Some of the most creative and important people in the film industry are getting together this weekend in NY but there’s a good chance (unless you’re a industry insider) that you’ve never heard of any of them. These people sit, often isolated, in dark rooms cutting together the movies we love to watch — yep, you guessed it. Editors. Editfest is coming to NY this weekend and I got a chance to speak to Steve Rivkin (Avatar, all three Pirates of the Caribbean, and many, many more) briefly about his workshop.

Yep, We All Know Avatar Was Brilliant, But What Didn’t Work?

Julina: We hear and can easily see the amazing successes of Avatar but can you tell us a little about what didn’t work with the technological process and what the biggest challenges were?

Steve Rivkin: One of the things that was unique to this project, is that really as little as people understand what editors do, there is even more to be not known on this particular film because of the fact that it was edited at least three times. First there was a performance capture phase where it really was all about the performance and the director working with the actors with reference cameras and performance cameras capturing their every move, every nuance and every bit of facial expression, and then those specific performances were pre-edited, and pre selected so that only the very best performances were chosen, to be photographed in the virtual world. So the second phase was the shooting and editing of the virtual cameras which was basically a playback session of all of the preferred takes with no actors present where Jim Cameron was free to concentrate on shot creation and not worry about the actors performances, whether they hit their marks or the lighting or the crew or the props or the set because all of this was completely separate from the performance aspect of the film. So then those shots were then edited to create a template for the final version of the film. So this is a process that is truly unique to this film and one of the very unseen challenges that was represented the process of making of the film. We’re going to be talking in depth about this at Editfest including clips of actual performance capture scenes and how we went through the process of selecting, editing and pre-editing, shooting and then editing the virtual cameras.

We would select the performances, sometimes a combination of performances and create a “playback load” which is what we called it, so specific performances, in synch with each other to be played in the virtual world in the lens of the virtual camera.

One of the most difficult things that we faced was editing what we called “performance cuts” of each scene which was a representation of the performances but didn’t necessarily reflect the shots or the angles that would ultimately be there so the discipline was to concentrate solely on the performance. We would actually build a scene as best we could with sound effect, music, anything to enhance the experience of evaluated the performances in the context of a scene, even though it did not even remotely resemble the scene because you have actors in motion capture suits and a bunch of set people — crew — standing around with props, throwing things or whatever, doing things to make it a more real experience for them. It was very challenging but we could evaluate the movie in performance capture form before we actually went to shoot the movie.

This is clearly only the tip of the iceberg on what they are going to be covering at Editfest NY so if you’re in the area, I encourage you to check it out.

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