The Tracey Fragments: She’s in Pieces
Confident that he had the talent and tools to execute his split-frame vision, McDonald asked Munce to test it first by creating “rushes” in Final Cut Pro that would determine whether the multi-framing efficiently conducted Page’s intense performance. “One of my fears though was that the boxes would overshadow the emotional content,” he says. But he came away convinced of the viability of his visual conceit and his team’s ability to execute it.
Piece Work
McDonald moved on to another directing job (Killer Wave, about tidal waves attacking America) to “help pay Tracey’s way through post,” while checking in with the editors for weekly reviews. “I essentially gave them permission to make it their own,” he says. “My job as director was to set them free and let them create, which they did, to stunning effect.”
Munce cut a rough in a couple of months, working out a first pass solution to the give-and-go challenges of split-screen exposition. “The challenge was to keep the story unfolding well,” he says. “We knew we would be able to get the audience lost and confused a little because that is Tracey's state of mind for much of the film. The key was to maintain a balance between Tracey's very real disorientation and the direct emotional orientation that the multi-framing achieved.”
The key challenge for Scales, the second designated editor in McDonald’s post relay, was making sure to “never let the multi-framing become a gimmick. We wanted to make sure that people related to Tracey on an emotional level before anything else. The multi-framing was always meant to help tell her story, not to become the story.”
Iterating and reiterating in the Final Cut Pro project files, Munce and Scales cut to a solution that effectively told Tracey’s story while literally reflecting her state of mind.
“Tracey's in pieces, and so is the film, “ says Munce. “That's the simplest, literal analysis. Throughout, we are watching her piece herself back together until she is finally able to see the consequences of her actions and admit to herself what she has done.”
Mad Blooms
Putting Tracey together again was helped significantly when assistant editor Matt Hannam quickly graduated to become the third member of the editing team while working on particularly complex multi-frame transition scenes, dubbed “blooms” by the editors. One particular bloom sequence used all 99 available tracks of Final Cut Pro, generating nearly 200 minutes of running footage inside two minutes of actual running time.
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But Hannam points out that most of the complex effects in the movie were created using Final Cut Pro’s crop tool and the luma and color keys: “We used keyframing in the Color Corrector to create the really psychedelic sequences, but generally the effects were done in the most basic way possible”
McDonald credits that leverage with helping bring Tracey to the screen exactly as he wanted audiences to see it. “Whatever we thought to do with Final Cut Pro, we could do,” he says. “In a way, the film looks like it does because of that radical fluidity. We could not have achieved our vision without it.”
