Our guests Wyatt Rogowski and Avner Shiloah take us through the process of editing Bryan Fogel’s ambitious new documentary film, “The Dissident”. From editing in three languages to creating incredible animated sequences, this team really had their work cut out for them.
The following interview is an excerpt from our video series, Production – In Conversation. To watch the full interview and see more video content, click here. Or you can listen to the Shift In Conversation podcast here.
Wyatt Rogowski – Editor – “The Dissident”
Avner Shiloah – Editor – “The Dissident”
Grace Amodeo – Marketing Manager – Shift Media
Grace:
For those who haven’t seen “The Dissident”, can you give us an overview of the film?
Avner:
It’s quite literally an investigation into the death of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Saudi Arabian journalist who worked for the Washington Post and was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. So the film is first and foremost an examination of what happened to lead to that event and what happened on that day, in the immediate aftermath, as well as a study of who Jamal Khashoggi was and what led him to that moment. Beyond that it also follows his fiance, Hatice Cengiz, who was with him that day outside the consulate. As well as a friend of his Omar Abdulaziz who is a Saudi dissident and they were collaborating together. So those are the three people that the documentary kind of focuses on and tells their story.
Grace:
Talk me through your workflow as a documentary editor on a film of this size and scope.
Wyatt:
First of all, this was the largest documentary as far as crew and as far as topic I’ve ever worked on. Whether it’s a large crew like this, or if it was just myself and the director, the process can kind of start the same. It really starts with creating a story map and the story beats. With documentary editing, you’re kind of one of the writers because you’re forming the story afterwards. On this film we worked closely with Mark Monroe, the writer. He formulated the story beats and basically an arc for the whole film. I like to say documentary editing is almost like having a sculpture. You start off with a big mound of clay and the first rough cut is just figuring out what the shape is. Then slowly as you keep going, you keep refining. You get to the point where you have your fine cut, and it’s like you can see the lines of the face. Then you get to the lock cut and it’s a beautiful sculpture, but it’s still plain. And then you get to the finishing process with color and sounds, and that’s where you do the paint and it looks beautiful.
I like to say documentary editing is almost like having a sculpture. You start off with a big mound of clay and the first rough cut is just figuring out what the shape is. Then slowly as you keep going, you keep refining.
Grace:
As an editor, how do you deal with footage that is not in English and needs to be translated?
Avner:
So much of the film is in Arabic, as well as Turkish, so we actually had to edit the movie in three different languages. Part of the general process for most documentaries these days is that every interview is transcribed and you work off of those transcriptions in order to build that skeleton that Wyatt mentioned. The translation is just one element of it, but we also needed a crew around us of people who actually apple these languages. We had a team of associate producers, both Turkish and Arabic speaking, and they really helped us shape this and put these interviews together.
Wyatt:
And I would also add that sometimes we wanted to condense a sentence or condense a long bite for a scene, it’s called “Franken-biting”. You chop up the clip and take a word from here and a word from there to make a more clear sentence. For things like tone and inflection, we have zero idea. Sometimes I would do an edit on paper of what we wanted them to say, and then give that to one of our researchers and translators and they would help string out a proper sentence.
Grace:
There are three distinct types of footage in this film — interviews, archival footage, and VFX sequences. Can you talk about how you had to treat all of these different types of footage differently?
Avner:
So the first group that we have is the shot footage that was shot by the production, which we can probably divide into interviews and vérité footage — vérité meaning that we are actually following along some of our subjects as they are experiencing things. So for instance, Jamal’s fiance Hatice maybe addresses European parliament or the UN. To me personally, that’s always some of the most engaging footage, for an audience it’s very visceral. The other aspect is the interviews, which is kind of the backbone of everything. The interviews are telling you the story. The big challenge for this is that we didn’t have any vérité footage with Jamal Khashoggi, who is one of the main subjects of the film. So our trick was to find as much archival footage of him as possible and try to create these emotional moments and draw his personality through those. What we needed to do was to bring Jamal to life through this footage. Otherwise, archival footage is usually there to support the facts that you’re trying to communicate. It tends to be a little bit less emotional, a little bit less immediate. It was always like digging for treasure in terms of these archival moments of Jamal, and trying to make them as engaging as the vérité footage.
