Editing Inside of Television: LOST

Hello Blog,

So I’m in the middle of post production for the short film “In Him,” and I must say that its coming along just fine. Just have to add some final revisions to the cut, pop some color, and clean up sound-should be good as gold. However, last Friday I had the opportunity to meet two wonderful gentlemen from the crew of the former TV show, LOST. They came to USC to give a talk on the techniques used in editing episodic television. The two individuals are:

CARLTON CUSE ( Executive Producer, Co-Showrunner and Writer) CHRISTOPHER NELSON (Editor).

Key takeaway points of the discussion:

• After shooting the pilot of LOST, JJ Abrams left to direct Mission Impossible 3. The time it took for him to make that entire movie, they shot 46 episodes of LOST. Episodic television is very demanding with time.
• In episodic television, everyone sticks around for the season except for the directors, so you cannot give the directors the call for every little detail, you give the call to the show runners. In LOST, directors were rotated every 3 weeks, not because there should be a variety in directing, but because each episode just demanded that much time to prep and shoot.
• Sometimes in episodic television, the director’s vision isn’t what the show runner wants, and so at this point, they would digress to the editor’s cut, and sometimes stick to that cut because the editors usually have a better sense of how the ball rolls in the show that the director just because he has stuck around for so long.
• If you are a prisoner of your former vision, you will not make the best version of your film. You have to look at your film and say, what is the best way to make the story with what footage I have?
• Collaboration is critical. Fresh eyes take the film and put it together to make it the most compelling and rich story possible- Chris will look at the script and see what works and what doesn’t. The script gets executed, tested by production, director will consider reworking certain parts, but creatively there’s less creativity coming from directors than the editorial because Chris will look at it and explain what parts work and don’t- which is more vital than him just piecing the narrative together.
• The best directors can previsualize how the actors will react to a script before finalizing it, so they give enough information to give actors the proper direction.
• As an editor for episodic television, to share your story with the show runner and director, sometimes you need to get images and clips off the web to share your developing story-using these placeholders until you convince the crew to get the actual shots.

Q: Many look at television as “not cool” to work in because it doesn’t offer as much as a feature film. So what is the positives and the negatives of television? What keeps you doing it?

Chris: There hasn’t been a better time for there to be television. For me, being a television editor is like being on Junior Varsity instead of Varsity. There’s the mystique that goes with, with being a feature editor. You can imagine being a feature editor working on bigger shows. But there is a distinction drawn for those who will hire us. You know, there seems to be a misconception in the feature world that those of us who work on television aren’t quite as good as those working on features. However, those working in features are coming back to television because theres work here. Also, there’s a clear distinction between episodic television and reality shows. People think that you can transition easily from reality shows over to episodic shows, but nobody can really say that its an easy transition.

Carlton: I think its definitely easier to be stigmatized an editor. In television, as a writer, you really have the opportunity to share a story over a long period of time. You know in LOST, we had the opportunity to share over 120 hours of our story and it allows for us to make detours and deviations. If you have an actor that you love, you can suddenly write like 8 episodes for him, and its different from film because in film you have to go from A to Z. I mean I love the social network, and I love what it stood for, because I used to watch movies as a kid and it would be so irrelevant. In the movie business, the director is at the top of the food chain. The way that I like to look at it is like, “Who’s the person responsible for making the movie?” In television, the most important person is the writer because the writer is pressured to push out scripts and everyone depends on him. The show runner has the final authority, and it might be as minute as choosing between the red car or the blue car, but as the show runner, I’m the final creative authority. If I call up the director and tell him I want alot of coverage and I want extreme close-ups, thats what the director has to do. Executive producers get somewhat of a diluted title, in LOST we had 6 executive producers, so we use the term show runner to establish this distinction.

Q: So what’s it like working with a director who hasn’t hired you?

Chris: In general, a good episodic director may bring a vision to a party, but a GOOD director brings in a lot of options. They need various transitions, openings, exits, coverage. They may have an over arching idea of what they want, but they need to bring enough material that can be sliced and diced in many different ways.

Carlton: The quickest way to never work for a show runner again as a director is to not cover a scene. So let’s say you’re directing an episode of LOST and you want to make a really cool moving master, so you basically come in one door, and come to a point and have a dramatic candle entrance, and we get the audience, so we come to one point and settle to another and only in the end of the scene will we get coverage. A director who is very willful will shoot that and not get any coverage. So Chris will be editing the scene and I will be like, well.. where is the coverage? I’ll go ballistic and say well… what the f*** are you doing?

MAKING DECISIONS ON THE SHOW

Carlton: The original idea, to back up 1 more level. What should happen in a show like LOST? Well, Damon and I were like, the expected solution was to get them off the island, so we figured we should get them off by the 3rd season. So the 4th season we would have to get them all back. There would be these weird time portals and stuff, but we should be practical, so there needs to be a plane that brings everyone back. Nonetheless, this is a television show, so the plane will cost too much, so we can show this, but we need a creative process. We took our best shot of shooting everything through the cockpit and using CG for the background.

Posted in: Panel