FEATURE GOING DIGITAL We pat ourselves on the backs for the industry’s great technological leaps, but most of the masterpieces of cinema were laboriously cut on film, stuff you could hold in your hand, generally covered in scratches and grease pencil marks. “I made the switch to digital editing in about 1995. The last film I did on a Moviola was Twelve Monkeys, which was all cut on film with projected rushes on film. By the time we finished that project, the Lightworks system was just coming forward and I realised that if I was to continue, I was going to have to get to grips with that. Or at least to the extent that I could bluff my way through a job. But once I turned that corner it was wonderful and very liberating. It seems crazy what we used to do. I feel privileged to have spanned both eras.” Go to the Avid website and you can find endless links to training programmes and support forums, but when nonlinear editing was first introduced, training was virtually word of mouth. “I was lucky that the first job I did I was given an assistant who knew the system and could say ‘press that button there and this will happen’. It was pretty crude compared to what we have now. People were much more tolerant – and still are – about how quickly the gear was changing. It is much more stable now.” 65MM MURDER Audsley worked on Murder on the Orient Express for almost a year, editing on Avid’s Media Composer. From his original meeting with Kenneth Branagh, he became intrigued to be working with someone who was not only the director of the project, but also its star and producer. “That proved to be fascinating to have a combination of those different sensibilities. I’ve worked with a lot of the same people over the years. It’s always exciting to meet new colleagues. And it was a different spin on the process in the cutting room too. “Ken had a very clear understanding of what he wanted this film to be. It’s one that, because of the Sydney Lumet film in 1974, has lodged into people’s psyches.
“I think sometimes we’re showing versions and cuts a little too soon before people have disengaged themselves from the process of shooting” MICK AUDSLEY
“We had to honour it, but also make it contemporary. Ken was pursuing, in the case of our film, the story of a moral dilemma for this invincible man who comes across a problem that’s bigger than him, and changes him.” For Murder on the Orient Express, Mick Audsley’s first collaboration with Kenneth Branagh, the editor worked with a trusted team–– whom he regards more as equals and friends, than assistants. Assistant editor Thora Woodward acted more as an associate editor and Audsley had regular collaborators in the visual effects department too. Murder on the Orient Express was shot on 65mm film, Branagh’s second foray into the format, after his 1996 unabridged Hamlet. The movie wears its reverence for film on its sleeve, going as far as to use rear projection in window scenes, rather than green screen. “Our processing moved from London to Fotokem in Los Angeles and there was a lag of about a week, which near the end of the shooting period made one a little nervous. You couldn’t clear stuff quite as rapidly as you’d like to.” The crew viewed 2K dailies down-resed from the 65mm negative which was scanned at 8K. Visual effects shots were also down-resed to 2K to make them more manageable. The film will be digitally distributed in 4K. SPEEDING AHEAD “The speed with which material can be made available is key to everyone’s piece of mind,” says Audsley. “It was quite strenuous having the gap on this film. It started as film negative, then went back into the digital domain, and in some cases it will come back as film, since we are making some prints of this film. “Anything that makes it easier to understand what you have early on is helpful. Soon we will be taking stuff straight out of the camera and into the cutting room. “The only caveat to that is that in the process of making films, the digestion process is not unhelpful. I think sometimes we’re showing versions and cuts a little too soon before people have disengaged themselves from the process of shooting and have an objective view of the material. There is something to be said for a bit of a time lag on that side, but from an editorial perspective, the speed with which you can view something, with audio on it, is invigorating.” “There haven’t been any surprises so far. I saw a test recently. It’s gone from 65 to 8K then to the DI at 4K and then back to film and it looked pretty impressive.” When Audsley isn’t working 45 weeks a year on groundbreaking films, he runs, with his wife and daughter, Sprocket Rocket Soho, a London-based networking group which hosts regular events where filmmakers can share ideas and keep each other up to date. n
36 | TVBE NOVEMBER 2017
34 35 36 Feature Murder_V4 JG.indd 3
24/10/2017 14:29