Xena Editor
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 13
SD: Can you give me an overview of what a film editor does?
Rob: The editor essentially takes disparate pieces of filmed footage and puts it together so that there’s a flow of story, nuances in performances, reaction shots to amplify what people are thinking, as well as setting up the timing and pace of the piece. It's a very fluid and malleable construct in the sense that once any given structure is put down, it can always be changed. A dialogue sequence can be recut to emphasize a particular character or action based on what you want to accomplish. I’m fascinated by the fact that you can put something together a particular way and then go back in and completely change it.
Let's look at “Adventures In The Sin Trade,” for a minute. At the top of act one, there's a montage where Xena travels from Greece to the Siberian steppes. In the original version, it was just a couple cuts of Xena going here and there. And Rob Tapert looked at it and said, “I don't feel like she's going anywhere.” In other words, he needed to be convinced she was covering a huge distance. So what started out as a few shots covering about ten seconds became a very involved, layered montage of timelapse clouds moving, Xena riding through various terrains and landscapes, intercut with images of sunsets, moon rises, desert sandstorms, snow storms - all images that were meant to convey the concept of vast distances being covered. It ended up being about 45 seconds.
Tapert asked for a similar revision in one of the India episodes that started off with some villagers washing clothes in what was supposed to be the Ganges river. He said he wanted to see the birth of a river. So we recut the opening starting off with shots of the Himalayan mountains in the distance, then went in closer to snow melting, to water rushing, to waterfalls, to small rivers flowing to larger rivers flowing to a huge river and dissolved from that to the original shot of villagers washing their clothes in the river. This wasn't anything that amplified the narrative of the show as much as creating a visual motif for the opening.
SD: What was the first editing work you did for Xena?
Rob: The first thing I did for Renaissance was the opening main title prologue for the Hercules movies. That then lead to working on Xena and the first episode I edited was “Chariots Of War.” After that came “Cradle Of Hope” and while I was finishing up that episode, they asked me to do the main title sequence for Xena.
SD: You wrote the words to the opening credits of Xena ?
Rob: Yes. Another company had been hired to do the main titles. Rob wasn't entirely satisfied with what they had done and asked me to look at it. I did and agreed it needed help. Then, at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, I received a call asking if I could come in over the weekend and cut a new main title. I told them it would take me a couple days to pull all the material I would need to work with and that I had a director coming in on Monday. It wasn’t possible to do both the episode and the title sequence. So they asked me to go through the shows that had been done and make footage selections that I would recommend be used in the opening sequence and could I come up with a better script for the narration. I wrote the opening narration over that weekend.
SD: But you also wound up putting together the credit footage?
Rob: I finished with the director a day earlier than expected and while the director's cut of “Cradle” was on its way to New Zealand for Rob to look at. I worked on the title sequence. I started cutting at 11:00 in the morning and by 4:00 in the afternoon, it was done. We made some further revisions afterwards, but the basic structure was laid down.
SD: You're about to edit the first dailies .
Rob: The very first dailies of my first episode of season five.
SD: What episode is this?
Rob: This is “Succession” which is not the first show of the season.
SD: What showed up today?
Rob: We received about an hour and ten minutes of dailies that cover two scenes - neither of which are complete. Meaning there's either main unit photography missing or second unit missing or both. I haven’t gotten far enough into the footage to know yet.
SD: Have you read the shooting script?
Rob: I read it through once. I don't read the script again after I've read it the first time. But while I'm cutting, I will go through the lined script if I need to refer to it.
SD: What is a lined script?
Rob: The lined script is the same thing as the shooting script, but on each scene, the script supervisor on set, as they're shooting the sequence, will mark down on each page what they’ve shot. A line gets drawn through whatever dialogue or action it covers with the take number.
SD: Each line on the page is a take?
Rob: Yes, or it might be multiple takes of the same action. I also get a continuity report. Basically, all of the takes that have been shot are written on the continuity report which lists the take number, description of the action, what was printed and what wasn't and maybe why it was good, why the director liked it or why it wasn't used.
