Norman Hollyn has been described as a “media expert,” a reference to his experience in both the old and new media worlds.
He is a long-time film, television and music editor (HEATHERS, THE COTTON CLUB, and Oliver Stone’s WILD PALMS) who is an Associate Professor and Head of the Editing Track in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
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November 14, 2008
I’ve just gotten back from a screening of a documentary I’m editing, and a conference for film professors, in China. And while that doesn’t fully account for my absence from these virtual pages, I was able to meet with a number of people who sparked some thoughts in my head that I wanted to get down here for you.
First, it’s clear to me that, as innovative as the industry is here in the United States, much of the real future of the world’s media is going to come from other places. I’ve spoken often about your need to get involved in mobile media — since no one is going to be watching movies solely in movie theatres or on television any more.
There was a panel at the conference where Ángel Blasco Marqueta, a professor at the School of Visual Arts in Madrid, spoke about Telefonica, the mobile phone company where he is a consultant. One of the points of his talk was that mobile companies are getting into content. They are beginning to distribute media of their own.
Of course, no one at the phone companies really knows how to create media, so they are out there buying up existing content. And that is where we come in. I don’t know about you, but when I edit something, I’m looking at it on a large monitor, my computer screen, the tiny source and record monitors in Avid or Final Cut, as well as a number of other size sources (I took my documentary with me as an MP4 movie on my iPhone and it looked great — even compressed from its original 720p HD format). So I spend my entire life making adjustments in my mind so I can extrapolate how something on a small screen is going to look projected onto a big movie theater screen.
How awesome would it be if someone actually paid me to not make that extrapolation, but to make separate versions of my projects for each format?
The general agreement at the conference was that this is where it’s all heading for the immediate future. There are hundreds of screens being developed for us to watch media on and many of them will require smart people to create content for them. I doubt that we, as editors, will be able to get hired to edit films solely for cel phones, of course. But it is likely that any features we edit will also need to have additional content created specifically for that market. You can hand that job over to someone who specializing in “repurposing” films for mobile or you can figure out how to do it yourself.
Now, let’s think about who a producer/director would prefer to hire on a job sometime in the near future. Do you think they’d rather hire someone they like who can edit additional material for the iPhone and Android phones, or someone who can’t? As the amount of income generated by cel phone media sales becomes larger, do you think they’d rather pay you two or three more weeks of your salary to reshape the material you already know into something tailored for cel phone users, or hire someone else who doesn’t know any of the material.
I know who they’d probably want to hire. An option that you, as an editor, might NOT have in the future is to say “Sorry, I only cut the features, I don’t do the cel phone material.” It’s kinda like saying to a producer today that they’ll have to rent an Avid station because you only cut on Final Cut (or vice versa). Nope, it’s important to know both platforms today, and it will be important for the editor of 2012 to know what looks good on the big screen, as well as on the screens that will be playing in kiosks in shopping malls.
In China, there wasn’t a single person in the Beijing subway (young or old) who wasn’t texting on their cel phones. Now, I can’t get reliable AT&T cel service in my dining room at home, but they get it in subway tunnels in Beijing. And there are 18,000,000 people living in that city. Once they move further into moving media, like films, on those phones, whose going to provide the material to fill them up?
It can be you, or it can be someone who your producer hires to do it. And then, maybe, starts to hire to do the longer-form material as well. And then maybe, despite really really liking you, decides to hire all of the time.
I’m not here to freak you out. I’m here to tell you about the great opportunity we’re going to have to expand who our audiences are. All we need to do is get behind it and learn it. And, for many of us, that means starting to see what happens when we put our films onto our cel phones and looking at it. How does the pacing change? How do wide shots work? Using the great new screens on some of these devices, it’s no longer true that everything has to be in close-up. But certain types of moving shots look better than others. Certain types of compression is going to look better with different shots.
We need to experience that first hand in order to be able to continue to be relevant by the time the new decade rolls around.
Scary? Maybe. I prefer to be excited by it.
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OH, what’s that picture up there at the top of the article? It’s the cover for my new book, due out on December 15th or December 25th (yep, that’s what it says on Amazon’s web site — Christmas Day). I’ll be talking more about it next week, but for now, click on the image above and go to Amazon and see the description there. Or check it out on Peachpit Press’ own website.
