Crowdediting The Nines
Norman Hollyn, head of the editing track at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, has a blog post up about “crowd-editing,” the post-production equivalent of crowdsourcing.
Right now, the Advanced Editing class at USC is made up of 11 students who have each taken the dailies of the feature film THE NINES (the really interesting and compelling, Ryan Reynolds/Hope Davis/Melissa McCarthy film directed by John August of whom I’ve spoken about a number of times) and are cutting it into an alternate version of that feature film. I assigned a different section to each of the 11 back in January.
All of them read the script and we talked about the plot, the characters, the subtext, the arc of the story — in short, all of the things that go into editing the film. We were visited by John and his editor, Doug Crise. Then the students started cutting together the film, one scene at a time. We watched scenes in class and I gave notes, along with the class. At one point, about six weeks ago, we finally had the entire film assembled and watched it in class as a full-length first cut of a feature film and stepped back to critique it.
This is the cut I now have on DVD, which I’ll watch this weekend. I’m fascinated and a little terrified to see what they’ve done.
As I said when I debuted the film at Sundance in 2007, I would like to make all the source material for anyone who wants to recut it, assuming legal and logistical hurdles can be overcome. The trailer competition was a start. This semester’s project at USC has been another helpful trial run.
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April 12th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I’m an editor trying to get more work in the narrative side of the world and would love to try something like this, to show that I can. Without experience you don’t get work and without work, you don’t get experience, as you well know. How would you like me to request a copy, is here enough or are there formal steps you would need me to take?
April 12th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Any chance of this getting released (illicitly or otherwise…)? I would love to see an alternative take of the The Nines.
April 12th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
John—I teach editing at Santa Barbara City College, which was a fairly advanced film program for a community college. We would love to take you up on your offer of making “The Nines” source available. (If I have to watch one more “Gunsmoke” clip….)
What do we need to do? My email address is:
mtcolin -at- pipeline.sbcc.edu -dot-edu-
Best,
Michael Colin Adjunct Faculty, Film Production Santa Barbara City College
April 12th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
I had the opportunity to edit a scene from the Nines in my editing class at Emerson College’s LA program over the past couple weeks. Doug came in last week to look at our cuts and give some feedback, and he’s going to come in again tomorrow to take a look at how his suggestions have been implemented. I find it really valuable to work with professionally-produced footage to improve my editing chops.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Wow. I took Advanced Editing at Tisch and the course consisted of editing that crappy stock footage that comes with the AVID while the teacher went through the software’s menus teaching us the program. All of which is pretty much completely useless ten years later.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
We at UCLA film school would love to have this footage. Sure, I’m just a student who can’t approve such a thing, but I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the students/staff would be happy to participate.
Don’t forget about UCLA. We’re not enemies! :)
April 16th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I came out of USC too soon to benefit from this, but on behalf of the thousands of us who edited the same “ER” scene and the same James Garner MOV scene, and our profs, who had to watch said scenes over and over and over again… God bless you, sir!