize the kitchen, and gather the ingredients so that the cooking process goes smoothly.
Then there’s the post. In the film industry, the post is the last draft of the script. It’s the final version of that script. No matter what you wanted to write or do, you can only edit what you have.
Brown continues, “Looking at the material of what you shot, you say, this is what I have to work with. Did I capture my story? How well have I captured it? You cut it together and have to think about sound design, color correction, ADR, and everything that can help enhance. For new filmmakers, it’s crucial to look at this journey as a holistic experience.”

[Please embed: https://pixabay.com/photos/shooting-cinema-camcorder-cuba-75599/]

In the 21st century, the editing process is very different between fiction and nonfiction. For Sam Pollard, the nonfiction editing process depends on whether or not the film contains interviews. “If it’s an interview-based film, I will make sure that the director has transcribed all the interviews, which I can read to make selects,” says Sam.
“Sometimes I just read the interviews. Sometimes I read and watch them at the same time, so I can hear the cadence of the person who’s being interviewed.”

Once Sam makes his selects, he uses a step-by-step system. If the filmmaker has shot B roll or verite footage, Sam starts by watching that. He pulls the things he likes and the things that work in terms of look, feel, and relevance.

From there, Sam determines the film’s structure. He writes down the interviewees’ themes on 3×4 cards. On a poster board, Sam lays out a three-act structure for the film based on those themes. He arranges the cards into these three acts, and that’s how he builds the film.

Of course, Sam’s editing process looks different for films with no interviews. “If it’s just raw footage that’s been shot on location, I’ll just make selects from that footage,” Sam explains. “Instead of using the storyboard structure, I’ll just edit sequence after sequence. Fo example, someone shot me today, getting up and doing my activities. I would just edit that sequence in order.”

After Sam edits his sequences, he starts thinking about the beginning of the film. “How do I want to start this film?” he asks himself. “Do I want to start with Lizzie having the idea? With me getting an email about this program?” Then, Sam moves his sequences into place.

This editing process lets Sam create order and structure. “That’s the way I work with documentaries,” Sam says, “because 90% of documentaries have no scripts.”

 “Being an editor gets you to understand the whole process of what a script needs, what production needs, and then, ultimately, what you need in the editing room in order to make your film effective,” David K. Irving explains. “The editor will want to spend a lot of time with the director thinking through how they want to do the story. They usually do their first cut, which is called an assembly, based on the script, and then they’ll eventually cut it down. Their most important job is creating a rhythm or a sense of pace in the film, so the film moves along.”

“I know when Shakespeare would write his tragedies, his first act always ended on a very tragic note, but he would always start the second act with a little comic scene for relief, so the audience could relax and then build up their tension for the tragedy that would happen at the second act.”

An editor, too, is looking for all those rhythms. They’re built into the script. Ideally, the director has given the editor everything he or she needs to put it together, but the editor is not on set. The editor is only making a movie out of the material they have in front of them.

“For example, many times, with an editor, I’ve seen them take a shot from an early scene and put it in a later scene as long as the wardrobe matched because it’s what they wanted in terms of their eyeballs going left to right. There’s a lot of freedom in the editing room. You have to let an editor be freeform in order to make sure they make the best movie possible,” Says Irving.

“As directors, we often get very stuck on the material we shoot. I shot a single take scene where at the end of the scene, one of the actor’s wardrobe got connected to another actor’s wardrobe and got dragged off the set. The actor was smart enough to come back on the set, but I didn’t print that take because I said I can’t use the shot if the continuity doesn’t work.”

“My editor said ‘the audience will never see the continuity problem’. That’s the take with the most energy, and that’s what’s in the film now. I, as the director, cringe every time I see it, but the editor made the right decision.”

In Midnight Cowboy ,the very famous movie with Dustin Hoffman and John Boyd, they almost get hit by a taxicab in the middle of the street in the middle of a scene, and Dustin Hoffman stayed in character as “Ratso” Rizzo, banged on the front of the taxi, and said, ‘I’m walking here! I’m walking here!’ That was never planned in the script, but in the editing room, we’re able to put it together and get this great moment that wasn’t planned, but the editor was able to use it to great effect.

Part of an editor’s responsibility is to take the material and understand what the editor’s vision is, but also, bring to the table their own particular perspective.

“A really good editor understands that, what he or she feels about the material, how they respond to the material, is just as important as trying to do what the director wants,” says Sam Pollard.

Sometimes, it’s about re-editing somebody’s interview or taking an actor’s line and finding a different note, a different word, or something that they might have said in a different way, in a different take, and using that instead.

“Some people call it sleight of hand. To me, it’s part of the practice, it’s a part of what I call the nuts and bolts of editing,” says Pollard.

“I see myself in a very funny way. I see myself as not so much as a magician, but as a professional craftsperson, like a master carpenter where my job is to take all these pieces of wood, or sculptors, they have all these pieces of clay, and give it shape and form and art.”

Sometimes, editors have to try something different: that tool or that piece of clay may not work.

“I see myself as a craftsperson. I always have. And to me, that craftsperson, if he or she does their job properly, they make it rise to the level of art,” adds Pollard.

One thing that everyone needs to understand about filmmaking and film editing is that so many components are necessary to make a good film.

It’s not just shaping performance in a fiction film. In a dcoumetnary, it’s also understanding how to figure out the best pieces of an interview and make different segments come together.

It’s also understanding how to create the soundscape of the film and how to create the titles.

What’s the opening Title Sequence and what should look like? Or should there be no titles at the beginning?

How should it unfold?

Should it be at the beginning?

