Editors are the unsung heroes of filmmaking. We can tell you first hand, that more than one of the films in our catalog took their full shape (in some cases they were fully RE-shaped) in post, and in the case of Cookies & Cream, our editor Hector Maldonado (along with composer/sound designer Damon Dorsey) technically saved the movie - making it possible for people to have even seen it. We should also mention the great job Daniel Green did cutting Brian Ackley's Uptown for us. He wasn't a "yes-man" in the least, and offered very helpful advise that several times challenged the director. That's possibly one of the main reasons the reception to the film has been what it is - there's that third eye approach to the work, and good editors should be trusted to do just that. If you can't trust em, why hire them?
After the jump, here is a cool piece in The Huffington Post about the subject:
One person, one idea. That's the Auteur Theory, which refers to a film director being the solo heart and soul of a movie. A little thing called non-linear editing blew all that up. Lightworks, Avid and now Final Cut Pro are insider names to most media consumers, but if you think these technologies are a small aspect of the media that is placed before you, well, you'd be wrong. These technologies are game changers. Why? Technology drives culture. In the 1970s, VHS became the vehicle of choice for pornography. In a wonderful assignation of tech-meets-flesh, the old men who masturbated under blankets in sleazy theaters were replaced by people masturbating at home. VHS, propelled on a surging sea of porno, became a dominant way to deliver movies, leading to the decline of Western civilization and Richard Simmons' exercise videos, though not necessarily in that order.
Can you feel the burn? It's not your fast-twitch muscle fibers that are on fire. It's the immolation of pop culture, consuming itself almost as fast as it can be produced.
Final Cut Pro and Avid and television are an especially combustible mix. These non-linear systems have made post-production cheaper but they've also dumbed it down. Anybody can edit now and it's way faster than it used to be. Clients can order changes and expect them overnight. Multiple editors can work on the same project at the same time, even in different cities. Reality television has been shaped by non-linear editing far more than it's been shaped by our appetite for cheating-spouse drama or seeing if people can lose weight if they are yelled at enough. Hours of footage can be digitized and then tossed at legions of editors who shape the story. Yes, that's right. It's really the editors who are shaping the story, not the directors who shot the footage or the executive producers who are spending the budget. Editors, sometimes working with story editors, are running things.
Read the rest of this piece HERE.
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