The big challenge for this is that we didn’t have any vérité footage with Jamal Khashoggi. So our trick was to find as much archival footage of him as possible . . . to bring Jamal to life through this footage.
Wyatt:
For the VFX, Bryan was looking for one of the editors to be more VFX focused. I can mess around with After Effects and do some small stuff myself, but I’m not very talented with 3D programs. There’s a ton of graphics in this film, and we eventually brought on an agency, The Office of Design and Development (ODD) from New York, and I worked closely with them. So I would do really rough Avid graphics just to show exactly the placement of things on the screen and how it should all work, trying to envision that myself. And then I would send it to ODD. There’s everything from newspaper graphics all the way to an entire Pixar-level film right in the middle of the film. It was an adventure, but it was fun and we made it all happen.
Grace:
You are two of a team of four editors that worked on this film, what is it like to work collaboratively on an editing team like that?
Avner:
The other two editors on the film were James Leche and Scott Hanson, two brilliant editors as well. This was pre-pandemic, so we were fortunate enough to all be in the same office and collaborate together. Very quickly it was a situation where we were all in the trenches together, we have very little time to execute this and we’re all on the same team. Let’s just make the best movie we can and have each other’s back. Mark, the writer, would have the marching orders for the week to get this story beat done or this scene done, and he would assign one to each of us. So each of us would take a first pass at something, and then usually continue on that scene for the second and third pass as well. But occasionally another editor would ask to take a crack at it. And this is where it’s really useful to check your ego at the door, and let them go ahead and do it. The goal is always to make the best movie we can, it’s not about any one of us shining through – it’s about just serving the narrative. It’s also useful to have that sounding board of the other three editors, and be very honest with each other. It’s so helpful to the creative process to have people that you trust and who know what the process is. When you are the single editor working in a vacuum, sometimes it gets really difficult to know if you are on the right track.
The goal is always to make the best movie we can, it’s not about any one of us shining through – it’s about just serving the narrative.
Grace:
What was the collaboration like between you and the director, Bryan Fogel?
Wyatt:
The relationship between director and editor is completely different on every film. I’ve had films where the director is over your shoulder telling you exactly when to cut, which can be good for the vision of the film but at the same time can be a little bit much. Bryan was actively out directing the film while we were editing, but he was always there to give us his input and help us on the way. He gave all the editors a lot of agency and he trusted us, and Mark, a lot. It was definitely a collaborative process. Bryan has a very specific style, he always said it’s kind of like a “Jason Bourne” type of film, even in a documentary. From the very first scene you’re feeling that tension and that energy, all the way until the end.
Grace:
How do elements like sound design and music get added into the edit? Are you working with that right from the beginning, or is it all added later?
Avner:
The quick answer is, we’re not working in a vacuum. We can’t afford to wait until we’re in the finishing process to add either music or sound design, we have to tackle those ahead. And it goes hand-in-hand with the construction of the scene. You might begin just working on what we call a “radio edit”, which is just the sound from the footage and the interview bites, but pretty quickly you have to incorporate music and sound design into that. The common practice is to start off with what we call temp music, which is music from different types of scores that seem appropriate for the tone of the film or the tone of any specific scene that we’re working on. We were fortunate to have our composer, Adam Peters, on board early on, so he was able to come in and discuss tone with us. He handed us a large folder of demos, from past projects and pieces he had lying around, so we could work with those and incorporate those in. That makes his job a little easier when he has to come in and finally score the final film.
We can’t afford to wait until we’re in the finishing process to add either music or sound design, we have to tackle those ahead. And it goes hand-in-hand with the construction of the scene.
