It’s a steep road to Sundance for an independent filmmaker. No surprise, then, that this year two films nominated for awards at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival took a helpful detour through The Edit Center, a unique film editing school in New York where students learn to edit by cutting actual footage from independent feature films — exclusively on Final Cut Pro.

Although Edit Center classes have worked on previous Sundance films, this year both 2004 class-assisted projects made it into the festival, as well as several films directed or edited by Edit Center alumni and instructors.

“We’re excited that The Edit Center and Final Cut Pro are helping so many indie filmmakers get their films into the Sundance Film Festival,” says Edit Center founder Alan Oxman.

Class Action

But more remarkable perhaps than the number of films they’ve helped into Sundance is how they’ve helped. Since 1999, The Edit Center has pushed a radical instructional agenda — teaching film editing to students by having them work on real features and documentary films.

“The Edit Center was founded on the strength of a single great idea: have students work on real movies.”

The core curriculum, a six-week Art of Editing course, brings together independent filmmakers with footage that needs shaping and students looking for a reality-based learning op. Each student learns Final Cut Pro, works with a top editor to cut actual footage on a dedicated Final Cut Pro system and graduates with a reel of cut scenes and a credit.

For Mollie Goldstein, the school’s director of education — herself an Edit Center alum who found the school after graduating from Yale by Googling “film editing” — the results are as inspired as Oxman’s original notion. “The Edit Center was founded on the strength of a single great idea: have students work on real movies,” she says. “And while we’ve upgraded our facility since the first class took place in the closet of a postproduction house, we haven’t changed the essentials much.”

Also unchanged, says Goldstein, is the central role of Final Cut Pro: “Apple technology is tremendously important to the Edit Center model, mostly because it is so accessible. Final Cut Pro is professional, powerful and inexpensive — a killer combination in independent film. The students edit on professional systems, and the filmmakers take that work and continue on their own professional-level setups — even if they’re on a shoestring budget in somebody’s apartment.”

Getting as Good as They Give

On the take side of the equation — attracting promising film projects — the school has learned exactly what to ask for from invited filmmakers and how best to organize class projects to return optimal results.

But what makes a director decide to risk his precious footage on a class project? Goldstein points to founder Oxman’s reputation — and cost: “a free rough edit is difficult to turn down.” And a steady track record of successful collaborations has made it that much easier to attract projects.

An unanticipated boon for the school has been the sheer capacity of digital filmmaking. “You have more and more people shooting 300 hours of footage and then having absolutely no idea how to manage it,” says Goldstein. “That’s great for The Edit Center, because it means that there will always be films that need our help and films for our graduates to work on.”

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