Show notes
Recorded live in front of a "studio audience" at the National Association of Broadcaster's convention, editor Bob Ducsay (The Mummy, Looper, Knives Out) discusses his work on director Rian Johnson's entry into the Skywalker saga, Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. Bob details the pre-viz process from the 'Battle on Crait' scene, as well as how post-viz was a powerful weapon in his editorial arsenal. Bob also walks the audience through the "Snoke's Throne Room" scene and describes how an editor utilizes "suspense" versus "surprise". He also describes working with the pre-existing template of the Star Wars universe and modifying it both visually and sonically to create something new and different within the trilogy. Bob's work on his new film, Knives Out, has been nominated for a 2020 ACE Eddie Award in the category of Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy). To hear all the latest interviews with the biggest names in TV and Film Post Production, subscribe to The Rough Cut. Get your own Avid Media Composer and use the same editing tools that bring the Star Wars movies to the big screen! Leave us a message at (781) 334-8369 with suggestions or questions. If I use it in a podcast, I'll send you something cool! TRANSCRIPT>> Matt Feury Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage editor Bob Ducsay. Bob Ducsay Matt! Nice to be here with you. Matt Feury Okay, so that was a little intense. Reflections? Thoughts? What do you remember most about cutting that sequence there? Bob Ducsay It looks exhausting to do. Matt Feury It felt exhausting. Bob Ducsay I know. But interestingly enough, this particular sequence had challenges that you wouldn't necessarily guess because a lot of the great complexities of the sequence were worked out in prep and in early post production. In this particular case, in early post production. This sequence was pre-visualized, which is sort of a low resolution cartoon that's made of the sequence. But what happens in a sequence like that is you have this template that you start with, but then you start to make all of the changes in the sequence as the photography comes in, and this sequence was no different in that way. And one of the big challenges of a sequence like this is because it's so visual effects intensive. In my editorial job, I'm heavily involved with the visual effects, and mapping all that out, and how all of those things interact, and all of the timings, even though some of those things will have been worked out, you know, as a template and a starting point in the pre-vis, there's an enormous amount more work that has to happen. So this sequence is really a lot about the complexity of the visual effects. But you get all of these extra things when you're shooting. And so the sequence changes and evolves over time. And another thing about the sequence is, this isn't the whole Battle of Crait. This isn't just a clip from it. But even what's in the final movie was considerably shorter than what was originally envisioned and photograph but, you know, in the total run of the movie, we found that it was a little bit long, so we compressed it. So those are the sort of challenges that a sequence like this has. Matt Feury You mentioned the animatic part of it. I found that really interesting, the pre-prep, because I remember a lot of the talk about the original Star Wars back in 1977, George Lucas would cut together shots of aerial dogfights from old World War Two movies, as a point of reference, and this is very similar to that, where you're literally putting together a sequence that represents what you're finally going to do, and then laying over the new shots on top of that. Bob Ducsay Well, to some degree, yes. And I mean, that's amazing what they did back in, you know, 1976, when they were making the movie. Because they didn't have the ability, they didn't have these tools that we have now. So, it's a fantastic way of envisioning and it's something that we kind of refer to as rip-o-matics. And we still do those sort of things because even in this film, there are times when you want something that just represents something that you think you need, and if we can go to another movie that we know has something like that, it could be another Star Wars movie, but it could be something completely different depending on the idea. And we'll source that and put it that in as a temporary thing that might only represent what the camera is supposed to do. It might represent the rough length of the thing. But it's something to allow us to envision what we're looking for and what we need from the visual effects guys, and then ultimately what happens in post production on these movies is that you have a post-viz department. And what that is, is there's a series of animators that are around that you can literally walk down the hall and you could say, I need a shot where the Falcon dodges this TIE Fighter moving left to right, and does this sort of thing. And they will build that shot. And then that shot becomes a template for for ILM to do the visual effect. So it's a very iterative process, but it's an unbelievable tool that allows us to represent things that don't exist. Matt Feury So I find that, as I do these interviews, I forget until the very end to ask about the overall process and people go, "Why didn't you ask them what they shot and what the editing room setup was like"? So, could you just walk us through a brief synopsis of the editorial process from the handoff from production into post and over to the other viz and sound departments? Bob Ducsay Sure. Well, the the movie was photographed principally in the United Kingdom, outside of London, at Pinewood Studios. And at Pinewood, FotoKem, which was one of our vendors, the lab vendor, they built a digital lab there, including scanning. So all the scanning was in house and just for our operation. The movie was photographed I'd say somewhere around 70%, maybe 75% on 35 millimeter scope film. And then the rest of it was a combination of Alexa digital Alexa 65 digital and some small amount of IMAX. So the film would come in, they'd scan everything at 4K, they would build DNX 115 files for us to use in editorial but then they would generate all the other various needs for people, including pulling material for ILM, because we're turning visual effects over while we're shooting. And so there was a whole infrastructure put together for this particular film that was specific to this film. Matt Feury Early on in your career you did films like The Mummy, The Mummy Returns. And those were groundbreaking in terms of the visual effects stuff done there. There were treatments that you used in those films that became points of reference for years after that, with the particle effects that you did. Here in Star Wars, you already have this sort of, it feels like a template about the visual world there. Did you find that constraining that you had to sort of conform to this way of doing things, or did you take the existing elements and tweak them and take them in different directions? Bob Ducsay Well, when you talk about some things in the movie,. I mean, it is true, you know, a Tie Fighter looks like a Tie Fighter, an X wing looks like an X wing. And so there are some things that a really strong template exists for, but then there's many, many things that are specific to this film that are designed from the ground up. I mean, if you think of the sequence with Snoke, who Andy Serkis plays in motion capture, and he's a digital character. So that's all very, very specific to this film, and there's there's a lot of things that are like that. And then even in like this sequence, you know, the the skim speeders, which are the vehicles that you saw in this clip, one