SD: I see something there that says “best for sound.”
Rob: Some takes have good sound and some don't. Maybe a truck was passing by at the time. I don't let that rule whether or not I use a take. It's always performance first and foremost. That's the key to any sequence.
SD: Does it say how long a take is?
Rob: The report will indicate how long each take is. Some are as short as 10 seconds, some a minute or longer.
(Rob cuts the shows on a computerized editing system called an AVID. Avid makes the software that drives the system and is based on an Apple Macintosh system. Think “a word processor for video images.”)
SD: You have two monitors next to each other. One holds all the takes in folders called bins (each uncut scene has its own bin) and the other one is where you open them up and put the pieces together. And the scene you’re working on now is the opening when Gabrielle is filling her water bags and Ares and Mavican appear.
Rob: Right. As an example of how things get changed on set, the shooting script says, “Gabrielle flips her sais and jams them into a nearby tree trunk.” The lined script reads, “Gabrielle flips her sais and jams them into a nearby pumpkin.” The pumpkin was obviously easier to put on the set than a tree.
SD: You work with the shooting script, a lined script and the script supervisor's report.
Rob: Right. For example, the script supervisor's report tells me which coverage I have now and which will be sent later. For this scene, the second unit will shoot a closeup of Gabrielle's hands filling the water bottle, a closeup of Gabrielle pulling her sai from her right boot and putting it back in the boot, stabbing the pumpkin and daggers hitting her water bags. It ended up being just a shot of the bags exploding and later we added CGI daggers hitting them as they explode.
SD: What’s the first thing you’re going to do?
Rob: With the scene between Ares and Gabrielle, since there's a lot of dialogue going back and forth, I’ll look at the beginning of the two takes with the camera on Gabrielle and pick the one I think is the best. Next I'll find the reverse angle on Ares to see what he's doing. Then I'll start cross-cutting the conversation. As I go along, I check the other takes to see if there’s something different or better I want to use. You look for subtle differences in the performance and ask yourself, “Why one is better and why?” This is especially important with very emotional scenes.
At the end of this take on Gabrielle there is a zoom in on Gabrielle which signals the end of the teaser. There's also a zoom in on Mavican which I can use. But my choice would be to use the one on Gabrielle because she’s the person in this scene the audience cares about the most.
SD: What’s that note on the slate (the clapboard that is held in front of the camera before each take)?
Rob: It says, “visual effects #2/2.” Now I know there is a visual effects shot coming. They send me a visual effects log and I look up #2/2 and it says, “plate – Ares appears.” [“Plate” is the term for a visual FX background. It is shot “clean,” or empty, and the special effect is then placed into it.]
SD: Because Ares doesn’t just walk into a scene. He materializes.
Rob: Right. So here I have footage of the area where Ares will appear - Ares then walks into that scene - he stands there and delivers his dialogue - then he walks out and they film the empty space where he had been standing. So, I'll start with the empty background and then “dissolve” Ares standing in position and it looks like he materializes. Later, the special effects crew will add smoke and highlights to the “materialization” to dress it up a bit. We have different looks for all the god appearances.
SD: What are you doing now?
Rob: I'm opening up my stock bin. Bins are holding folders in the computer. This is my sound effects folder. I know in this scene there are going to be some sound effects I will want to use; one being the sound of Mavican hitting the ground as she jumps into the scene. Here we have “body fall #4.”
SD: There is another department that adds sound effects to the finished episode. Why do you put your own in now?
Rob: None of the sound effects or music I put in the episode while I'm working on it are kept. I do it because it makes the show play better for the people who are viewing the episode during the editing process. A different situation, for example, was M’Lila’s song in “Destiny.” I needed to cut the montage to that music. So it was given to me to use during the editing.
SD: I see you started Ares’ line of dialogue with a shot of him speaking, continue his line over a shot of Gabrielle reacting to what he is saying and end up back with a shot on Ares.
