CHAPTER 8

Managing Your Time

Unlike many kinds of film work, dialogue editing is amazingly unsupervised. If you’re editing the music or effects for a television special, or perhaps a documentary, you’ll usually be working with a client or a supervisor. But if you’re cutting dialogue on a feature film, you’re mostly left to your own devices. A dialogue job with a lot of work and only a deadline to guide you requires planning and discipline.

Screen First

I like to screen a film before I actually begin working on it, even before the initial spotting session. And I prefer to do this any place but the picture editing room, the worst imaginable listening environment. The ideal spot is the dubbing stage where the film will be mixed, ideally with the rerecording mixer and someone from the production. This offers several advantages.

The purpose of the initial screening is not to solve the innumerable problems of the film’s dialogue but for you to decide these issues.

That’s all. But that’s a lot.

Use an Evaluation Form and Past Project Timesheets

When I screen a film for the first time, I bring a form for evaluating it (refer to Figure 7-1). I use it to remind me to ask the right questions and to make it as easy as possible to compare this film with past projects. This helps me come up with a schedule and a budget, and it’s also handy for recording my impressions of what to expect from the director and picture editor.

After the screening, I use my report to see how the film stacks up against previous projects. Of course, this only works because of another piece of data: my project timesheets, where I record my working hours and what I do each day on a project. I use them to make sure I’m on target with my hours and that I’m being paid fairly, and as an archive to use in budgeting future projects. (See Figure 8-1.)

When I see a film for the first time, I ask myself which of my former projects it reminds me of. Once I can limit it to a few choices, I check the timesheets and have a pretty good idea where I stand. Of course, it often matters little what I think about the needs of the dialogue. What ultimately sets the rules is the (often seemingly arbitrary) budget the producer has assembled. If a producer has etched into his mind what your budget will be—your fee and your allotted hours—then there isn’t much you can do about it. If you think it’s doable, take the gig. If not, walk away.

Set Daily Goals

You’ve negotiated the number of studio hours available to you and settled on a schedule. You know the deadline, and you know when the film will arrive. Aside from a screening here and there, no one cares how you organize yourself. Still, to make sure you finish on time and that the project doesn’t turn into the film from hell, you must plan your days.

Because dialogue editing is a predictable, methodical operation, it’s relatively easy to break it into parts and develop a plan. I normally organize dialogue work into three passes, with the first one being the most demanding and each successive pass more general and flowing. A typical plan breakdown is shown in Table 8-1.

Figure 8-1 A timesheet for tracking editing hours. Recording time spent for each part of a project makes future estimates more accurate.

The schedule shown in the table is front loaded, with the overwhelming majority of my editing time devoted to getting started and completing the first pass. Why?

Table 8-1 Dialogue Editing Passes

Schedule Your Time

Make up a schedule that marks the important landmarks of your film. These landmarks aren’t yet your steps in the process but rather the important dates for it.

Put these dates on your calendar. They’re the realities you have to deal with. Of course, everything will change, but you have to start somewhere.

See how many days remain for actual editing. If you originally had 30 days for dialogue editing but 4 will be taken up with ADR spotting, director meetings, and the like, assume you have 26 actual working days. Using the percentages from Table 8-1, determine how many days you have for each step in the process. Your 26-day schedule for a 6-double-reel film might look like what’s shown in Table 8-2.

Before plugging these days into your calendar, remove one or two from pass 1 and one from pass 2. Unfair? Perhaps, but this is your contingency if something surprising comes up. Something surprising always comes up. The computer breaks, your child gets sick, the director wants to screen again, you get stuck in an unanticipated ADR recording session. It’s limitless. Stealing from yourself about 10 percent of your editing budget will save you when you need it.

Now you can create a schedule that might look like Figure 8-2.

As a last step, I calculate how much film time, on average, I must complete during each shift. Our imaginary 6-reel film is 105 minutes long and we’ve budgeted 15 days for the first pass. This means we have to average 7 minutes of film dialogue each day to stay on schedule. Of course, some days are good, others are bad. There are times you’re the smartest, most creative editor ever seen and times when you wonder how you got the job. That’s why the 7-minute average is just that—a benchmark for this film—but it’s a useful tool for knowing where you stand.

Table 8-2 Breakdown of 26-day Schedule

Occasionally you’ll find yourself editing smaller projects with very quick turnarounds. Say you have a 90-minute documentary for which you have to edit (or rather salvage) the production sound in three days. That’s 30 minutes of film per day! Now, if you work a 10-hour shift, which means about 9 useful hours, you have to average about 3½ minutes of film per hour of work. The first day will be slow because you have to set up your session, label the tracks, and get to know the film. So day 2 will have to be extra aggressive (as though you could be more aggressive!) to make up for lost time from day 1. Some people find this kind of micro-organization stressful and neurotic. Others find it comforting. Your choice.

Estimate How Long the Editing Will Take

Even if you’re an ace estimator and you have an impressive database of previous jobs to use for budgeting your new job, you’ll quickly realize that the dialogue budget—and hence the amount of time you’ll have to work on the film—is largely out of your hands. It’s common for a producer to ask you how long you think it will take to make a masterpiece out of her muck. After a good deal of detailed analysis, phone calls to colleagues, and educated guesses, you decide on seven weeks. Don’t be offended when your thoughtful response is met with “Seven weeks, you think? That’s nice, but we’re going to do it in three weeks.” You wonder why she asked.

