Traitor: Closely Watched
Whatever footage Nachmanoff shot on a given day was processed the same night and telecined the next morning at Technicolor in Toronto. The material was then digitized onto a Final Cut Pro system in DVCPRO HD and shipped overnight on a Firewire drive to Fox in LA. In this way, he was never more than two days behind camera with footage.
As he edited, Fox used iWeb to share his cuts with Nachmanoff, who could view them online any time during production. For collaborative remote reviews of edited scenes, Fox devised an online review process using syncVUE (now called FUZE) and iWeb. “Once we were locked together on a QuickTime file of a cut that I’d moved to my iDisk, we could grab, fast forward, rewind, and make notes on it in real time. It connects with Skype, so I was able to see Jeffrey via an iSight camera while also looking at the screen. It was a brilliant way of going.”
Besides making realtime notes on Fox’s ongoing edits, Nachmanoff sometimes took away from their sessions specific ideas for altering his coverage. “To be able to see something Billy cut together even with a two or three day delay was a powerful tool,” he says. “I knew what I’d shot, where I was going, and what the scenes were looking like.”
Editor’s Cut
Shooting lasted from early September 2007 through late November, after which Fox had two weeks to finish his editor’s cut. He had his hands full keeping the narrative pacing fast while keeping all of Traitor’s multiple threads untangled. “The movie was challenging because of the story line,” he says.
Because Fox’s ‘pulled back’ editorial style involves never tipping his hand to the audience, the task of exposition was that much more complex. “When I’m cutting, I hold back as much information as I possibly can, to the point where when you watch it you might think it’s a little thin,” he says. “I like to keep the audience sitting up in their chair, really studying and involved. I hate it when I’m watching a movie and they telegraph what’s going to happen.”
Stacked Assets
Fox’s Final Cut Pro editing timeline was as loaded as his editing style is spare, sometimes with as many as 8 video and 30 audio tracks. The stacks in his timeline reflect his efforts to achieve, even in very early cuts, a highly finished cut of each scene in the movie, with dialog, music, sound effects, and visual effects.
"Being able to use Final Cut Pro in conjunction with Soundtrack and Motion played a huge role in making each cut much more polished than it would normally be so early in the editing process,” says Fox. “We were able to make virtually all the decisions on how the finished movie was going to look and sound.”
Nachmanoff notes that while Fox’s temp effects were eventually replaced in the finished film, he frequently used them to guide the specialists in creating final visual effects and sound design: “Working in Final Cut, we were able to quickly try things out in very sophisticated mixes without the fear of being locked in and unable to undo things if necessary. These advantages were amplified because Billy does such an extensive amount of sound and visual work as he goes. We were able to preview for ourselves a tremendously finished product all along the way. And it gave the effects and sound people a big head start.”
Seeing It Through
After Fox showed Nachmanoff the editor’s cut, the two moved to Hollywood, where they worked on the film’s pacing, story clarity, and playing time. Nachmanoff was happy enough with their progress to invite studio executives in for screenings halfway through the scheduled ten-week window for his director’s cut.
“We were able to work with such high-resolution picture and such great audio that we could stop anywhere in our workflow and screen it for the public, our producers, or our studio without having to make apologies,” he says.
Positive reactions to the screenings from the studio and the producers made it clear that no apologies would be necessary either for the film itself, which Nachmanoff credits in no small measure to Fox’s edit.
“I think that in some ways, editing, cut to cut, is the least of the editor’s job,” he says. “The most important thing is helping the director tell the story the best way possible. That means protecting the big picture and thinking of the whole film. Billy really understands this, and on Traitor, he did all of that.”
