TOM NOONAN movies: How they get EDITED - WHAT HAPPENED WAS... THE WIFE - independent movies

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WHAT HAPPENED WAS... (click here for THE WIFE)

Having very little money we decided to cut on video (I owned an editing system the summer after attending the Sundance Workshop. Though slow, it would have to suffice). We printed only three or fours rolls of film during the shoot just to give us an idea of the color, to see if the focus was sharp, and to check if the lighting setups matched, scene to scene. But to save money we did a video transfer direct from the negative. All our editing and previews were on video. We then did a video matchback negative cut without ever seeing anything printed. This method is all too common today but at the time it was still considered pretty risky.

I edited the film (under the assumed name, Richmond Arrley - I didn't want to take credit for too many jobs fearing it would prejudice an audience against the film as a vanity production.) This process took nearly a year. We test screened the movie on projected video every few weeks toward the end of the edit to see how an audience reacted. My opinion of test screenings is that they can be very helpful if handled properly. What we did was hand out card at each screening asking for people to list things they liked or disliked about the film, things they didn't understand, and things they found too obvious, etc. But I never read the cards. My producer, Scott Macaulay, would read them and if an issue came up repeatedly he would tell me. For me the screening were more helpful in a more direct way - I would sit at the back of the room and feel how the screening was going. Where did the film feel slow, when did it feel confusing. And with each screening these would change - for example, a particular scene for one audience would often have a completely different meaning from another audience - and I could sense that. It made me realize that a film really only exists in the moment it is being watched by a particular audience, not unlike a play in that way. I was interested in consistency - I would look for scenes that would usually be confusing or boring (link to BORING) and I would go back and work on those sections and then show it to another audience. Over time I think this process helped the film enormously - it was not unlike the play process helping clarify the script for the actors and me.

The sound editing was done in an even riskier way in order to give me unlimited mixing time for almost no money. I used a Roland DM-80 digital mixer/recorder (8 track) to do the sound work. We synced up the dialog thru SMPTE output from my analog video editing system (Panasonic S-VHS decks). We cleaned up the production tracks, did the affects (most of which we recorded ourselves and then laid in using samplers), composed the music and did the final mix in a tiny little apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (directly across the street from the theater where the play was presented).

A sound technique I attempted in WHAT HAPPENED WAS... (sort of a parallel to the color scheme) was to take sounds elements from Jackie's reading of the story and put them subtly into the sound track earlier on in the story. For example, we took Jackie's vocal screeching car sound (which opens the children's story) and put that under every chair scrape and outside car tire squeal in the rest of the film. I also put that screeching sound in as the dolly pushes in on the video monitor as Michael arrives at Jackie's apartment. I also took words from the Jackie's reading of the story and slowed them down (to create a male type voice) and speeded them up (to create children's voices) and put these voices outside in the street and coming in from neighboring apartments throughout the early part of the story. These were at a low volume as we hoped that they would create a subliminal underpinning for the later developments in the story.

The job of composing the music for the film fell to me. I did it also under an assumed name ( Ludovico Sorret) for the same reason I did as an editor. There was really only the opening and closing numbers and the two source events ('Til Tuesday - Voices Carry and the torch song that Jackie puts on the stereo after dinner).

Once the mix was complete we dumped it to a stereo timecode DAT and transferred that sound directly to optical, never having synced up the sound on any film format before the final print was made. As far as I know this was the first time anyone had done the sound on a movie without ever using mag stock or film as a medium for mixing or syncing. And we were on a terrible deadline. The film had been accepted at the Sundance Film Festival and if something didn't sync we'd have to go back several steps to fix it and that delay would have probably prevented us from getting a print done in time for our competition screenings. But miracle of miracles EVERY SINGLE reel synced up perfectly on the first pass! I was in rehearsal of WIFEY when the transfer was being checked out by Scott Macaulay at DuArt. We had a phone on the stage and he would call me as he checked each - calling me every 10 or 12 minutes to tell me that in amazement that every reel was perfect. We had a film - in sync!

THE WIFE (click here for WHAT HAPPENED WAS... edit info)

It was very different finishing a film when someone else was paying for it. These differences were, for me, positive and negative.

On the plus side, money was there to complete the film (on a very, very tight budget). We were able to afford to do the sound in stereo with Dolby, which in the case of the simultaneous scenes (link) being intelligible was an imperative. CIBY also had a distribution arm in Europe and a sales company worldwide which promised to make the sale and distribution (link) of the film somewhat less precarious.

On the other hand we were under contract to deliver the film faster than I felt comfortable. I wanted a full year to complete - they wanted it in six months. In the end they gave us most of the year to finish but we had to operate for months under a schedule that was, for me, unproductive. There was also a provision in the contract regarding the length of the film - it had to be more than 90 minutes but less than 110 minutes. At first this didn't seem a problem but when the first edit came in at 130 minutes it grew to be one. On WHAT HAPPENED WAS... there were none of these constraints and even though I completely understand a financier wanting some basic assurances as to delivery schedule and length, I found it unhelpful in the process of trying to make the best film possible. I know you probably would think this is bit nit picky stuff (considering the fact that I had complete final cut and CIBY had made no suggestions about the script or casting or shooting - even the notes they sent when seeing rough cuts were very minor and were always followed with a reaffirmation of my right to final cut) but still I found it a difficult situation.

I cut again using my own S-VHS editing system. We cut the negative the same way (Dan O'Grady at JG Films) using matchback and we again printed almost nothing to film during post (there were a few focus questions that required us to see the footage on film). We again did test screening every two weeks during the last three months of the editing. This again proved invaluable.

The sound was again done on the Roland DM-80 digital work station but this time Scott Macaulay insisted we do a ‘real' mix at a studio. Bill Nisselson (at Sound One) gave us a very good deal and we did the final mix in three days using Riley Steele. Considering the limited mix time the film came out rather well. But looking back I would have preferred to have done the entire mix again on the DM-80 (even though we had 48 tracks at Sound One and the DM-80 is only 8 track). And this in no way is a knock to Sound One. They're one of the best mixing facilities in the world. I just find that time is the single most important resource in low and no budget film making. (link) I would have liked to have a minimum of a month to deal with the stereo image questions that came up when doing the simultaneous scenes

alone. There was no way to test the sound with preview audiences as we had with WHAT HAPPENED WAS... We just had too many tracks to handle in the DM-80 alone. We had to wait to the mix to hear everything together. Next time I'm going to mix at home again if I can swing it.

Timing the final print of THE WIFE was also a very time consuming process. We went through three timing sessions at DuArt before it started to come together at all and finally I was allowed to be present (a great and rare privilege usually reserved for such directors as Woody Allen) for the actual corrections on the Hesseltine. The problem was not with the lab - nor was it with my cinematographer, Joe DeSalvo, who did an astounding job. It was just in the nature of what we were trying to do - we shot at very low light (with the aperture nearly wide open) a film that was 75% lit by unpredictable candle and fire light. For example, matching all the angles as far as density and shade in the dinner scene was a nightmare. And the exteriors were mostly shot completely by kerosene torches which were impossible to control (they'd start out very bright and would fade up and down in unpredictable jumps during every scene) On top of that it was very windy. Matching those scenes, cut-to-cut, was delicate and time consuming.

conceived written cast rehearsed shot edited financed distributed

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