October 31, 2008
The last three weeks, and the coming two, are going to be quite insane. I’ve been finishing up a second cut on a documentary that is screening in Beijing next week and I hop on a flight to China Friday evening with (I hope) all of the Quicktimes and SD DVDs ready for screening. The film, which was shot and edited in HD, using the Panasonic P2 technology — and edited in Avid (and looks absolutely amazing) deals with life around five international rivers — the Amazon, Danube, Ganges, Mississippi and the Rio Grande — and is a lyrical piece about people’s relationship to their surroundings. I like it quite a bit, though it’s only in a second cut. A lot of work.
The other thing that I’ve been doing is finishing up my book, THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT, which will be coming out from Peachpit Press in December. Finalizing the sixty or more color stills, from movies such as THE GODFATHER, THE MATRIX, FINDING NEMO, three student films, two web series and more, has been sucking away a goodly portion of time as well. You can click on the book title and see a flyer about it, which also gives you a discount if you order ahead of time. Buy early. Buy often.
Finally, one other thing that I’ve decided to do (besides vote — absentee ballot, since I’ll be away — vote early and vote often) is to evangelize for a fantastic new film which is having a one week run out here in Los Angeles beginning November 7th. It’s called CAPTAIN ABU RAED and is without a doubt one of the best films of this year. It is Jordan’s first ever entry in the Foreign Film Oscar category. It is a truly amazing story about an airport janitor who finds a captain’s hat one day, puts it on, and is convinced by the poor kids in his neighborhood to tell them stories of his “travels” as a pilot. I know that you think that every film coming from an Arab country has to be political, but this is political only in the sense that WALL-E is political. It is set in a world where the reality shapes the characters, but they live within the world without resorting to politics, because they simply are.
Many of us complain about the low quality of films in the theaters today and then don’t bother to support the films that elevate our experience when they ARE out there. For those of you in the LA area, this is your chance to do something about it. Go see the film at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills in the week that it’s there. Support small films, made by independent filmmakers (the director, a Jordanian and American, graduated a year or two ago from AFI, and made the film for 2 million bucks) who have personal stories to tell.
Go do it people, and then I’ll see you when I emerge.
October 12, 2008
Adam Curry, on Cranky Geeks Episode 137 (an always entertaining and, often, informative web show about tech, hosted by John C. Dvorak) talks about the problems with iTunes and other web-based movie and music download services. The conversation takes off from the recent fight between Apple and the Copyright Royalty Board, which has been rattling the sabres and threatening, at the recording industry’s bidding, to raise the rates that Apple and other pay for each song that is downloaded through the iTunes store (from about nine cents to about 15 cents).
In a well-reported story, Apple threatened to shut down the iTunes store if the board’s recommendation was accepted. The board relented and kept the rates the way they were, but Curry’s point is that the major media companies are not to be trusted with pricing structures. Curry, who many years ago was a VJ at MTV, and has come to known as one of the pioneers of podcasting (the “podfather”) is a co-founder of web video site Mevio, a site which stream all sorts of video podcasts and video content.
Curry, noting that “this is how Hollywood works… they’ll give you a nice little teaser rate and the minute it kicks in, all they have to do is crank it right up. You can never win.” He said that this is exactly why, when he started up Mevio he avoided Hollywood content like the plague (as opposed to sites like Joost). Curry has some major financial backing behind his site, and he’s chosen to put it into creating content, rather than repurposing it from the majors.
I ran across something similar, though on a much different level, when I was preparing my new book. As a guide to shaping stories, I wanted to use examples from all facets of moving media — films, television, web series, commercials, podcasts, etc. Now, this is not a book that you’re going to see on the New York Times best seller list at any point in my lifetime. It’s primarily a book for filmmakers and students — it’s first printing will likely be no more than 20,000-25,000. So, I went to the studios to ask for permission to use stills from certain films.