Rob: In real life, people react as you're talking to them. If you show someone's reaction after the person who’s talking to them has finished, it feels too late unless it is appropriate to what was just said. Usually I want to blend the action of both characters together. You might find it interesting that even though this scene is between Gabrielle and Ares, I'm playing most of the sequence on Gabrielle’s side.
SD: Why is that?
Rob: Because I feel the scene is really about what is going on with her. The focus isn’t on Ares except for what he may be trying to do with her or to her.
SD: It’s almost as if she's having an internal conversation and he just happens to be there. Because Gabrielle was mad at Xena before Ares appeared.
Rob: Exactly. The scene could be cut so that the focus is on Ares if that was the story you wanted to tell. But this story is about Gabrielle's frustration, so you keep the focus on her. Gabrielle has much more emotional stuff to deal with than Ares. Renee has more to do as a performer so it feels correct to me to be more on her performance.
SD: You once told me about how a cut can move the viewer from one speaker to another without them realizing there's been a break in the shot.
Rob: Starting the dialogue on one character and then moving to the other, brings your eye toward the second person. It's as if you’re standing watching two people talking and your head moves naturally from one to the other. Very often I will cut on eye movements. If someone’s eye flicks off to the left, you’re going to look to see what’s caught their attention. With the cut, you, as a viewer, get thrown in that direction, The cut should lead to the next shot naturally. That’s why you don’t see it. The finished sequence should just wash over you, one image falling into another, so that by the time the scene is over, you’re left with an emotional response to what you've just seen, rather than thinking, “Oh, nice editing.”
SD: As you're just starting to put the episode together, are you concerned at all with the final length at this point?
Rob: No. I don't worry about running time until I have the show complete.
(I returned to interview Rob again during the filming of “Them Bones, Them Bones.”)
SD: Now we're looking at “Them Bones” and talking about the baby skeleton coming out of Xena’s stomach.
Rob: What you’re seeing are a lot of things that help make the sequence work as well as it does. It's not just about editing. It's also about performance, camera movement, and music. The sequence is filled with radical, disorienting cuts that make the viewer feel uncomfortable and part of Xena’s nightmare. I normally wouldn't make an abrupt edit like that. But this scene called for it.
SD: I remember you once saying that editing is normally smooth and unobtrusive. But this is a time you wanted just the opposite. You're deliberately smacking us in the face with the horror of the moment.
Rob: Yes. Michael Khan, Steven Spielberg's editor, did that in Jurassic Park - making strange edits in strange places. You don’t know why you're being made to feel uncomfortable, but the way the editing is structured does that - which adds to the overall impact of the sequence.
SD: You said Rob Tapert had a specific goal in mind in the hallucinatory sequences of “Them Bones”?
Rob: Rob wanted to imply that drinking the blood somehow transformed the person's body. It wasn't just a matter of spiritually going to another place as much as the body being transformed in some physical fashion that enabled the spirit to go to another realm.
SD: And the difference in Gabrielle's trip?
Rob: Gabrielle is going to meet Alti. Alti's not a nice person, she's something to be afraid of. So he wanted to imply visually that where Gabrielle was traveling to was not going to be sweetness and light. It needed to be more ominous. So he suggested adding tornadoes, avalanche, spiders, etc. to the footage that intimated traveling and time distortion. Gabrielle’s images are more organic compared to Xena's transformation which is more psychedelic. The medical footage implies the body undergoing changes - the disaster footage portends the danger that awaits her.
(This next part took place after I had returned from my trip to New Zealand and Rob was editing “Who's Gurkhan.” He also worked on “The Rheingold.”)
SD: In this very big book you work from, I see what looks like storyboards.
Rob: They sometimes do storyboards on action sequences. This one is from “The Rheingold.” They’re a graphic visual representation of what's going to be shot. A storyboard never represents every take that is shot nor does it represent the actual cutting sequence of a scene. But it's a good place to start in terms of what footage I can anticipate getting and what the progression of a sequence will be. It's a roadmap for what they intend to accomplish.
