Film Editing Wisdom For Editors & Assistants

Film Editing Wisdom For Editors & Assistants

Whatever stage of your film editing career you’re in, be it just beginning or sitting on decades of experience, this collection of editing wisdom should hopefully inspire you to continue to grow, learn and edit better.

Anne V Coates – Editing Legend

Anne V Coates is an incredible editor having cut films such as Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Sight, Erin Brokovich, In The Line of Fire and many more greats. If you want to meet her in the flesh she will be the key note speak at Edit Fest London 2013. If you can’t make that event, Gordon Burkell from AOTG has a brilliant two part interview with Anne in the run up to Edit Fest London. It’s worth clicking through to the AOTG site for a full list of other interviews Anne has done – great stuff!

The Changing Role of The Assistant Editor

The Canadian Cinema Editors presents a great question and answer session over on AOTG, with several assistant editors from feature and TV productions discussing how their role has changed with the demise of film and the advent of all digital productions. Towards the end of the video they also share some insights on how you can break into being an assistant film editor and then progress up the chain within editorial.

Editing The Hobbit – Jabbez Olssen

Oliver Peters has an excellent behind the scenes look at the editorial process for Peter Jackson’s epic The Hobbit trilogy. The article is full of tons of technical details about how Olssen used Avid to cut the film including handling millions of feet of R3D stereoscopic files (to mix metaphors) and incorporating all of the visual effects shots. Well worth a read.

The editorial team – headed up by first assistant editor Dan Best – consisted of eight assistant editors, including three visual effects editors. According to Olssen, “We mimicked a similar pipeline to a film project. Think of the RED camera .r3d media files as a digital negative. Peter’s facility, Park Road Post Production, functioned as the digital lab. They took the RED media from the set and generated one-light, color-corrected dailies for the editors.

Editing Barton Fink in 4 Parts

These 4 videos come from the Manhattan Edit Workshop with assistant editor Michael Berenbaum discussing what it was like working on the Coen brothers Barton Fink.

Tim Squyres – Ang Lee’s Editor

The Manhattan Edit Workshop recently posted these clips from Tim Squyres discussing several different films from his career the editing techniques he used. Insightful stuff.

In this last video Tom O Neil interviews Tim on his work on Life of Pi, including working with Ang Lee, 3D and a CG main character. It’s a great 15 minute conversation.

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