What’s in a Note?
Filmmaking is already a team sport with your creative partners - a pretty incredible collaboration with each unit bringing their own ideas, styles and creative solutions to a project- but it also extends beyond that playground.
Anytime your project is funded with someone elses dollars, the investor will naturally have a say in how the project develops. It can also mean there are competing ideas.
My television work has quickly outpaced my film portfolio. I can’t speak to the differences as acutely, except to say that with a feature film, you are taking your time with considering every single beat and line of dialogue. With TV, you of course follow an episode from assembly to picture lock and will know the dialogue inside and out. But what you don’t have is the time to settle in with each decision.
So, what are the kind of notes you get when editing an episode of television?
Everything’s on the Table
Creative:
This is the most on obvious and broadest type of note to tackle.
Creative can mean the style of editing, the use of music tracks (“temp scoring”), and any of the hundreds of decisions that you make as an editor, like the shot selection at any given point.
“Make the editing more aggresive here” That would likely be asking you to cut more frequently/with intentional jumps (or even disorientation) to heighten the kinetic energy of a scene.
Conversly, you might read “lets settle in, and soak it up first”, requesting that shots linger; let the performances and underlying emotional energy come through.
Easy hanging fruit might look like “lets try a mellow music track here”, or “cut sooner to Sarah’s reaction”, “lose the tail end of this establisher shot, it goes on too long”
Creative can also allude to all the other elements that show up on the screen; ideally, what was blueprinted in prep and executed in production has delivered what everyone had in mind; whether that be the production design (the film sets), costuming, props or any other story element. I have not had many notes go back and forth on this front. However, there are multiple conversations that were needed whenever there were VFX extensions, additions to costumes, or holograms & tech screen replacements were needed on an in-story device.
“Lets have the (MacGuffin) emit an orange glow when its activated”
Performance:
Unsurprisingly, peformance is where the largest percentage of director notes will be focussed on.
You can expect the director (and later, producers) to ask to have a look at the alternative takes to how a character delivered a line of dialogue - even if you’ve already cut in their ‘circle take’. The “circle”/”favourite” take is a bit of a misnomer sometimes anyways - just because the director prefered it while capturing it on set, it doesn’t necessarily mean that its the best option once in the edit.
This is the crux of editing anyway - any story, no matter how rediculous, can be engaging if you buy into the performances of the actors. A foundational task as an editor is to help shape the ‘best’ performances, using the great moments the actors gifted you with.
So you’ll try out the different versions of the same lines - sometimes the actor will deliver a line with more ‘hope’ in one take, or perhaps in another, with an unsure or questioning inflection. At times, the note may not even be about the delivery of the line, but rather the framing of the shot.
“Do we have John saying the line exactly this way, but in in a medium shot? We want to see him holding the (MacGuffin) here when he says this, so that it really lands”
Worst case scenario, you may need to ask the actor to come into to re-record the line (aka, ADR) for a performance to match the chosen angle/take that’s in the cut.
Story Pacing & Clarity:
Cutting for pacing is a close second to cutting for performance, in terms of volume of notes (and I’d argue in importance as well).
As you get to the later rounds with producers, ‘let’s cut this’ will probably become the most common note. For now, this should be self-explanatory, but this really is a subject all unto itself.
Story clarity is paramount. What’s making sense in the script doesn’t always make sense on the screen. And if an episode is getting slow (or, conversely is feeling well-paced, but is running too long for the network’s target runtime) a few lines or even an entire scene may need to be dropped. Usually the kind of scene that gets dropped first is quieter character moments - where perhaps the plot is not advanced, but our affection and understanding of a character is.
Its a tough balance and quite tricky to know if you can get away with losing it. After all, if we don’t care about the characters, we won’t care what happens to them, no matter how cool it may look. On the other hand, after a couple of ‘slower’ scenes in a row, most viewers are picking up their smartphones to distract themselves.
However, what happens if you drop a line or scene that was needed to undertstand the plot?. How do you get that information back into the story? (…Or maybe it was missing in the script?)
A quick answer is, again, ADR. The producer may decide to add a piece of dialogue when the camera is on a cut-away. For example; lets say that the VFX decision above was a late addition. So we could ADR an updated line.
“The (MacGuffin) glowing orange means the warlocks are near”.
VFX, Music & Budget Constraints:
VFX is a lot of work and takes a considerable portion of the overall budget these days. In a perfect world, all VFX-intended shots are planned of time and shot in a particular way to help mitigate work and sell the finished shot better. Other times, VFX is needed for fixing a shot; painting out car logos, a stuntpersons wires, a reflection of the camera crew in a window. All this “quick” shots add up incredibly quickly.
While the hero shots ideally can be maintained, you will often recieve notes to try and decrease or altogther eliminate the need for the small fixes.
