Offline - Losing the Creative Out of the Editor

I think this may come off like a generalization, but I was in a little drinking hole last night with some friends, 2 editors and a flame Op and we were chatting about work.

Here at the Beeb, I am quite grateful to be free from corporate films as they can be quite soul destroying. However, corporates are a very lucrative industry and many post houses who employ great talent and are responsible for quality broadcast and film work wouldn't survive were it not for the income of corporate films.

My Editor Friends were just coming off a stint on the corporates and going into some series work, they too were near the end of their tether with this onslaught of corporate productions and the self important posers that produce them (again a sweeping generalization, I know some really lovely people that produce corporates, we were just a wee bit drunk and bitter). Anyways, they were desperately pleased to be back on the broadcast side.

My other friend , the VFX Guy, lamented the tedium that goes into effects work on longform shows and is quite well placed in a company that now produces commercials, but even then has suffered through week long rotoscoping jobs that made him go a bit cross eyed.

Sometimes it just seems like a lot of the creativity in Post Production has gone. The editor is too often a functional role, realizing the producer's vision rather than using his/her understanding of cadence, juxtaposition and general experience as a craftsman. The restraints of every shrinking budgets means that time and kit suffer. You may have to use crappy software based conversion tools or text/graphic effects plugins. You may have to cram an hour long project into a few week edit. The editor then just has to do what production want, with perhaps only minor exceptions.

I think the VFX artist still retains some mystery about his/her work as most dir/prods just know what they want and have very little clue how to achieve it. But the VFX artists' smoke and mirrors are hiding less and less as the technology (like in editing) becomes more accessible.

On the flipside, I have recently come across a lot of editors who are 'non-technical' offliners, that just cut films together and don't really care to know about the immensely important geeky side of post work. This is a growing trend with the proliferation of freelance Final Cut Pro. Don't get me wrong I am a huge fan of FCP. I love using it, but it is dramatically impacting the post production landscape. The effects are both good and bad. Such editors lack the fundimental post production knowledge to aid their productions into the finishing stages and often leave their Producers in the lurch several stages later in post.

I think the editors who feel as though they make a difference to the majority of their productions and have been able to develop collaborative relationships with prod/dir over a series of projects should feel rather fortunate.

As well as being attacked by lack of money, bedroom guru's and producers going at it alone, the offline editor's craft and creativity is under threat by the changing way films are made. I have been holding on to a studio daily piece that I wanted to highlight as some great work coming out of London, but reading it again today has made me look at it in a new light.


The piece is on the edit of the Killer's new video, Directed by Tim Burton. Have a read and a watch of the video here.

Basically, great opportunity to cut a video with one of a few contemporary auteurs. Amanda James also got he opportunity to use her expertise in benefit of the project.

With music videos it’s important to establish a performance bed and I felt this especially so on this project as Tim had never shot band performance before. His main concern, given his background was naturally the narrative element, so I had to fairly quickly assemble a rough structure so that he would be able to envisage how the performance and narrative would function together throughout the video.

But, what strikes me now is the increasing trend of editors assembling green screen shots. I imagine it is very difficult to do such an edit and feel this again is a place where the editor loses out in the creative process.

Other than a couple of location setups the entire film was shot against green screen, so we had to imagine when and where the skeletons would be... There was no real back and fourth between us as give or take a scene or two, I pretty much had to lock the whole thing down before they could begin.

But in the end Amanda felt she could add to the creative process both through her understanding of music video construction, but also with 'the level of finesse I applied to the effect shots, I guess he’s not used to that being done to such a degree at the offline stage'.

That last statement backs up my point. With the increasing level of vfx work in productions offline editing is again reduced to a functional task rather than a creative one.

I am just lamenting the fact that a once highly regarded creative role is evolving into a 2 class system where the undereducated, underpaid and undervalued are outnumbering the elite. The industry is turning out more and more functional editors and fewer craftsmen. What do you think?