You would have thought that I was threatening to usurp their entire business model. Some studios, actually, were quite great about it. Paramount let me use a large number of stills from THE GODFATHER. Pixar authorized use of stills from FINDING NEMO. MGM stepped up on one of their films–MAD DOG TIME, an off-beat film which I edtied some years ago. But Warner Brothers (who I was asking for stills from THE MATRIX, CITIZEN KANE, and a few others) engaged in a back and forth with me that almost torpedoed all stills in the book. There’s a discussion here about fair use, which we won’t get into right now, but my point is that every single usage of anything from a major is seen as a potential profit center. Now, I don’t begrudge the studios from trying to recoup their money and then some on the films and music that they finance. That’s business. The stumbling block, as Curry points out, is the inability to have a perspective on this, especially in these changing times. Every opportunity is seen as a chance to squeeze more and more money. Apple certainly is making their fair share, but the business of online media is in its infancy and companies like Pandora, iMeme, Joost, and Mevio (among others) simply don’t have the cash flow that they all hope to have in five or ten years.
This is precisely what SAG is going for in their negotiations with the studios and, frankly, their issues are exactly on the money, though they are (perhaps) too early to have any great effect. The studios obviously realize that there is a decreasing future in selling pieces of plastic to an audience for playback at home. That’s why they’re trying to wring every dollar out of a nascent industry now, so they can establish a beachhead while the sands are still shifting.
But many web companies can’t and won’t pay the going rate. So, rather than set themselves up for a thrill-ride when the rug is pulled out from under them, they’ve decided to go to places where they can get content without those attached strings.
And that’s where we editors can see some light at the end of the tunnel.
Joost, for instance, is looking to make deals with people who can reliably create continual content of good quality, and they’re giving a decent profit split to the creators. Companies like Mevio, Podshow, Pixel Corps, ChannelFlip, and Leo Laporte’s TWiT network, are trying to create a business model without depending on the majors for content. But much of it, when you graze the content, is far from compelling. Everyone is at the early stages of figuring out how to provide shows without spending tons of money, but talent costs. Not everyone can tell stories in ways that involve the audience — that takes some talent.
That is what we do as editors — tell stories. And as these smaller companies evolve past the Tonight Show format — hosts interviewing people in front of green screens — they are going to need people like us. What we need to do is to get as familiar as we can with the format as it exists today. Many of us think that learning the latest buttons on the Avid, Final Cut or Premiere software is enough for us. Simply learning how to color correct is useless in a world in which color correction is an afterthought, or not as necessary. Justin TV didn’t bother with anything other than a camera attached to a hat and that show attracted major interest for a while until they ran out of ideas. It wasn’t the lack of beautiful production values that causes the show to jump the shark, it was lack of compelling content.
What I’d recommend every one of you out there do (well, maybe I should say “every four of you out there”) is to surf the web shows as much as possible and see what’s out there. And then partner up with people who you can bring your own storytelling talents to. Learn what everyone is doing and then join in. There will be many ways of telling stories in the future. To think that there are only two screens — film and television — is very short sighted. The future will belong to people who can make content with their Red Cameras as well as they can in front of a webcam streamed over Stickcam.
October 4, 2008
I’m liable to be a bit bumpy for the next few weeks as I finish up my next book and get the documentary on global rivers into shape for a screening in Beijing the first week in November. Despite my prayers, time has not expanded to fill the work available (I’ve been told that the reverse is true, though I’ve never been in a situation where I could test that out).
So… for this week I’d thought I’d do an unfair comparison between linear and non-linear storytelling and how it affects storytelling and editing.These thoughts were prompted by two movies that I’ve recently seen that were directed by men known primarily as writers — TOWELHEAD by Alan Ball (writer of the amazing AMERICAN BEAUTY and showrunner for the less amazing by still fascinating SIX FEET UNDER), and SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK by Charlie Kaufman (writer of the amazing ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, and the less amazing but still 80% fascinating ADAPTATION).
Right up front I’ll tell you that, to my mind, both moves were flawed — TOWELHEAD in a stupefyingly plodding, near-student film linearity, and SYECDOCHE in an aim-too-high-and-you’re-going-to-fall sort of way.I’ll take the latter any day of the week.
