Searching. Actress Cyndi Williams, as Julia, in “Room.”
A case in point is recent Edit Center class project “Room,” a Sundance-nominated psychological thriller directed by Kyle Henry and edited by Edit Center teacher Pete Beaudreau.
In his narrative feature debut, Henry, an Austin-based filmmaker who received attention for two long-format documentaries (”American Cowboy,” “University Inc.”), tells the story of Julia, a married Houston woman with two children barely making ends meet by working at the Paradise Bingo Hall. She begins having visions of a stark, industrial room, and after waking up from a minor car accident, flies to New York City to find it.
“Instead of having one person sit in a room and look at all the footage, The Edit Center just made more sense. We could have 14 people looking at footage.”
Al About DV
Henry wrote the script over the course of 4 years, starting in 1999, and through connections, grants (“A $5K grant can mean everything to an independent film”) and the skill of cinematographer P.J. Raval, managed to shoot the entire film in DV on a handheld Panasonic DVX100. Henry chose DV chiefly for “run-and-gun” portability — the script called for setups in 80 locations in two states — but also to allow himself enough latitude to push his scenes.
“I wanted to have the option to work with my actors, take as many takes as I needed and not worry about hundreds of dollars of film running through the gate with every shot,” he says.
Although DV delivered aesthetically for Henry (“I didn’t want a pretty New York”), it also left him with 130 hours of footage, prompting editor Pete Beaudreau to suggest that they take the film to The Edit Center, where two successive classes worked on it.
Dual Assembly
“We had absolutely no money after shooting,” says Henry. “Pete knew that I wanted him to edit the film, and he also had this wonderful gift to give the project, which was to allow us to move forward in postproduction when I couldn’t afford to pay him.”
“Kyle had just tons of coverage,” says Beaudreau. “Instead of having one person sit in a room and look at all the footage, The Edit Center just made more sense. We could have 14 people looking at footage.”
Three-Point Edit. Director Kyle Henry (right) engages student Sandy Patch, while editor Pete Beaudreau audits.
After re-capturing the entire film with co-teacher Chad Beck and two teaching assistants to ready the footage for the students, Beaudreau guided a class through a first assembly.
“It was really tough for students to tackle because of the amount of footage,” says Beaudreau. “Too many options sometimes make it impossible to make that first decision. The Texas section was standard narrative, but the New York section was tricky, more poetic and expressionistic. But the first time it ran through, we got a really good pass on the first hour of the film, which is amazing. And the second class filled in a lot of the holes.”
Working from two 4-hour class assemblies and the director’s notes, Beaudreau was in a much better position to create his own first 2 ½-hour rough cut. “The big advantage for myself and Kyle was to be able to see what was working and what wasn’t, almost immediately,” he says. “It really helped when we actually finished cutting the film, because there were things that we’d seen either narratively or performance-wise or even from a scriptwriting level that didn’t work when they were cut together.”
“It’s such a weird idea,” says Beaudreau of the school’s method. “But it definitely works.”
Next page: “Swimmers”