What is the Editor’s Job?

One of the key factors that has shaped the way we teach editing and post-production at IFSS is the dramatically evolving nature of what the ‘editor’ is and does,  the ever broadening scope of what post-production encompasses and indeed the increasingly hazy line between where production ends and post begins.

The curriculum at IFSS is built around an holistic and integrated approach that seeks to focus on where roles in cinema making overlap rather than where they diverge. As such we’ve built a technical post production learning journey that seeks to see the whole landscape and build consummate skills across all the tentacle-like arms contemporary production. The aim is not to make everyone and expert at everything but rather to ensure everyone has a solid udnerstanding of what all the pieces are and where they lie. Only then can you really see the shape of cinema as a Diretcor, Writer, producer or Cinematographer.

Norman Hollyn is the head of Editing at the renowned USC school of cinematic arts in LA and he shares our perspective on this ,  succinctly suming up this new environment and its demands on ‘editors’ with an article on one of his blogs entitled :

Does The Editor Have A Future?

After taking in the bigger scope of things Norman breaks down some pragmatic fundamentals that he believes should be at the heart of the Editor’s toolbox.

• Familiarity with at least two editing systems. I’d choose Avid and Final Cut, though some industries and many European and Middle East markets really want Adobe Premiere.
• Ability to do soundtrack manipulation.  For some people, this means a great familiarity with all of the filters and plug-ins available on your editing system. That’s crucial but an additional skill would be to know applications like Pro Tools, Soundtrack Pro, Logic or Audition.
• Ability to do basic color correction. My wife is convinced that I’m completely color blind because of the way I dress every morning. That excuse won’t save me in the editing world (remind me to tell you about a color blind director I once worked for). You need the ability to take a shot which looks too gray and touch it up so that it matches the shot immediately following which is more blue.  You can do that on a basic level within any good editing program. You can do it really well using the color correction modules in Avid and Final Cut (I don’t know about Premiere since I don’t use it). But add-on programs like Color and Looks, and to manipulate what you’ve shot to give you some very different. These programs help you get even better color correction results, though the learning curve is horrific.
• Visual Effects creation savvy. With nearly every single film and television project out there having some visual effects (even if it’s just adding a skyline to a scene which has too many buildings in it), it is important to be able to work with green screen, to create mattes, and manipulate the image in increasingly complex ways. Facility with programs like Photoshop are also a real plus.
• Along with that comes the ability to create the internal and transition effects that are on every show nowadays. Being able to create good titles in Apple, Avid FX or another program, as well as to move the image in and out of split screens, is an essential skill if you want your collaborators to understand the vision for the film.
• Compression knowledge. This is actually a placeholder for all of the skills that you’ll need in order to output cuts from your system and put them on a DVD, server, or some web-based location,  for viewing by your director, producer, studio exec or your favorite dentist/financier. It is also helpful, if your film is going to end up on the web in some way (and whose film isn’t?) to be able to know the workflow that will get it there.  Familiarity with Compressor and the much better (in my mind) Sorenson Squeeze is essential for this.

It is these same key elements that underscore the whole post-production curriculum at the International Film School Sydney; an holistic and broad base of production skills that see the role of the ‘editor’ as much more than just ‘cutting’.