Now, I’ve worked on films that people hate and others that people love, sometimes at the same time. If I remember correctly, our first carded preview screening of HEATHERS scored less than 30% in the “top two boxes” (as studio people are wont to say) — Excellent and Very Good. MR. DESTINY, on the other hand (on which I was a second editor) scored over 80% by the time we finished our sixth preview. And while I wouldn’t trade in either experience, mentioning the first film today gets me way more respect than the second — for good reason. HEATHERS tried something which pissed some people off and made others love us. By the time the preview was done, a good chunk of the audience had left, though not without filling out their response cards (obviously). MR. DESTINY… well… it was cute. Nobody got pissed off, but nobody loved it either.
So I expect less than 30% of the audience to like SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. It is, like other Charlie Kaufman films scripts, a trip inside the mind of someone who isn’t thinking straight — and I mean that figuratively and literally. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a disaffected theater director whose wife takes their young daughter and heads off to Germany near the start of the film. Immediately after this, he receives a sizable MacArthur genius grant and decides to mount an ambitious theater piece in which he methodically duplicates the people and events in his life, using actors who seem to have a total commitment to the project.But, immediately, things begin to go wrong. Caden, develops an autonomic nervous disease which seems to cause him to live his life at a different time pace than everyone else. His perception of how long his wife has been gone, for instance, differs dramatically from everyone else’s. Months fly by rapidly in Caden time. In screen time, and in the lives of those around him, we’re not so sure.
Then there’s the growing problem that he (and we) face as he directs the actors who are playing the people from his life (including his wife, a desired girlfriend, a second wife, and more). Think about it — what happens when the character playing him, gets ot the point in the play when he needs to hire someone to play himself? Like an M.C. Escher drawing or someone looking at a mirror which reflects an image from an opposite mirror, you begin to add additional Cadens to the play. So, after enough time has elapsed you’ll have Caden hiring more Cadens who have hired other Cadens who have hired other Cadens. And if that doesn’t make sense here, let me tell you that it’s not much easier to follow up on screen as well, as intriguing as it is.
It begins to strain the mind. So you can see the interesting puzle of the film and, therefore, in its reception. Most people will give up. It’s just too damned hard. And, though it’s sometimes worth it, sometimes it isn’t.But at least the film works hard at creating a situation, and that would (I’d imagine) make it interesting to work on.
The challenge of editing a piece like SYNECDOCHE is to tell its non-linear/linear story in an involving way, without getting so explicatory (is that even a word??) that it becomes boring. No one wants to be lectured at, after all, even in service of the plot. A large part of what we do as storytellers, is trying to figure out how to give the audience the information that they need to know, without making them feel like they’re sitting in a classroom. The struggle is to tell the story so some/many/most people get it and can get that plot under the belts. That will free them up to enjoy the wonderful performances by Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Samantha Morton. It was something that Kaufman, with director Michel Gondry, was able to do so well in ETERNAL SUNSHINE. If you got it, then you could really see how well the characters played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet moved through this odd terrain. You loved them or felt for them or were frustrated by them. But you reacted to them, not the oddities of the story.
So, maybe 30% of the audience got to that space. Maybe more, if you’re lucky. You have to be prepared to have a large chunk of the audience walk away from the film in frustration. It’s not “fuck you, you didn’t understand me,” it’s more like “sorry you didn’t get it, but the people who did were right there with us.” Most editors who are worth anything, would take the challenging tasks hands down over those film that follow formulas so they’re easy to cut. Walk the characters into a room, stand them up facing each other and then cut into the over-the-shoulder shots for a bit, before cutting in for a close-up at the crucial moment. POW! Instant reaction! Very straightforward. Very linear.Which is only part of the problem of the mess that is TOWELHEAD.
Now, up front, I should say that I am a big fan of Alan Ball’s work, especially when he doesn’t direct it. The weakest episode of TRUE BLOOD so far has been his. And, aside from its brilliant finale, none of this episodes of SIX FEET UNDER seemed to be able to get out from under the writing and become full-fledged works of their own.
