What's he up to, eh?
So… Final Cut Pro X, eh? Lot of chatter about it. Lot of controversy.
I bought it the day it came out expecting to jump in and find an editing Nirvana. Instead I found something that made my head hurt. I believe this reaction was not unique. Being slightly busy, I resolved to keep an open mind and give it a proper go when I had the time. Turns out that time is now: six months later! Continued…
Categories: editing, Personal, Recommendation, Work.
Just realised that the edit which prompted the previous post will be the last sport programme I do for a very long time. I’m halfway through a 12 month contract with Gaelic indie mneTV (who have a terrific logo, don’cha think?), but the remainder of the time will be devoted to a single programme. It’s an ob-doc, which typically take ages to film and edit, so that’s me accounted for until the end of March.
Categories: editing, Personal, Work.
A few weeks ago I spent a long weekend editing a programme for STV called, Susan Boyle: Two Weeks That Shook Show Business. I’ll assume you know who Susan Boyle is. The programme was to play on the Bank Holiday Monday, dividing the double episode of Coronation Street and going up against East Enders on BBC1. No pressure, then. The producers quickly decided to structure the two halves of the show thusly: part one would illustrate the story, the humble beginnings, the audition on Britain’s Got Talent, the YouTube sensation, the twittering celeb couple and global super-stardom; part two would analyse the phenomenon, offering possible explanations and suggesting where it might go next.
Part one would take care of itself, but part two was tricky, basically because we didn’t really have any idea why the story had gotten as big as it did. All of us working on the programme knew the story, of course, you could hardly escape it, but the why of it was quite baffling. Luckily, the crew came back with some very insightful interviews, with Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus being particularly eloquent and perceptive. So, over the course of four days (with the Saturday shift extending to about four in the morning, only for Sunday’s to start eight), we lived and breathed Susan Boyle. The picture that emerged was of a talented woman who had dedicated her life to the the care of her elderly parents, and when they had both passed decided to take her best shot at a singing career, fully aware that if success eluded her it wouldn’t make her a failure. She knew, I think, that it was the attempt that mattered, giving her all. That’s why she took the initial jeers and skyward glances in her stride: she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from doing her best. What happened then was out of her hands, but she’s handled it with the same philosophy — as long as she tried her best, nothing else matters.
The programme got 27% of the TV audience that night, beating East Enders’ 25% and the ITV network by 10%. That’s a success. I know our hard work on it wouldn’t have initially made viewers choose it over East Enders — Susan herself was the draw. I do like to think, though, that when they arrived they got something a bit more thoughtful and considered than they might have expected. A few of my pals in the business (who can be a tad cynical) praised it for not sensationalising the story any more than it had been already, and for not trying to pretend Susan was something that she’s not (while still being respectful and complimentary of her and her obvious talent). The Scotland on Sunday bemoaned the lack of an interview with the 1:24 girl or backstage info (like whether the judges really had no idea what to expect from Susan), but concluded: “for what it was, 2 Weeks That Shook Showbusiness was still pretty good.”
One observation I’d make is that much of her success is because of mainstream media’s failure to understand Twitter. I don’t blame them: as everyone who uses Twitter knows, it’s impossible to understand Twitter unless you’re doing it. It simply defies explanation. Boyle’s story went ‘global’ because it went American, and that only happened thanks to a pair of tweets from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. That’s it: one tweet apiece. Kutcher’s was something along the lines of, “That made my night,” to which his wife replied, “You saw me getting teary.” To anyone not tweeting all day it may be easy to take that as ‘Demi Moore announces to the world her admiration and love of Britain’s Susan Boyle!’ She didn’t announce anything of the sort. Well, she did, but she didn’t. That’s where Twitter’s unique form of communication lies — idle musings, random thoughts, passing notions. Sure, plenty of people tweet things of great importance to them, but it’s clear to me from the slightly indirect tone of both tweets that they were meant primarily for the other’s spouse, rather than all their fans and followers. As such it was tenuous to suggest that she’d captured the heart of Hollywood. It’s a tiny point in the Boyle story, admittedly; the fact is that once it had been brought to the Americans’ attention via Fox and CNN they lapped it up, so does it really matter how it got there?