Wyatt:
To piggyback off that, the music and the sound design in general can really help tell you if the scene is going to work. If you have no sound design it can feel very bland and blank, you don’t feel the energy of it. Especially if you’re trying to make it a thriller, for it to be successful you need all of those elements to be in there. For sound design, every editor usually works with a big library of different sound effects. Especially for the big animation sequences, if there was no sound design then you wouldn’t feel like you’re actually in it. With vérité footage, you have natural sound that makes you feel like you’re there. For VFX we need to build it from the ground up. Let’s say there’s a tiny little animated battle scene with the bees and the flies, every single little tiny leg that hits the ground needs it’s own little sound. You can have tons and tons of tracks for just one second of footage, it’s pretty crazy.
Avner:
And this is just our preliminary work, when it’s in the final sound mix that’s when our partners at Skywalker take it and kick it up a notch. They really elevate it because they know what they’re doing, so what ends up on screen is of a higher quality than what we deal with, but we still try to do the best we can. And it’s pretty fun.
Grace:
How did your opinion of this subject and these events change as you were working on the film, and what do you hope the audience will take away from the film when they see it?
Wyatt:
So I generally didn’t have too much knowledge on the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, so this has taught me a lot. Especially with the history of Saudi and the US’s relationship. I’d say the main takeaway is for the audience to really see the human rights abuses in the world. Bryan brought on the Human Rights Foundation to be a sponsor of the film, and it really sheds light on certain regimes and governments in the world. For governments to look past these human rights abuses and for the audience to actually see that, and think about these things when it comes to voting in the next round of leadership.
I just hope that people come away with more of an understanding of the actual people who were involved in this, who are more than just a headline or a statistic. Jamal was a real person with aspirations and dreams whose life was cut short.
Avner:
I had some knowledge of the region and some idea of what happened with Jamal, but I was shocked to find how blatant the evidence and the actions of Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia were. The other thing that’s very surprising is how complicit the Western governments are in their relationship with Saudi Arabia. What I would want an audience to come away with is basically that we need to hold our elected officials to task for how they treat this government and other governments. No matter which party it is, all different administrations throughout US history have been very complicit in the behavior of Saudi Arabia. Whoever the leadership is has to be held accountable for what they do. Beyond that, I just hope that people come away with more of an understanding of the actual people who were involved in this, who are more than just a headline or a statistic. Jamal was a real person with aspirations and dreams whose life was cut short. Hatice, his fiance, was left with this emptiness, this has defined the rest of her life. Omar is a Saudi dissident who can never go home again because of this regime. And he will always live in fear that they will try to do the same thing to him as they did to Jamal. These are real people who are affected by these horrible actions, I hope audiences come away being touched by that aspect.
The review screen has been redesigned for an improved review and approval experience.
- First, you’ll see that the left-side navigation bar is hidden to make more room for the viewing experience. To return to your Feed, click “Feed” at the top of your screen or click the arrow in the top-left corner.
- The files in the link now appear in a carousel along the bottom of the screen. To hide the carousel, click the carousel button in the top-left corner.
- Comments appear in the right-side drawer. Click the speech-bubble icon in the top right to view and hide comments.
- Click the information (“i”) icon in the top left to display additional information about the asset you’re viewing, such as dimensions, file size, and any tags that have been added.
See exactly which workspace you’re in with the simplified left-side navigation. Click your workspace logo to open up the Workspace Switcher menu and switch to any of the SHIFT accounts you have access to.
You can now share assets directly as a Spotlight presentation without leaving your project. Simply select your files and click the Spotlight flame icon in the top right corner of your screen. This will open a Share window where you can choose a template, adjust your settings, and create a presentation link to start sharing.
To quickly group your assets into a playlist, you can now select them, right-click, and choose Create Playlist from the Advanced menu. Your new playlist will appear in the right-side drawer under the Playlist tab.
The Administration interface has been updated to be more consistent with the rest of the app. In addition to the new dark theme, you’ll now be able to assign users to roles and projects even more easily with dropdown menus in the Add User and Edit User windows.
You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was a year we’d rather have skipped. We didn’t have that option, so we’ve had to deal with it – just like our colleagues and friends across the industry. By staying true to our values and with the phenomenal talents of our team, we’ve been able to keep innovating and help our customers continue to create engaging and compelling stories.
