OBPFILMS

Walter Murch is an editor (The Conversation, The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient, Tetro among others), sound designer (The Rain People, THX–1138, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now among others), and one-time director (Return to Oz).

He is also a personal hero of mine. What Murch brings to the world of editing is an unmatched passion for the cut as well as a frighteningly detailed sensibility for everything that it does to the human psyche.  It is something filmmakers should be grateful to cling to (read In The Blink Of An Eye and The Conversations) when they find themselves swimming in the sometimes scary muck of shots and takes.

Logging footage is often the first place to start after the cameras have stopped rolling. This can often be a tedious process, where you are naming shots and takes, and making notes about what’s good and what’s expendable. But thanks in part to Murch’s approach, I have learned to respect and enjoy this part immensely.

First I make myself a playlist of music that in some way is associated with the project, and then begin carefully going through each shot and take, making my initial gut reaction notes. First impressions are rather key. It can be the most glaring of elements (a camera bump, a line of dialogue that stands out, a gesture) or the most subtle (a blink, a look, a quirk). When I’ve exhausted all the takes from a setup, I grab a representative still, something that seems like a key moment from the shot. Once I’ve gathered up all the stills representing every setup from the production, I lay them all out in grids and create a book. The shots are in a rough sequence order, but most if not all of the shots are in an order that was never intended for the film’s story flow; this helps shake me out of any tendency to see the film in only one way as I go through each scene to put the film together on the timeline.

So when it finally comes time to cut a scene, I am not blindly scavenging through files for bits of shots (a method that not only frustrates the editor, but the film itself as well). To avoid this trap, I have laid out road maps, Murch-inspired road maps, to help me get somewhere desirable, somewhere hopefully special. Either way, thankfully, the journey is just as fun as the destination. - Alex