But why did they lap it up? Clive James wrote and read a piece on Radio 4 where he praised her voice but made the point that voices as strong grace opera choruses and am-dram groups up and down Britain. It’s a lovely voice, don’t get me wrong, but is it really that extraordinary? Is her talent the equal of this five year old from Korea who can play any piano piece she hears but once, Mozart-style?
For my part, when a female singer is introduced to the world I usually find her vocal talent sufficient to justify the dedication of the managers and publicists that got her her break, but the back of my mind will always whisper, “Lucky for them she’s gorgeous, too.” The implication, of course, is that an equal talent in a more homely personage will be ignored. I haven’t heard anyone in the business say this explicitly, apart from snide remarks on X Factor like “you don’t have the right ‘look,’ dear,” nor have I seen any research to suggest that for every good looking singer I’ve heard of there’s at least one unattractive one who’s doomed to lead a ‘normal life.’ It’s just a feeling I have because, deep down, I know I’d rather look at an attractive woman than an ugly one. Comely over homely. It’s self-evident, obvious, but it’s also harsh, shallow and unbecoming. So, do I like the Susan Boyle character because it affirms that I can see past the glossy veneer, thus proving I’m really a good guy? Do I like her only because it makes me feel good to like her, to flatter my own ego?
There are other reasons to like her, of course, more objective reasons: her handling of the sudden media attention, for instance, seems Herculean to me. Though she’s lacking any technique at all in dealing with journalists (all her interviews consist of barely-useable one-word answers) she seems perfectly happy to deal with them anyway. She was interviewed by Larry King from her living room and was completely unfazed by the heavyweight champ of talk show hosts. When a film crew ambushes her on the streets of Blackburn, she chats amiably and with humility about her new situation, and while she is unpolished, she carries herself with considerable grace. And though she may not be Kiri Te Kanawa, she can sing. As McManus pointed out, she has a great deal of talent and she’s on a talent show so why shouldn’t she find success?
So cutting this particular show was a revelation for me and hopefully for the viewer too. Come her next appearance, I wish her all the best. Whatever happens it’s difficult to see her suffering any bad will now. She’ll forever be a hero in her own community and if she’s remembered outside of that, it will be fondly, I’m sure.
Categories: editing, tv, Work.
I’m glad to be back in the temporary employ of MNE Media, an independent producer of Gaelic-language tele. The show I’m working on is called Cuide Ri Cathy (Company with Cathy). It’s an interview show where Cathy MacDonald chats with Scottish celebrities over the course of a single day. So far I’ve done shows with Hardeep Singh Kohli, Tony Roper, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Alan Rough, Sir Menzies Campbell and, er, Leon Jackson. It’s a warm show, informal, friendly and relaxed.
As I walked into the offices on Thursday, though, I got a shock. The whole place was branded, from wall-mounted hard-backed posters to PC screen-savers, with the logo I designed for them last month. Designing logos is not something I usually do, as a rule, and I was flattered and perplexed when they approached me with the project. They explained their wishes for it in abstact terms, essentially describing how they saw MNE as a company (alive, dynamic, current, etc.), and I had a weekend to come up with basic concepts. Coming up with images around a theme turned out to be a great joy, and a very similar process to writing drama.
The strongest concept I had by Monday morning was that of a fuse. Not the kind of fuse that goes in a mains plug, obviously, but the fuse of a bomb, a stick of dynamite. I thought the spark of the fuse would in itself be dynamic, while holding the promise of the explosion to come. Come Monday I showed a mock up to the MNE senior management and left them to consider. Thankfully, the concept appealed to them and their only notes were practical, considerate of its future as embroidery on jackets and polo shirts, letterheads and on the side of vehicles. After a few drafts, everybody was happy, especially me: I’m now a logo designer!
After that was the usual technical ballet of the delivery. I’m used to this when doing video for a company’s website. Basically, websites are not my area of expertise; I have enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to be really useful. So there’s often a brief period of finding just the right format for the web guys, them talking in web terms, me talking in video terms. We always get the optimum file pretty quickly, but the trial and error for a project’s specific requirements is always necessary, it seems. In fact, it’s probably better than me thinking I know it all, because I’ll never be as au fait as someone who’s dedicated to a medium other than my own.
