Digital Video - July 2008 - (Page 16) CLOSE-UP EDITOR DAN SWIETLIK FINDS THE STORIES IN HIS FOOTAGE. BY JON SILBERG principal at Santa Monica, California-based Cut + Run, editor Dan Swietlik says that he and the other cutters at his company like to reach beyond the classifications that they — especially those who deal mostly with ad agency clients, as they do — can find themselves in. The company, which employs six editors, five assistants, an executive producer and a team of producers, various support personnel and a chef, primarily works on commercials, but the staff also seeks out other creative challenges. Swietlik himself found such opportunities recently on two high-profile documentary features: Michael Moore’s Sicko and The Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore. DV recently sat down with Swietlik in one of the edit bays at Cut + Run. DV: Is it hard to not get pigeonholed into being thought of as the editor who does just one kind of spot? Dan Swietlik: I’ve always been firm believer that any good editor can cut just about anything. I know this is a business that wants you to have a certain specialty or style. Twenty years ago, I was the car guy. Ten years ago, I was the comedy guy. Now I’m the documentary guy. You can’t avoid it completely, but we all want to mix it up a little. Tell us a bit about the technical setup at Cut + Run. We have six offline Avid Media Composer bays attached to essentially a Unity server and then two finishing bays using Avid DS systems and their own local storage. Three of the bays are about to flip over to Final Cut Pro. A couple of us have totally embraced being “Final Cut People.” But it’s important to say that people don't come to us for our technology. I like to say, “They don’t come for the planes, they come for the pilots.” You worked on two major documentaries after focusing for a long time on your commercial work. Do find the two kinds of editing very different? Oh, yes. On documentaries the editor is more a writer of the final 16 dv july 2008 A product. That was true on both films but especially on Sicko. The Inconvenient Truth was built around Al Gore’s [PowerPoint presentation] appearances, and at least on that level it was scripted. But on Sicko, we had over 1,000 hours of footage! We would cut great standalone scenes, but then the question was, “What do they mean next to one another?” So we would start to write rough narration and do a scratch track to suggest how the story might go together. Michael guides everything, and he makes final decision and personalizes it but we couldn’t just sit there and wait for him to write something to go forward. We had to try things out even if the result stank. Then we could learn something and move forward. So how do you get 1,000 hours of footage down to the length of a short feature? The topic of healthcare is huge. We started with a three-headed monster: Insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. We had to lop off some heads. So we stuck mostly with insurance companies. There were things that I originally thought were some of the best scenes that were gone seven months later — but we had to walk a fine line between getting the points across and not letting audience members’ eyes glaze over. It must have been very different to work on something for so many months as schedules for commercials seem to be always shrinking. It’s certainly a different way of working. A few months ago I cut a nine-spot package for Chrysler. We were on location from day one. I would cut the output from the camera tap right there on location. The next day, those transferred dailies would come in, and an assistant would eye match and over cut them on top of the version I’d finished using the video tap images. By the third day, I was making client revisions on that material and cutting day three’s material from the tap. Three days after the shoot, the edited spot was airing. It was exciting of course, but every time someone pulls off something like that, someone else somewhere says, “That’s great. Let’s shrink the schedule a little more.” DV www.dv.com PHOTO BY JON SILBERG CUTTING TO THE CHASE http://www.dv.com
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