Emily VanDerWerff is tripping out on voices. She recently learned, for example, that male and female voices aren’t all that different. In terms of pitch, voices considered feminine fluctuate between 100 and 525 Hertz, while voices considered masculine typically stay in the 65 to 260 Hz range. A voice in the overlapping zone — around 100 to 260 Hz — could go either way.
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Liza Cardinale is an in-demand editor for shows like Outlander, Orange Is the New Black, and Insatiable. Her father was a writer for shows like Family Ties, so she received her introduction to the world of television at a young age, with backstage visits affording a peek behind the Hollywood curtain. “[It] made me feel like, ‘Ooh, maybe I could do this. Maybe I have access somehow,’” she recalls.
While studying film theory at UC Berkley, she stumbled into editing on a tape-to-tape system without any formal training. Later, she would tag along with a friend who was a film assistant for Jonathan Demme on The Truth About Charlie. There, Cardinale met Carol Littleton, A.C.E. “[Carol] is just legendary. She’s amazing,” Cardinale says. “And she brought two cats with her to work every day. I thought, ‘These are my people.’” (more…)
After being shut out in 2017, the second season of Fleabag swept all the major awards this year, including two Emmys and six Golden Globes. Auteur Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also plays the titular lead, brings us the tear-jerking, wall-breaking tragicomedy, crowned by The Guardian as one of the greatest television series in the twenty-first century — and we’re only in the first two decades of the hundred-year span. That’s the kind of impact the show has had among critics and fans.
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Step into an indie comics convention, and you might find someone like Lamar Abrams. Unlike the spectacle that San Diego Comic Con has become, indie comics remains a relatively small, tight-knit community where everyone knows your name, and the conventions themselves have remained cozy. The work you’ll find is deeply personal — raw talent and emotional vulnerability reign supreme. The ‘zines, chapbooks, precious objects, and art prints you’ll see were likely assembled and stapled together with some friends on the floor of someone’s garage.
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Joker netted eleven Academy Award nominations this year, including Best Film Editing. We spoke with the editor, Jeff Groth, who also received an ACE Eddie nomination for his work on the movie, to find out more about his approach to the project. On Joker, Groth makes the leap from comedy to drama with long-time collaborator Todd Phillips, nominated for three Oscar categories: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. He and Groth draw upon the tone of late-70s and early-80s cinema to create a grimy, realistic world in sharp contrast to most DC/Marvel films. Within this frame of realism, they explore Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) journey to self-realization through madness. By establishing a baseline of reality, they’re better able to depict Arthur’s drift away from it as he becomes The Joker.
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Hot off wins for Best Film Editing at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Eddies, Andrew Buckland has had a crash course in awards season excitement with director James Mangold’s film Ford vs. Ferrari. (Not so for Buckland’s frequent editing partner Michael McCusker, who, in addition to Ford vs. Ferrari, won an Eddie and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for Walk the Line, another Mangold film.) Buckland just finished editing the upcoming feature The New Mutants when I caught up with him to discuss how he began his partnership with McCusker and Mangold, cutting high-energy action, how he feels about all these awards, and more.
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Who would’ve thought that a satire about a little boy with an imaginary friend (who happens to be Adolf Hitler) would ever see the light of day, let alone be a critical and box office hit? While the premise of Jojo Rabbit might seem risky for Academy voters, at the time of writing, the film has garnered six Academy Award nominations including Best Film Editing for Tom Eagles, who recently picked up an American Cinema Editors’ Eddie Award for Best Edited Feature Film – Comedy or Musical.
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Imagine this scenario: It’s the Monday before the Super Bowl, and your team has officially wrapped the trailer for the summer’s highly anticipated superhero prequel. No one’s seen the trailer but you, the team, and the studio execs. It’s from one of the biggest (and most secretive) studios in the world — keeping the trailer under wraps is mission critical. (more…)
Eric Kissack manufactures luck. Throughout his career as an editor and increasingly as a director, he’s had the savvy and hustle to be in the right place and time for “luck” to kick in. He’s gone from cutting comedy shorts to major studio releases and to directing hugely successful shorts and national commercials, as well as editing prestige TV.
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Lauren Taylor knows that the success of a movie or TV shoot can hinge on the tiniest details. The angle of a streetlamp, the contact information of an animal handler, a prop cigarette — they’re all part of an impossibly complex, constantly shifting equation that must be solved before production can even begin.
Taylor is a location coordinator, most recently on the Hulu series, Wu-Tang: An American Saga. Her job is to make order out of the chaos that is television pre-production. She handles the contracts for locations. She navigates Byzantine hurdles set up by mayors’ offices. She procures permits.
Taylor began working in the New York City film industry after graduating with a film and electronic arts degree from Bard College in 2010. Knowing she loved movies, but unsure exactly how to translate that into a career, she began working as a PA in different departments. She dabbled in wardrobe, casting, and construction before settling on locations.
Now, nearly a decade into her film career, Taylor is a member of the Teamsters Union and has worked on a mix of critically acclaimed independent films, Hollywood movies, and high-profile TV shows. Before entering the Wu-Tang, Taylor was location coordinator on If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and location manager on Swallow (2019) and Before You Know It (2019), which premiered at Sundance.
Taylor’s work, in some ways, hides in plain sight. You can see the fruits of her labor — successfully acquired locations — in the background of every shot, but there’s a world of effort that goes into finding and locking those places down. In this interview, Taylor breaks down exactly what the locations department does — and what it takes to become a coordinator. But first, we start with semantics. (more…)