SD: Rob Tapert told me yesterday he'd seen the first cut of “Who’s Gurkhan,” and he wanted to make the scene of Xena being tortured more artistic - a way to keep the horror of what she was going through, but tone down the brutality of the moment. How do you go about that?
Rob: There are several ways of putting images together. One is to cut them back to back with other images either in a linear or non-linear sequence. For example, if you have brutal images of someone being beaten and you cut these images one after another, then you're going to have a fairly difficult sequence to watch. You can dissolve from one cut to the next and you'll get more of a flow between the cuts, but you're still going to have a sequence that's brutal to watch because the images themselves are so strong.
You can’t remove the brutality, but you can temper it and give it a surreal feeling. One of the ways to do that is to overlay images on top of one another and have very long dissolves between them. You can also use camera moves so that images flow in and out of one another. This gives you a sense of what's going on, but you never really see anything specifically graphic.
One of the sequences they filmed was a shot of a bloody arm with a manacled hand. The camera panned down to Xena's head which was turned away from the camera because it was Lucy's body double and moved across the floor to some fire. On top of that image, I laid over a shot of Xena being beaten by three guards which was a high angle shot from another part of the jail. That gave the sequence a more dreamlike quality than simply seeing someone being pummeled. When Rob saw that, he said he wanted more of that kind of imagery added to the dungeon scene.
SD: Is there anything you need to watch out for when overlaying images?
Rob: If you put two images that are dark on top of one another, both of them get darker. You need to have one lighter than the other to be able to make them both out. Also, if both images are in the center of the frame, they will fight each other. If you have a light image with a face on the right side of the frame and a darker image with some smaller action on the left side, that makes a good fit. This scene wasn’t originally designed to have overlaying images. So I've used push-ins to Gabrielle, pulls out from Xena, panning out from arms — all of which help me meld the images together.
SD: “Who’s Gurkhan” was originally intended to end with a scene of Xena on a boat asking Gabrielle to go ashore with her because they were going to go horseback riding on the beach. For various reasons, this ending was not used. Seeing as they filmed the sequences leading up to that moment with the riding shot in mind, did that necessitate any changes in the boat section?
Rob: This is an example where a sequence is designed to be seen a certain way and ends up being entirely different. In the original structure of the sequence, Xena has rescued Gabrielle and Sarah from Gurkhan. Now they're on the boat and Gabrielle has a conversation with Sarah about being forgiven and tells her, “You don't know what mothers are like and how much they can forgive.” After that conversation, Xena walks up and says to Gabrielle, “We're going ashore.” Gabrielle wants to know what’s wrong and Xena tells her nothing's wrong. Then we go to footage of them riding on the beach - which was originally part of Xena’s hallucinatory fantasy that got her through the torture sequence in the jail cell earlier in the show. (And subsequently not used.)
SD: (I'm looking at the editing screen as Rob is explaining this) Xena and Gabrielle smile at each other during this exchange of dialogue.
Rob: Right. There's a little smile from Gabrielle and a big smile from Xena and that was where it was supposed to dissolve to the riding sequence on the beach. The riding scene didn't work out and we decided not to use it. So I needed to restructure the scene on the boat to make it the final scene of the episode. And Rob wanted to go out on Xena's smile.
Xena was originally smiling because she knew the plans she had for herself and Gabrielle. I restructured it this way. After I established they were on the boat, I had Xena walk up to Gabrielle and Sarah before they finished their conversation - not after. Now Xena is hearing what they are saying - which she wasn't privy to in the first version. This gave me a chance to have Xena smiling in response to what Gabrielle was telling Sarah. So now, Xena's smile is given an entirely different motivation and meaning.
SD: Is this something you might have done in the past?
Rob: Yes, but I'll leave it up to the fans to try and figure out where and when.