“Swap this wide shot to the medium-wide instead so that we’re not seeing the crew in the reflection”
“Since this is the third time we are seeing the (MacGuffin) glowing, lets just stick to the closeup shot on John’s face and add an orange glow to the bottom of the frame. The audience will get it”
Boom. $4000 saved.
The same thing will happen for music, especially if there are popular ‘needledrops’, i.e, real mainstream songs that the production has to pay to use. They do not come cheap.
Budget constraints have an obvious connection to whatever is happening on set. But its as important in post production to have flexibility.
Of course, all constraints do bring an opportunity for creative solutions.
Taking Requests, Making Changes
Patience Through the Process
Every editor has their own workflow when dealing with the feedback.
I copy all the notes into a todo list in Apple Notes, so that it pops up on the ipad under my monitor (which up till then, was showing me the script and continuity paperwork).
Then I usually work my way backwards from the last note towards the beginning of the episode, so that the timecoded comments stay (mostly) accurate to my changing sequence.
I don’t follow this as a hard rule however. At times, if I hit a ‘big’ note that I know will be tricky to solve, I may jump ahead and circle back around to it, just so I can I don’t lose too much momentum. Before every major change, I also dupe the sequence, and start working on the new one - that way I can make sure to save frequently and so that I have a decent ‘restart’ point if I accidently mucked up the sequence beyond repair while trying to address a note.
For any responses to notes that require any more context beyond ‘done’, I will write a comment in red font describing my suggested solution (or my obstacle in addressing it). Writing down your responses is critical if you want to be able to ‘show your work’ (math teachers be proud of me!). And, because of the copious amounts of revisions you’ll do, it’s extremely challenging to be able to instantly recall the reasoning behind every edit decision you made when the director has a 15 minute opening in his schedule for you.
Push Back
As for when and where you push back on a note - that will of course depend on the releationship you have with the director or producer. As a general rule, and obviously when not spefically asked me opinion, I do not push back at all unless I think the director has missed a reason behind a cut. I’ll bring it up in a way that allows them to decide on the potential compromise.
For example, on small items:
Maybe we have an issue of continuity. If I get told “use the medium-wide shot as John stands up, if we have it” I would respond with “Yup, we can swap it. However, in that medium-wide shot, we can see he’s left the (MacGuffin) on the couch, but it has to be back in his hands when he exits the room”
The director can choose what to do from there, but they obviously need to have the informed choice.
On larger notes:
Perhaps the director found a moment between characters reduntant “lets lose this small beat between John and Sarah before they head out to save the POTUS. They have one during the gunfight anway”
If I strongly believe a requested change is significantly worsening a cut, I will express that it’s tough to lose…whatever it is we lost.
On a TV show, I have to make this point quickly and then drop it. This is for two reasons. One, because the tight schedule doesn’t allow for much more back and forth - and if I don’t raise the point immediately, it may got lost among the many other notes. Secondly, no one wants to keep arguing about a decision they’ve already made.
On a film edit, I can let the director (and myself) sit with the change, and then a week later bring it up again, if I still feel the same way.
“Do we miss seeing this moment between John and Sarah? I think it gives the necessary weight for later on in the gunfight, when they catch eachother’s panicked looks”
Obviously, no director is as dumb as my unimaginative examples, but it’s not really about that. And even if you were 100% in the right to push back, it’s your job to bring the director’s vision to life. So while its important to make sure the best story comes through, you have a loyalty to the director & producers to carry out their ideas first and foremost .
Coincedentally, that will also be what get’s you re-hired.
A Practice of Balance
Once you’ve recieved all these types of notes from a director, and have combed through to make sure you’ve adressed them all, you will pass the new cut up to an executive. They’ll come back with their own sets of notes hitting these areas. You address, revise, send the new cut out to the network executives now. And repeat.
This all sounds fairly straight foward right?
But the complexities are usually not so much in whether a note is possible - you either have the footage or you don’t - but whether the desired effect can be created. I.e, can you address the reasoning behind the note? Occassionaly a note can be suggesting one solution to an issue, but is in actuality addressing only a symptom from another less obvious issue. To put it simply; can you read between the lines?
On top of that, each change ripples across the episode. Replacing a shot to fix a performance mistep in Scene 2 might mean a new VFX fix to remove a boom mic reflection, ballooning the VFX budget. This is where the ability to find the best balance comes in. A balance of story, performance, the footage already recorded, and the budget left to enhance any elements.
Compromise is a key word in the process. You will have competing notes and opinions, and you may even be given notes that absolutely sound like a waste of time. When you’re on your 5th round of revisions, a good editor will do their best to remain cool, patient, and most importantly humble - give each note an honest try. You never know what stupid idea might turn out to be brilliant (or, at the very least, spark another idea).
It’s been said many times before that the best response to a note that an editor can have is “sure, let’s try it”.