I thought that I was prepared for the editing in terms of theory and practice and experience. However, for the editing of NoOne I chose to follow the method from the book “In a Blink of an eye” by Walter Murch. I followed not only his principle about the importance when to cut in reference to the shot.
He proposes to judge a cut if it follows the next characteristics Emotion (51%), Story (23%), Rhythm (10%), Eye-Trace (7%), Two-Dimensional Plane of Screen (5%), Three Dimensional Space of Action (4%). I even followed his suggestion about the work process during his editing. I set up a standing desk and I started to review the entire footage. We had a little bit of less than 1 TB of 4k footage for the 17 days of shooting; this was the footage from both - the feature film and the footage shot for the documentary. So for the feature film we had around 700 GB of raw material. If one minute(60sec) 4K mp4 file was around 1 GB of memory then we had around 700 minutes or twelve hours of footage. For a feature film this is quite a lot of material it is like for a 90 minutes long film is somewhere around 1:4 or 1:5 shooting ratio, the standard, the average standard for feature film is 1:3.
As I said it before I was not aware of the quality of the shot material. Because of the problems with the equipment (our available laptops couldn't play the 4k footage without to drag the footage or just to stop or to scribble the frames, the only one laptop which was able to play smoothly was used for the data loading and backing up) and the video monitor. I was able only to review and watch the shots from the camera display. The camera displays are very tricky, some of them are showing brighter and more saturate images than the real image, this was the case with the GH4. Actually the exposure of the real footage was always 1 stop or even 2 stops down from what was seen in the display monitor.
At the end of September 2014 I sat down or better said I stood up in front of my two computer displays and started reviewing the material. I remember that I started again simultaneously to read the screenplay from its beginning but I was so captivated and interested to watch the production footage that I dropped the screenplay and since then I have never ever picked it throughout the entire editing process.
There is a saying that editing is the final draft of the screenplay so I wanted to experience really how powerful, how deep and how much can be done with the editing.
I spent a week or even more just watching all the footage and I found out that my real journey just was at its beginning. I didn't know where to start at all, I was overwhelmed by the quality of the material. So many shots with different angles, from different points of views I started to write down some notes about the shots which I liked but then I stopped and at the end of the second week I decided that I needed a much more structured and disciplined way of working. I wanted instead of doing some quality creative work, in terms of choosing which take and shot to use for the assembly to do some quantity work first in terms of syncing sound for the entire video and audio material and getting to know very well what actually we had shot.
First I started to sync the footage with the production sound, I created for every day a timeline in which I was dropping all of the clips without doing any trans-coding or converting. I was using the original 4k source on a full HD timeline. I started to sync the sound with the clips. Thank god that we used a clapper board. I did the syncing for another week. I needed to do it really precisely and for more of the clips I had to do it manually.
At the end of the third week I had 17 timelines for every one of the 17 days full with the synced footage and the sound shot on that day.
It was at the end of October 2014 two months after the wrap of the movie and I was at a stage where I didn't even start to select and put down an assembly what else to build and edit of the film. We couldn't afford an editor or even an assistant editor. So all of the work had to be done by myself.
I felt that it was the right moment to do an assembly which basically is a really long version of the entire film scene by scene, act by act, from beginning to its end. In the assembly you are not cutting precisely but instead you are building the structure of the film. However, I needed to be very precise and selective when choosing which shot and which take to get instead of the others variants of the same and here the real struggle began.
It took me another two weeks to go through all of the footage to start selecting the ones which I felt I would be using in the assembly. I found out that we had lots of problems with the shot materiel. From technical like very shaky camera and unusable takes because of that, to ones like with just not good acting or really bad sound and over exposed scenes. I felt that I was cutting the film more like I would edit a documentary. Building the story from the material which I had not from the ideas and the screenplay which we had. Of course this is an exaggerated statement because all of the material was shot and played following a screenplay and a structured story so I just wanted to use the best of what we had. I also felt the need to let go of the film itself to tell its story, so I was trying to be responsive, sensitive and receptive as much as possible.
When I finished the assembly of the film it was almost three hours . I felt that for the first rough cut in order to cut out one hour out of it, because we wanted the film not to be more than 90 minutes I needed extra visual help. I again did what Walter Munch was doing. I printed out a very big visual board with screenshots(filmgrabs) with all of the film's scenes' most emotionally crucial and important shots in a sequence.
Thus I had a visual map of the entire film, we placed it on the wall in Boris's children's room, where actually I was cutting the film, he was still sleeping with us so his room was available to be used as a post production studio for the next one year and a half.
I started cutting the rough cut of the film. I already had spent more than three months editing the film and I was trimming but not cutting out, I was able to get it to around two hours. The biggest problem which I found was that we were telling and thus shooting the film from so many characters' perspectives. In the screenplay we tried to write for every one of the five characters a character arc with subplot for every one of them. Probably thus we were compensating for our lack of experience and we were trying to cover up the feeling that there were not enough interesting events happening or that the story wasn't deep enough or that we tried to compensate for the lack of a leading protagonist.