In this case, the foreign medium was print. The brief period of trial and error was with the company that was to put the logo onto physical objects. The issue at hand was the relationship between the resolution of an image and its dpi (dots per inch). In short, I was producing files of huge resolution, many times that of a movie projected in theatres, but because I was operating within a video application (thinking only of endcards for programmes and animations) the dpi was constant and unchangeable at 72 dpi. This is generally considered the standard for all video, at least the conversations I’ve witnessed between videographers and printers is anything to go by.
The trouble is that 72 dpi is pretty poor when printing something physically. Having done a bit of research online, it’s my lay impression that although they seem the same in principle, dpi and resolution are quite independent of each other. Essentially, no matter how much I upped the resolution of the image, because the dpi was 72 it would always look poor when printed on a large scale. The dpi is more an instruction to the printing device on how to render the image physically than a true measure of the image’s sharpness. This implies that once you have a sufficiently resolved initial image (albeit of 72 dpi), one can simply use a print-friendly application such as Photoshop to simply set the dpi higher.
This is what I did. I took an image 3840 x 2160 (four times the resolution of HD video, which you can watch on the biggest screen of any multiplex with no problem at all), opened it in Photoshop and reset the dpi to 400. The resolution increased accordingly (and artificially, of course), but hopefully the resulting file would print with solid curves and smooth gradients. Judging from the decorations at the MNE office, it worked just fine.
Now, I just need to get myself one of those polo shirts…
What greeted me on Thursday morning
There are always, it seems, several edit jobs on at once. The idea of seeing one to finality before embarking on another is naïve, at least when you own a production company where you are the sole editor on staff.
Of the three music videos we have produced in recent weeks, the first (which was finanised over a week ago) required attention this morning: a broadcast master needed to be produced. In the Cage we can master to DVCAM, HDV or in any conceivable file format; when it comes to the venerable DigiBeta tape format, we must enlist the help of either an equipment hire company, such as the ever-reliable Progressive, or post facility like M8. Today, we used the latter.
Editing is also finished on the second video, for Alto Elite’s Walk Away, but final delivery awaits, and the third remains to be approved by the band themselves, so further editing is still a possibility.
During all this, a making-of documentary for the DVD of an upcoming feature film takes shape. Of that I will say little at the moment, in the way of specifics.
All the while, new projects are appearing in our diary with increasing frequency. It is up to us now to finish them to our high standards as quickly as they are arising. This is a good position to be in.
John Scalzi commented on his blog last Sunday that the problem with the editing in a 3D film like Coraline is that the eye must refocus.
I’m dying to see if 3D can become more than a novelty this time around, mostly because I’d love to see how the language of film will change to accommodate it. Scalzi’s is the first sensible discussion along these lines that I’ve come across.
And to address his point, it’s part of the process of cutting from one image to another to be aware of where in the frame the audience’s attention will be (or most likely be) at any given moment. Off the top of my head, think of the cut at the beginning of Bladerunner when Leon shoots Holden for the second time, sending him and his wheeled chair hurtling back. We cut abruptly just as he hits a table to an aerial shot of flying police cars in downtown LA. Where the crashing Holden has just been is now the space between buildings where flies just such a car. Ordinarily, our eye could be drawn to the geisha on the billboard: it’s the biggest object in the frame, most animated and most colourful. But in the previous shot, we can’t help but look at Holden because he’s in motion, and we’re genetically predisposed to look at moving objects over stationary ones. So when they cut to the cityscape, we’re forced to look at the car.
This technique was developed a century ago. Hopefully 3D filmmakers will heed Scalzi’s warning, and learn to consider the Z-plane when designing sequences, filming (or rendering) them and finally cutting them.
This is an exciting time for film making; let’s not screw it up.
Categories: editing, Recommendation.
I recently edited a commercial apiece for Clyde One and Forth One, Glasgow and Edinburgh radio stations respectively. Like the Leprosy ads, I can’t see the ads on the stations’ official sites for some mysterious reason. The Drum has Photobucket versions here, but I don’t know how long they’re going to be around (and the quality’s not great), so I thought I’d host them here too:
Categories: Work.
I recently edited some TV spots for a campaign to raise awareness of randmised clinical trials. They were shown across Scotland with each region having its own version. Here they are:
Categories: Work.