#WinTogether
In addition to the pandemic, 2020 was a year characterized by tumultuous events and widespread unrest. But when I looked more closely, I found humility. It wasn’t always there, but when we all put others in our community first, it was amazing to see.
One of the things that I’ve seen is our team, our clients, and our partners really unite with a common goal: to emerge from these experiences with determination and an eye to the future. When I look back at 2020, I see collaboration with our partners and customers, showing and feeling empathy, and asking the question ”what can we do to win together” was the strongest and best thing we could have done. We listened, and, where we needed to, we evolved.
We made a strategic decision to accelerate and intensify our shift to the cloud
Fast Followers Cross the Chasm
Cloud innovation was not new to EditShare. In 2015, we introduced our first cloud solutions and in 2019 we embarked on a more aggressive investment in cloud. At that time, not everyone was ready. One customer even told me “you’ll take my content out of my house and into the cloud when hell freezes over”. But, 2020 validated our decision as the cloud quickly became a necessity for everyone. The market needed us to complete the journey and reinforce our cloud efforts as a strategic focus of the company. The pandemic was the catalyst for doubters to “cross the chasm” and become mass adopters. As existing cloud users were able to continue with their business of remote working and collaboration, the fast followers saw that it was time to make the jump.
Our overall feeling was to go back to our core values and tenets – flexibility, scalability and openness – and build a much broader solution. We designed seamless proxy editing and all the services around it. The cloud has enormous potential and we are just at the beginning. What we can do now is phenomenally useful, but the best is still to come.
No One Has a Monopoly on Innovation
As organizations are being forced by the circumstances to cooperate in the cloud, most are doing it because they want to, and that’s because it’s the best way.
The cloud is a fundamental shift in the computing paradigm. It has empowered buyers. It’s as far as you can get from the jaded approach of “Here’s my solution. Pay me some money and I’ll install it. Pay me some more money and I’ll upgrade it. Pay me still more money and I’ll make sure it keeps working”. The cloud changes this to a far more cooperative model, where multiple vendors open their products to integration, making it easier, not harder, to work with third parties. In this environment, it makes sense for there to be open standards; open APIs where integrations can happen as need and innovation dictate.
Nobody has a monopoly on innovation. Other vendors have products and services that can enhance our workflows. It means that customers can use the “best of breed” products in their workflows and still be confident that they’ll be supported and supportable into the future.
The cloud gets better because it’s always getting broader and wider. It encourages collaboration. It means that we can add our or another vendor’s services easily and without breaking anything. It means that we can issue upgrades every quarter and know that it’s not going to cause problems. Clients are always up to date. It’s a virtuous circle, where it’s in everybody’s interest to work together.
All Bets on Cloud
I’m seeing an upswing in the industry, even at this early stage. Spring is just around the corner. We don’t have the pandemic put to bed yet but – at last – there are some promising signs. By the middle of the year, we’ll be able to put what we’re learning right now into practice. For our customers this means savings and efficiency.
As the value of our clients’ content grows, so does the need for flexibility to cope with doing business in an era of dramatic and unexpected change. We’re on the side of anyone who is facing up to these challenges.
It would have been wrong to bet against Moore’s law. It was wrong to bet against the web. And now you should absolutely not bet against the cloud.
Ultimately, we give our clients flexibility, continuity and confidence. If you want to engage with our software, you can run it on any suitable hardware or you can take it with you into the cloud.
We’re going to take with us what we learned in 2020. Empathy with our customers – not a new thing, but number one going forward. And guiding customers towards the cloud. We’re there, ready for them: it is no longer a question of “if”, but “when”.
In 2020, we launched a video podcast series, Shift In Conversation. We now host two series — one for marketers and one for professionals in production — with a third coming soon dedicated to the advertising industry. Each week, we speak with creative professionals about how their work has changed in 2020 and what the future looks like for their industries, to share industry knowledge with our customers in Media & Entertainment, Marketing and Advertising.
