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[Monday at NAB]
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Cassidy Tells Editors About Storytelling
Academy Award Nominee Recounts Digital Workflow, Works With Penn
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by Walter Schoenknecht ,
~ April 14, 2008
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TV TECHNOLOGY
Academy Award nominee Jay Cassidy told a rapt NAB Post|Production World audience that he’d rather forego the customary “film editor as surgeon” analogy in favor of a more creative comparison: sculptor.
“Thanks to digital technology,” Cassidy said, “the clay stays wet longer; and our ability to shape and reshape is given such greater power.”
The Sunday morning keynote audience heard Cassidy, a 2008 Academy Award nominee for Best Achievement in Editing, deliver a revealing exploration of the film editor’s contributions to the storyteller’s art.
“Movies are the 20th-century storytelling tradition,” Cassidy said. “Part of the delight in my job is to make my contribution to the way stories are told.”
Comfortable as a presenter, Cassidy painted a well-structured portrait, echoing the structure he clearly saw laced through director Sean Penn’s 2007 feature “Into the Wild.” Even more telling, however, were his departures from his own structure, taking delight in sharing both the small, moment-to-moment decisions and the big themes and structures that underlie the project.
What emerged was a depiction of the editor as vitally involved in the telling of a film’s story. Cassidy’s frequent references to the craft of “the filmmaker” were clearly intended to include his own contribution as editor, and the individual anecdotes and scene descriptions he presented painted a consistent, albeit humble, portrait of the editor as a creative collaborator.
According to Cassidy, Penn’s clear structure for the film facilitated a kind of storytelling that leaves the impression of a patchwork of multiple points of view.
“Sean wrote the script as a linear story,” Cassidy said. And while Penn realized during production that intercutting flashbacks and alternate narratives would be an integral part of the film, he consciously deferred planning those cuts until after the film was shot. “Every editor will tell you that ‘the edit is the final draft of the script,’ Cassidy said. “In this particular film, it was at least acknowledged on the way in.”
In order to permit this sort of variability during editing, director Penn and his production team agreed to a framework of eight “guiding principles,” a combination of storytelling goals and production must-haves, which provided a set of landmarks around which other elements could be arranged.
Working both in the studio and on-location over the film’s episodic eight-month shooting schedule, Cassidy and his assistant were able to assemble periodic recaps of prior footage, which proved helpful in reorienting the cast and crew following each break.
Consistent with his ensemble-oriented depiction of the editor’s role in storytelling, Cassidy positioned the editing style of the scenes he showed strictly in the context of the unfolding story. The editor’s work, he explained, can’t be judged apart from the film itself. “There’s no such thing as a well-edited scene in a film that doesn’t work,” he said. “And nobody buys a ticket to see a scene out of context.”
Cassidy’s repeated collaboration with director Penn may result from a shared view of the filmmakers’ relationship with their audience — and with the story itself. As Cassidy told the Post|Production World audience, “Storytelling, at its heart, is an act of generosity on the part of the storyteller.”
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