Ball’s first feature film as a director, follows the maturing process of its 13 year old lead, Jasira, as she navigates the dual worlds of sexual discovery and her Arabic upbringing in the suburbs of Houston. She lives with an intolerant, pompous father, and next to an Army reservist who, conveniently, may be called to Iraq at any moment and who finds her budding sexuality too much to ignore.So, does that description seem pretty straight-foward to you? Even as I write it I realize that there is great room for interesting character pieces in it, but that it seems incredibly linear. And that is exactly the film’s problem. There are a slew of great ideas in the script but they are told in an overtly linear fashion. Each scene seems to be designed to serve a singular purpose. When it completes that thought, we move onto the next scene and its singular purpose. As an editor, I can’t afford to be catty about this type of filmmaking. I’ve done enough work on films like this myself, and have actually found great joy in working on a film in which you find the subtextual nuances in an actor’s performance, or where the collaborative process is vibrant and fulfilling.
But the creative juices just aren’t stimulated in the same way when the storytelling hits every emotional beat at the right time. I’ve never been a big fan of the Robert McKee style script analysis which tells us what needs to happen in what parts of the script. That seems too narrowly focussed to me. Not every film needs to be non-linear. In fact, I’d even say that most should not be non-linear. The joys, for me, of editing those films come from finding the nuances and multiple layers below the linearity.Complexity fuels the soul somehow.That is why, I suppose, I’m less interested in action films like RAMBO than I was in THE MATRIX. Its complexity that keeps me going, no matter what it’s tone. And the plodding nature of the plot in TOWELHEAD leaves very little to chance. None of the people who I know think in a straight line. Of course, movies are not reality, but their thought process always feels too pat to me when they move too predictably.
Editing a predictable film feels… well… predictable.
September 26, 2008
I’ve been spending the last several days jamming to finish the remaining few chapters of my book, which accounts for my late entry this week.
I was writing something that sparked some thoughts that I’d like to share with you. It’s about changes in journalism and the way in which they tell stories. I’ll paste it in here and add a few comments below it.
[NOTE: The name of the book is THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT, and deals with how we shape our stories using all of the crafts of the filmmaker. That would account for my continual mention of that phrase in the piece.]
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The Lean Forward Moment in Journalism
Journalism has certainly been undergoing major changes in the last ten years, as it moves from printed to electronic distribution. Television journalism, faced with competition from reality television and other forms, is trying to attract and keep viewers.
It has always been an axiom of journalism to begin with a strong leading paragraph (the lede). You can think of this as crafting a strong Lean Forward Moment at the very start of the piece. This is not dissimilar to beginning a television episode with a strong opening scene and is done for the same reason—to keep the audience from moving on to another story.
After the lede, journalistic style is structured around something called the inverted pyramid, in which information is presented in decreasing order of importance, leaving the audience with the expectation that they will receive much of the crucial and interesting information near the beginning of the article. In my opinion, this type of style will make it more difficult for online journalists to keep an audience attentive all of the way through a piece (it is also, I believe, one reason for the decrease in news stories which jump to other pages of a newspaper).
Vibrant news reporting, in the era of web and video presentation, will require journalists to shape their stories differently, providing periodic Lean Forward Moments, and arcs in their stories, while still maintaining journalistic integrity.
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My Additional Comments
A year or so ago I gave a talk to the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board who were all interested in how to use new media techniques to tell their news stories (I do some consulting in addition to all of my regular jobs). It is no secret that newspapers are fast disappearing, as they lose customers to television and web sites, classified ads to Craig’s List, and display ads to everyone. So most good news organizations with any money are trying to figure out a way to keep writing about the news, but incorporating Internet tools. Of course, they are being to do all of this with no increase in personnel or salaries.
It’s that bad out there for them.
We talked about a number of things, including how to use social networking and user generated content, to present local news stories that people cared about but they couldn’t afford to cover. Another thing we talked about was how to tell better, more immediate stories. In other words, how to learn from films and television in order to keep themselves relevant. We didn’t discuss it then, but it strikes me that the way in which we editors tell stories — with strong beginnings, and then a series of escalating emotional ups and down, leading to a large and satisfying denouement — is very different from what journalists do. In fact, news writers who don’t lead off with the strongest statements are often accused of “burying the lead.”
But, burying the lead a bit might not be such a bad idea in terms of emotional storytelling. It seems natural to me that you’d want to parcel out the story in continually evolving chunks, not dump it all in the beginning and hope that the reader will bother to turn to an inside page when they meet the words “Continued on page…”
In what ways do you think journalists can learn from film editors? And what can we learn from them?