Our host, filmmaker and Shift Media Marketing Manager Grace Amodeo, was inspired to start the podcast when COVID hit. “We needed to think about how to continue creating content that would reach our audiences. All of our customer events were cancelled, and much of the content we’d been working on had to be reimagined,” Grace said.
“The reach of video is enormous, and gives us the flexibility to share to so many new audiences beyond just our own customers.”
As a video-based platform, it made sense for us to create new video content for our audience. Grace noted, “The reach of video is enormous, and gives us the flexibility to share to so many new audiences beyond just our own customers. We quickly realized that our video interviews could also easily be re-published on audio podcasting platforms, to allow viewers to consume content however they liked.”
And thus our video podcast was born.
The Challenge: Project Management and Media Storage
The podcast is produced 100% virtually, with all interviews on Zoom. Unlike a traditional audio-only podcast, with a video podcast we needed to manage video, audio, and design files all at once.
As the podcast grew with more guests over time, the amount of files we were juggling quickly became overwhelming.
As the podcast grew with more guests over time, the amount of files we were juggling quickly became overwhelming. Grace remembers, “At first it was just the video file and a simple thumbnail, but we soon expanded into audio, written blog content, and a variety of social media deliverables. Each platform needed its own specific type of deliverable, multiplied by 20+ episodes (and counting). It’s a lot to keep track of.”
We needed a robust system that could handle project management, production and promotion, along with a way to securely store and organize content.
The Solution Part 1: Airtable for Project Planning
After trying out a few different tools, our team landed on Airtable to organize interviews, distribution, design, and marketing. We created a public Video Podcast Planner template that you can clone and use for free in Airtable. We created tables for all of the following work areas:
- Steps for booking a guest
- A production checklist for virtual interviews
- Post production deliverables
- A branding checklist
- Social media deliverables for sharing your content
We love the ability to visualize our spreadsheets with color-coded statuses and categories for each type of episode. You can even add emojis to quickly identify your tags!
Airtable’s Views feature allows us to quickly transform one sheet into multiple views, where we could visualize each episode with the guest thumbnail:
The calendar view is also handy, where we can easily transform due dates on a spreadsheet into a color-coded calendar view:
get your free template
Ready to start organizing your own podcast project? Clone our free Video Podcast Planner on Airtable to hit the ground running.
The Solution Part 2: MediaSilo for Media Management
Because the MediaSilo platform is designed to securely store and organize large amounts of media files, it’s the perfect solution for all of our podcast assets. In addition to our logo and promotional graphics for each channel, we have set design deliverables to promote each episode. These included a video thumbnail, article graphics, and social media graphics for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
We decided to create dedicated folders for each speaker, so that as we are promoting a new episode each week, the marketing team knows exactly which folder to look for.
Because MediaSilo is optimized for video file storage, the app automatically captures all the file’s metadata, which you can surface in the metadata tab. This powerful feature is useful when checking the video settings for online publishing, where certain sizes and file types are often required.
Conclusion
Thanks to both MediaSilo and Airtable, we now have fine-tuned our process which enables us to produce several episodes each month. And the end result? Be sure to check out and subscribe to our video podcasts Marketing In Conversation and Production In Conversation. If you work in Advertising, stay tuned for our third channel dedicated to all things advertising coming in early 2021.
Want to try out MediaSilo and Airtable for your own video project? Sign up for an Airtable account here, and request a free 14-day trial of MediaSilo.
Our guest Charles Frank takes us through the personal journey of producing independent documentary content. Anyone with a camera and a story to tell can get started!
The following interview is an excerpt from our video series, Production – In Conversation. To watch the full interview and see more video content, click here. Or you can listen to the Shift In Conversation podcast here.
Charles Frank – Director and Partner – Voyager
Grace Amodeo – Marketing Manager – Shift Media
Grace: Tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do with Voyager.
Charles:
I’m a documentary director. I do a variety of documentary work — branded documentaries, short-form personal films, and I just finished my first feature-length documentary. I’m a partner at Voyager, which is a production company that has a roster of directors that do broadcast commercials, branded documentaries, and original films.