Should it be at the end?

“There’s some films I’ve worked on, like the title sequence in Mo’ Better Blues, a wonderful company, Balsmeyer & Everett, they created this wonderful title sequence that they gave me all these beautiful elements of Denzel and Joie and Cynda Williams, that I was able to shape to make it
work.”

“They did, also, a wonderful sequence for Jungle Fever that’s really very nice, using the landscape of Brooklyn to create the titles,” notes Pollard.

Titling is a very important part of this shaping of the filmmaking process and telling the story.

Pollard mentions a film about Martin Luther King and the FBI that he recently finished. When working on it, a company in California created a raw-ish title sequence with Martin Luther King using both imagery that we shot on a soundstage, imagery of archival footage of Dr. King with stills and other elements to create a very textured opening.

If you’ve got the budget and the money, you can do extraordinary title sequences. Sometimes, if you don’t have the budget and money, you can still do extraordinary title sequences.

Everything about filmmaking is going the extra mile, using your imagination and your sense of technique, and finding good collaborators to make the story come alive.

KIMBERLY ALEAH: As a content creator, data is one of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal. Ultimately, when you make something, you want to make sure that you’re getting it out in front of as many different eyes as possible. What I do when making a piece of content from a creative standpoint, is always start with the fact that we need a hook. We need something that’s going to add something different to the larger cultural conversation. This is because when you’re on the internet, there’s unfortunately a lot of other stuff to compete with.

Once I have that hook that we’ve used from pre production, production, editing, all the way through the development process, we have to figure out where we’re going to put it. This is when data comes into play, because data allows you to profile your audiences. That can look like a number of things.

For one, you want to find out when people are consuming content. Are people consuming content on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon? Are people consuming content on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 PM?

Another thing you want to ask yourself is – what is my target audience? Am I going for school age children? In which case, maybe I want to publish stuff before the school day starts at 8:00 or after the school day is over at 3:00? Is my audience younger professionals? In that case I might want to wait until they get off from work. Is my audience more based in New York than LA? What does that day look like for them?

Just asking all the different questions about who an audience is, what type of content they want to consume, when they want to consume it, and then lastly, on what device, is important to effectively reaching them.

Are they consuming content on a smartphone? Are they consuming the content on a desktop computer?

Across different age demographics, you’ll find that for the 13 to 18 window, a lot of that is vertical video. When you’re a creator, it might incline you to consider shaping your piece so that it plays a little bit more aesthetically for a phone.

It’s just thinking about all the different questions of who the audience is, what time they consume their content, where they are consuming their content, and lastly the ideal duration. Duration is one of the most powerful aspects of data because it lets you know that not only is an audience engaging with content, but they’re sticking with it. They’re watching for more than three to five minutes. They’re watching the full 12 to 15 minutes.

This is where you find your strongest audiences, because you’ve made something that they find interesting. If you’re already starting with something on your phone, and you’re doing it with a group of diverse individuals, and throwing it into this larger ecosystem, it’s not only going to inspire other people to share your work, but it’s also going to inspire you to create new things that you didn’t think of originally.

And so for me, I love smartphones, which are very on brand for millennials. It really is one of those things that you have as a tool in your pocket to tell stories instantaneously. When we talk about these larger social movements that are happening, there’s a reason that a lot of the stimulus, a lot of the incidents that start those movements were recorded on phones.

They’re so much more accessible. They just let everyone have an immediate voice that doesn’t have to be mitigated by a traditional development room, a traditional studio process. A lot of the bureaucracy gets skipped, and a lot of the content making gets put first.

What does the future of cinema hold? I have often been beaten up over the last 10 years. Therefore, I’ll be very shy to say what I ought to say. You know my guess. I can tell you what I hope it will be, because we’re witnessing a television take over, streaming services take over the theater business unless you’re a big tent-pole movie.
We need to think about what we want for the theater industry in the future. The streaming television industry is booming because they produce great and digestible content, a user-friendly format, great funding, and plenty of resources. These factors negatively impact the film and television industry, which makes it difficult for traditional theaters to sustain their industry in the future.
I believe in the theater. I believe in human nature working as a society. However, we must employ the mentality of a ritualistic temple to maintain human nature in society. I refer to it as a temple because many of us don’t attend a physical church or a temple anymore.
We need to go to the movie theater. I’m not hallucinating. We, as a group, go to a place, preferably a dark house. We’ll speak freely, a heart-to-heart communication so that we enter an abstract world, forgetting reality. But you get down to the truth. I think that’s something. When you walk out, life is different. You are inspired.
It’s more than entertainment—it’s spiritual as well. I don’t see how you can get the same effect sitting at home watching television, going to the bathroom, and resume watching. It’s different. I think of the ritualistic event presented in a black box, where you’re sitting as a group, as a congregation. I think from day one in the cave; the cavemen spoke of how to hunt lions over a campfire. People become absorbed into storytelling and togetherness.
I still believe in the theater. However, I think it needs an upgrade. It’s hard to compete with television. If you want people to schlep into a big place, but have safety issues, then at some point it will cease to be. I don’t know how much theater can survive. Everybody’s going through a difficult time.
My thoughts are immersive, so we can experience with a group of people. You’re inside a movie instead of watching it from outside. The movie has its own language, 2D film, whatever, but it’s something bigger than life, with fine quality. Like when I was young, and I’d see a Hollywood make a movie.
No matter what they do, we go see it. You have a choice in this. Those days are probably harder to get back. It’ll be taken away by television, and unfortunately, sometimes iPhones. But in theater, you must make something good, very special. And some of them will be immersive.