Figure 8-2 One month of a dialogue editor’s life.

Although it’s not really up to you to decide how much time and money the film’s dialogue will get, it’s still important to have a grasp of the possibilities. At the very least, you need to know if it’s worth your while to take the job. Use the timesheets from previous projects as a guide for estimating how long the job ought to take. If your estimate is reasonably close to the producer’s mandate, then you can likely scrimp a bit here, give up a few free hours there, cut a corner or two in places, and pull it off. But if the schedule you’re being “offered” is wildly out of line with any comparable project you’ve done under similar circumstances, reconsider the offer.

What’s “reasonable”? In general, two weeks per reel of dialogue (without ADR) is very comfortable. It depends, of course, on the problems you’ll inherit with the tracks, as well as the expectations and temperament of the director. With two weeks per reel, however, you really have nothing to complain about. On low-budget films, a week a reel is more common, and even this is doable if the gods are with you. But when the schedule creeps below a week a reel, beware of problems. It’s by no means impossible to cut a film in less time, but there’ll be the inevitable compromises. I’ve cut dialogue at a reel a day, but such jobs are more embalming than editing. And if you’re the least bit conscientious, very tight schedules result in far greater stress than more reasonable gigs do. You work harder only to be paid less.

Negotiate

When negotiating your time and fee, try to keep the dialogue and ADR as separate items. First of all, they are separate. Dialogue editors edit, ADR supervisors plan and direct the ADR, and ADR editors cut the tracks. On small films, though, it’s common for the dialogue editor to have some (or all) of the ADR responsibilities. Since small films often have “just a little” ADR, there may be no ADR supervisor and the dialogue editor is expected to fill in the gap. Before you shake hands on the deal, clarify your ADR responsibilities: spotting, planning, directing, recording, and editing.

ADR supervision is a full-time job. Properly spotting the calls and preparing the paperwork aren’t minor tasks. Be certain that you know the range of your responsibilities before you settle on a fee and schedule. If the supervising sound editor is covering the ADR spotting, planning, and recording, or if there’s an ADR supervisor, you may be left with just the ADR editing. Once the supervising sound editor comes up with a count of the lines to be recorded, you can calculate how long it will take to cut those lines into the film. There’s no need to get petty or paranoid or greedy about the extra work. Just take this into account when you’re making your deal.

Negotiating the amount of time you’ll have to work on a film is one of your most important responsibilities. It’s not just about money. If you can get an extra week, or even a few more days, to spend with the film, your tracks will be more than happy to show their appreciation.

Work Out of Sequence

As you organize your tracks and figure out how scenes were constructed, you’ll begin to crack the code of the film’s dialogue. You’d think that cutting dialogue would be very similar on all films, but it’s just not true. Beyond the obvious technical differences, each film’s dialogue tracks have personalities of their own. It’s up to you to figure out what they are. The more time you spend with a film’s dialogue, the closer you’ll come to understanding how to edit it. Too bad for the first reel you cut, because that’s where you know the least, where you’re stabbing in the dark for inspiration. As you work more on the film, you get better at knowing what to do to make the tracks happy.

The first and last reels of any film are its most important. During the first few minutes of a film, viewers—listeners—pass judgment on the soundtrack. “Is this a competent soundtrack? Is the dialogue well edited? Can I relax and enjoy the movie, or do I have to be on the alert for sound silliness?” Like meeting prospective in-laws, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. Don’t blow it.

Similarly, there’s no room for sloppiness or insecurity in the last reel’s dialogue, since the “sound memory” that a viewer will go home with comes from the end of the film. Run a perfect 3½ laps of a 1600-meter race but choke on the last turn and you’ll be remembered only for your fizzle. The last reel is no place to learn how to cut the film.

Combining all of these factors, I don’t edit dialogue in film order. I always start with an interior reel and then work my way outward. I also never save the final reel for last, since I can count on being tired and stressed at that point. A typical 6-reel editing sequence might be 3,2,1,6,4,5. I don’t eliminate editorial teething pains by beginning with an interior reel, but I bury them in a less critical location, in the film’s “soft underbelly.”

There’s another practical reason to forgo the first and last reels when you begin editing the dialogue. You did everything in your power to make sure that the picture department locked the film before handing it over to you. In truth, though, there’s nothing you can do to prevent an avalanche of changes. The problems of the film really are bigger than you, but this doesn’t mean that you have to be stupid about changes. Beginning your edit in the middle of the film may buy you a bit of peace. Of course, you can’t predict where postlock picture changes will occur, but it’s reasonable to assume that the first and last reels are more vulnerable than the interior reels to change. Story setup problems occur largely at the beginning; resolution issues, at the end. If the film is still having birthing pains after picture lock, the odds are good that the first and last reels are most at risk. Start with an interior reel, and hopefully by the time you’re ready for the exterior reels the dust will have settled.

Expect Changes

Despite your 3-color cross-indexed schedules (or perhaps because of them), things will change. The film will be recut, a key actor will be away during ADR, the director will need a special scratch mix to show at her daughter’s birthday party. That’s filmmaking. Take a breath, pull out a fresh calendar, and redo your schedule. You’ll survive.