Basically in the screenplay and its story was written with many protagonists who are having one same goal, their wholeness, well being and happiness. However, when I was editing I felt that in the limitation of the frame of time which we had I wasn't able to give enough screen time for every one of them. If I wanted the film to be 90 minutes I wouldn't be able to tell their stories. So what was our problem to make the film to be more than 90 minutes. In 2013 and 2014 I already saw that the audience span of interest was shrinking down. We thought that for a provocative psychological drama shot in Bulgarian language in Bulgaria it was crucial to be as short as possible if we wanted the film to be watchable and to be possible to be sold out and distributed worldwide. However, the most important thing even wasn't the sale and marketing strategy for the film but its focus.
I felt that if we were following the screenplay's structure and point of views, we were lacking focus and dramatic depth. Our intention from the very beginning was to create a film which to show the character's inner world transformations. So I felt that I had to choose to tell the story from a single point of view in order to create and show this transformation in detail, despite that we weren't shot the film that way. What I mean by that. When I was shooting a scene, I was shooting the dialogue, the reactions and actions of every character involved in it, that way I managed to cover every character's point of view involved in the scene, and in the film.
However, one is what you want, the other thing is what you have. I found out that I didn't have enough good takes or enough length of the good takes to create a solid one point of view story. So I had to mix the perspectives and make more poetic film in order to create this feeling of inner world life and transformation. Everything was edited in order for our main protagonist Vera to experience a real inner transformation on screen and this transformation to be believable and emotionally powerful for the audience.
Aggressive editing, attacking the material and cutting out the fat from it until the film starts to look a little bit rushed out, then you go and put back some length here and there. This is the advice which some of the best editors are giving when being asked about film editing. And this is the hardest thing about editing, to get the right amount of fat cut out. I think this only can be determined by inner feeling and pure intuition. It's about feeling for emotional authenticity, rhythm, movement, space, time, dialogue, sound and music.
By the way I was assembling and then editing the film with muted sound. I did hear what the take and the shot was about, but when I edited the shot I dropped it to the timeline where there was no sound. I was cutting the rough cut looking for emotion and reactions, and mainly I was looking for the information to come from the action and the reaction in the scene and not from the dialogue, the sound design and the music. So basically I was making a silence film. I found out that with this process I was able to separate very distinctively the layers of information. It was very clear what were the information coming from the cinematography with its colors, compositions, camera movement, and perspective, then I was catching the second layer, the dialogue, another layer, sound design and at the end the music.
It was at the end of February 2015 and beginning of March. Boris was having his first birthday in his life, we celebrated it with friends and family. I was celebrating another good occasion. I got a NoOne's first rough cut. It was two hours long. I showed it to Vasil, Yavor, Blagovesta and Nikolay. We discussed what can be removed and what could be edited. We agreed that it was too long and it needed to be cut at least to 90minutes so I needed to cut out another 30 min.
It took me another month and a half just to make the final cut 92 minutes and then I started to play with the structure and the continuity of the scenes. I changed the beginning of the film, I started to arrange the entire film around the character of Vera, because I found out that her character was with the biggest inner change, with the biggest dramatic arc and she was going through the most interesting and powerful journey.
After nine months of hard work, I had the final cut of the film, it was edited very like the version which is available for streaming now, but with temp music and without sound design and mix and without color correction . Editing was the hardest part for me in terms of emotional investment and psychological investment in the film. Also I put more than 20 kg on me for almost one year. I was 70 kg before the screenwriting process and pre production and for one year and a half I got to 90kg. I stopped training, doing yoga, hanging around with friends and my social interaction and life was decreased to its minimum especially during the editing of the film.
Editing requires lots of sitting and watching. Basically you are watching the film for more than 100 times and while watching the film you are constantly thinking about the shot choices and lengths.
UPDATES from 2020 while editing YATAGAN
Oahh, man, oahh man. This time thanks god I wasn't alone in this stage of film producing. Christo Dermendzhiev the producer and I edited the film. We chose to give the rushes to another editor Ruslan Grudev who made the assembly and the rough cut while Christo and I watched the entire footage.
After a month and a half Ruslan projected us the rough cut, and it wasn't bad but wasn't what we wanted and most importantly the rough cut wasn't utilizing the potential of the material which we had shot.
Ruslan had to quickly cut the rough cut so he didn't have time to watch every shot and every piece of material.
We decided to start fro scratch and thus Christo and I edited the movie from point 0.
It was an intense and nerve wracking experience but comparing to NoOne was much lighter and pleasurable. First, it was a comedy so when we nailed a scene it was great fun to watch it even on its rough stage how the comedy begun to pop up. So in that regard the experience was fantastic.
The nerve wracking moments were when Christo wasn't hitting it correct in terms of correct and believable storytelling but those moments were few and we managed to go through them quickly and without so much arguing and drama.
We managed to get our rough cut after 4 weeks of editing but the cut was extremely polished and with very little fat. Christo even was sound editing and creating transitions and sound effects plus music while we were cutting the scenes.
Our rough cut was around 100 min which we managed to get down to 92 minutes in our final cut.
Yatagan is extremely aggressively cut movie with more than 2500 cuts which is like the standard for an action movie. This is how we wanted the movie to be.
The editor is the creator and the real filmmaker, because for real she can kill it or bring it to life, but only, only if there is enough quality material to work with it.
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