of the things that Ryan Johnson the director wanted was he had a very, very specific, I'm going to call it "art direction" notion of what that material should look like, and what the colors should be. And this went into prep on the movie. In as much as there are actually physical effects of those explosions. So a lot of the ideas behind that started to be worked out in prep on the movie and physical effects that were going off in the movie. And the actual physical production led to a portion of the design work for the visual effects. However, all of that still continued to evolve in the post production process. So that, just as an example, is an idea that hasn't been explored in any other movies and maybe some of the technical aspects of executing that were the same as some that have been used before. But for this particular film, there was a tremendous amount of focus on how that sequence, from a visual effects standpoint and even from an editing standpoint, is art directed. Matt Feury How about sonically? Because, if you think about the Star Wars world, it's the sounds more than anything; the lightsabers, the blasters, the sound of an X wing and a Tie Fighter, that are so well established. But I noticed in watching the Crait battle, there's almost a new set of sounds that were really more organic, the sort of the thudding of the guns, they sounded more like organic guns and things like that. When you're cutting, do you just go back to Ben Burtt's original sound effects library because you can and you start incorporating that where and when you please? Bob Ducsay Well, I mean, it's a whole slew of things to be precise, because just anecdotally, the first week we were in and we started cutting the movie, my assistant does a lot of the sound effects tracking for me, and, I'd walk in in the morning and I would hear sounds that I'd heard my entire life and I wanted to know why somebody was putting Star Wars sounds in our movie. And so these are such iconic important sounds that a lot of things, some of them even go back to the original Ben Burtt designs. But then there are other things you know, we had an incredible sound team up at Skywalker. They invented many, many things that hadn't been used and some things were modified from some of the original Ben Burtt sounds. And it's interesting that you pointed out the the sort of thumping of the impacts hitting the ground because I love that sound effect. And it's something that we worked really very hard on. And what that is, is that we never really got what we wanted. And then during the dub, one of the sound effects editors who's sitting there while we're mixing the movie, tried some drum hits. And that's actually what those things are. So they're the furthest thing from explosions, but they have the right sort of emotional sense that you want from it. And this is something that we're always striving for while we're cutting the movie, both with the cutting of the movie, the telling of the story, the sound effects, the visual effects; you're always trying to evoke a strong emotion from the audience and, in that particular case, something quite unusual was used. Matt Feury You mentioned Snoke and we actually do have a scene from the lightsaber battle in the scene with Snoke and Rey and Kylo. Let's talk a little bit about that scene and the challenges you faced working on that particular scene. Bob Ducsay Well, I just I really love this scene, because, you know, the the heart of the movie to me is the "Luke, Rey Kylo" triangle, and the Rey/Kylo part of it really takes some twists and turns in this moment in this section of the film. And one of the things that was difficult about doing this movie is that we never got to screen the film for an audience, because you just don't do it because there's too many things that can't get out there. We cut the movie on the Walt Disney lot in Burbank and they built a small theater for us that seated 14 people. So the most, the biggest number of people that ever saw the movie was 14. So you don't really get the kind of reaction, you have to really kind of hope that it's working. And we had great confidence, for us, that this was awesome. And it was gonna work. But we never had any type of verification from an audience until the premiere, which happened just a few weeks before the movie was released. And for the first time, we showed the movie in front of 2500 people and the audience went nuts for the sequence and all those things that you're excited about. People were really reacting to the way that we had hoped. But you on films of this size, that isn't normally the case. You normally get to take them out and show them to somebody to understand things that the audience doesn't get or things that don't work. So that was a particular challenge and many of the things in the movie, but in this scene in particular,was something that we had really hoped would work, and thankfully it did. But I think one of the most interesting things about the sequence is, from an editorial standpoint, is that you're working with a motion capture character. And in this particular case, Andy Serkis played this character and gave a tremendous performance of which in the sequence nearly all of what you see is Andy's performance. There's a shot where Snoke looks down at the lightsaber and he looks over to Rey and Kylo. That's a keyframe shot because we didn't have that specific shot in the movie, or in the in the mocap when the movie was photographed. But besides that, most of it's, you know, nearly all Andy stuff. But the difficulty is that because you can take things from different takes, and you can, even within a shot within a close up, you can be switching takes, it adds a tremendous amount of overhead for the editor, because there are so many options as to what you can do. And I think that that's a particular complexity here. And another thing about motion capture is because ultimately, I mean, nearly all those shots are completely digital shots, including the background, what you see in the original photography, the camera doesn't have to be there. So now you could start talking about, "Well, I want the camera to do this. and I wanted to come around there". So, the director in conjunction with me, we're figuring those things out. So it adds an extra layer of complexity when things are not really there that are ultimately there in the final movie. Matt Feury To call this a big movie is the understatement of the year. But what kind of pressure does that put on you as an editor, in terms of time and in terms of expectations? Did you approach it the same way you'd approach a film like Looper or a film like The Mummy? Bob Ducsay Well, I think the main thing that you have to do, no matter what the film is, you have to try to do the best that you can to tell a great story and to do everything that you can to make the characters work absolutely the best they possibly can and to be true to themselves. So in that way, this movie is like every other film, because those are your goals and those have to be your goals no matter the budget, no matter what the resources. In this particular film, I would say the biggest pressure was simply the expectations of the film. Because people were very excited about the film, as they are on all Star Wars films, and you don't want to screw it up. So that's something that you think about every day, and all the people in my cutting room and the director and the producer, everyone loves Star Wars so much that we felt a particular responsibility to do our very best and to make [a great film]. So I would say that's the biggest pressure because you talk about schedule and all that, I mean, we had a tremendously long schedule…
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