(more…)
InSync PLUS is a full-service creative agency with deep roots in the film, television, streaming, lifestyle, and branding industries.
With more than 50 years of experience, InSync PLUS pushes artistic potential to develop compelling trailers, TV spots, and digital campaigns to support feature films and shows, including Ford v Ferrari, Jurassic World, and Goliath.
Its integrated, personalized approach to client services brings the agency into daily contact with designers, production, and advertising companies with the highest expectations for professionalism and security. To ensure these clients meet their business objectives, InSync PLUS takes a proactive approach to client satisfaction by embracing the unexpected, exploring the unusual, and always seeking out the most unique creative expression for its clients.
The partnership with MediaSilo—along with an emphasis on anticipating and exceeding client needs and looking beyond traditional secure sharing strategies—puts InSync PLUS in an ideal position to pivot its clients’ workflows quickly when the COVID-19 crisis hit.
New World, New Workflows
InSync PLUS was a long-time MediaSilo partner prior to the global health crisis—first as a Wiredrive user then upgrading to MediaSilo’s intuitive, highly secure platform in mid-2020. In the early days, its team of editors, producers, and creative directors was located on-premises and used Wiredrive alongside Aspera and Box to securely send and receive media using centralized storage and standard security policies.
Pre-COVID-19, a typical workflow included sending media links to studio executives for review and approval, then discussing feedback on a phone or Zoom call. But those traditional workflows had to evolve when the pandemic made remote work environments the industry standard.
According to InSync PLUS’s COO Patrick Esposito, one of the agency’s top priorities—before and during the pandemic—is ensuring that clients know their unreleased content remains safe at all times.
“The most important part of what we provide to our clients is the empathy and sympathy that we understand their needs,” Esposito said.
InSync PLUS clients were forced to upend workplace environments and embrace a brand-new way of working, which made supporting these values in the rapidly evolving production climate more critical than ever before.
How MediaSilo Helps InSync PLUS Support Evolving Client Needs
When the InSync PLUS team began using the MediaSilo platform for secure sharing in June 2020, they quickly discovered that it addressed their clients’ new challenges and use cases significantly better than Wiredrive.
MediaSilo’s upgraded experience provides a secure, end-to-end solution for InSync PLUS’s team and its clients in a few key ways:
Simple but Secure Login
When a new project begins, the InSync PLUS team adds clients as MediaSilo users so they can access works-in-progress. To maintain a secure environment, clients receive a customized login link to their ready-to-review content that provides an authentication layer without the need to remember yet another password.
Full Media Protection
Depending on the use case, someone on the InSync PLUS team will select a playlist of files or pick a project or folder to share. InSync PLUS grants clients access to these resources by adding the clients’ names as recipients and then sharing with them the unique link generated by the system.
Customizable User Permissions
MediaSilo’s user permission model gives InSync Plus administrators and project owners full security oversight. They can assign client users roles with permissions to view and download content within their respective projects, but only InSync PLUS team members can share, upload, and delete content.
Custom role capabilities allow InSync PLUS internal users to directly invite clients to one or more projects rather than sharing individual projects or folders as private links. This streamlines the client experience by centralizing access to all InSync PLUS projects in one location within MediaSilo.
Future-Proofing Secure Sharing with MediaSilo
When COVID-19 brought the entertainment industry to its knees, InSync PLUS stepped up to the challenge. Partnering with MediaSilo enabled the agency to operate at full capacity with a 100 percent remote team and stay focused on its clients’ needs during stressful, uncertain, rapidly changing times, including:
- Enforcing an elevated level of security for major studios and networks’ sensitive, pre-release content
- Providing a protected, centralized hub for clients to access ready-to-review work
- Quickly and smoothly adapting to an improved media-sharing workflow
Using MediaSilo, InSync PLUS will continue to build on its legacy and help its clients in the entertainment industry navigate the future with authentic, effective, and measurable integrated marketing campaigns.
