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Cutting the Distance Between Art and Technology

Words by Ric Getter

As Walter Murch edits, he stands at his workstation. In part, it is the position he had grown used to, in the thousands of hours he spent hunched over a Moviola. However, part of it is the physical relationship he needs to maintain with the film, feeling its rhythm and flow. The walls around his workstation are covered with neatly assembled storyboards of hundreds of frame-grabs, two or more per shot. These are Murch’s visual guideposts through the thousands of feet of film selected from the many miles of film that were shot. This inherent desire for organization predates his work in film. “There’s some part of my brain that gravitates in that direction,” he says. “Generally, I have to watch out that it doesn’t take over.” But, it has never held back his appreciation for the important element of serendipity in editing. “You’re either open to that or not. And, I love that kind of stuff. Goddard has a great phrase for it; he talks about editing as the ‘transformation of chance into destiny.’ When it’s at its most powerful and mysterious, that is what you feel. These things that have combined so wonderfully together weren’t intended to go together. Some mystical wind is blowing them in that pattern.”

As an Academy Award winning film and sound editor/designer, Walter Murch is a master in the world of images and sound. His credits as film and sound editor include Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti , The Conversation, and the director’s cut of the Orson Wells masterpiece, A Touch of Evil. He is also one of the crafts most brilliantly articulate spokespersons, with carefully chosen words, a steady flow of clarifying allegory. His book, In a Blink of an Eye, is one of the best on the editor’s craft. More recently, Murch himself was the focus of a book, Behind the Seen, which documents his work on the first major feature film edited with Apple’s Final Cut Pro: Cold Mountain.

20 Years With FileMaker
For Murch, the Mac was part of the production since just after its release. He quickly recognized the ability of FileMaker to easily organize the volumes of data an editor needs to track in a feature film. “I got a Mac (it was the 512) in 1986 and then quickly went to the Mac Plus. I started using that and the great-grandfather of FileMaker on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was shot in 1986-87. That program is still the one that I use. Every film I work on I rewrite the program.” He points out that his database has been evolving over 20 years. “It’s also kept up with the transition from celluloid, which I was editing on in 1986, to when I started using Avid in the mid 90’s and then switched to Final Cut in 2002.” Murch is now editing the film Jarhead, on Final Cut Pro. The PowerBook that carries his copious notes and FileMaker database is never far from his side.

One of the decisions to go with Final Cut on Cold Mountain was budget. They could have several Final Cut workstations sharing the same pool of clips for the price of an Avid. “In our case, one of the things that we were concerned about being in Romania was the fact that we were very far out on our supply line and being able to have four systems gave us a healthy redundancy in case something did go wrong. In fact, nothing went wrong.” But Murch discovered an added advantage. It gave his young and talented assistance a chance to play a bigger role. “It was a discovery that we made. We had an intuition about it, but once we really got going and realized how possible and easy it was to do that, then we leaped at it. That’s a particular bone I have to pick with editing systems up until Final Cut. Whatever their strengths or shortcomings, it was very difficult to allow apprentices and assistants to actually edit images.”

In terms of making editing more accessible to more people, Murch draws upon a comparison to a similar “technological” breakthrough, the transition in painting from fresco to oil. “In fresco painting, you very much have to plan very much in advance and if you make a mistake, it’s difficult to correct it. You have work in place and work on a deadline and you have to accept the fact that things will turn out differently than you expected…whereas, oil painting is the Renaissance equivalent of digitization. It was portable, it was relatively inexpensive, and you could paint over it if it was a mistake, you could improvise and it clearly didn’t hold back creativity. If somebody hadn’t done fresco, could they do good oil painting? Of course!”

A More Personal Cinema
Walter Murch was part of a generation of filmmakers (including Francis Ford Coppola including George Lucas) who was drawn to their craft in spite of Hollywood, rather than because of it. “I was mostly influenced by the world cinema rather than Hollywood: Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Goddard, Truffaut and Kurosawa. Certainly mainstream Hollywood films in the 50’s and 60’s did not get to me the way these other films did. I think that was generally true of our whole generation when we went to film school in the mid-sixties. Some very high percentage had been pushed into film school by the same kinds of films.” He adds, “We were being pushed not by Hollywood but by this other idea of more personalized cinema…and the adventuresome leaps that these films were making that Hollywood wasn’t quite able to do.”

There was one area where Murch almost immediately saw the possibility for expanding a film’s potential: sound. His work on Apocalypse Now coined the term “sound design” and brought Murch an Oscar. “One of the reasons for the emergence of the term ‘sound design’ is we were creating a new sound format. It was what we were calling six-track, but it is what has been dubbed the 5.1 sound track. … It was a format that we designed simply for that film and we didn’t realize that other films were going to adapt it. Because it was new, I thought my responsibility was to orchestrate that space in the most interesting way possible. I thought that the analogy is with the production designer who is given a space and decorates that space with interesting objects and images. In that sense, I was given the three dimensional space of the theater and I could move the sound wherever I wanted in that space.”

Striking a Balance
Murch sees in computer-based editing an equally great potential for changing the landscape of filmmaking. “What it does is it’s pulled out into the daylight the tendency in film that was always there: the balance between spontaneity and control. Digitalization and digital editing forces the choice and in the future, there will be even more of that.” He notes that we are beginning to see that taken to an extreme now with digitally animated feature films. “Those are way stations towards the total control of the image where every single pixel is there because the filmmaker intentionally put it there or blessed it.” But Murch also sees in this the potential for loosing some of the serendipitous discoveries and inspirations that come as the result of less efficient technologies. “The strengths of linear systems is that they threw up a lot of stuff at you could recognize, ‘oh that’s good!’ But it would be very hard for you to articulate that in advance.”

Murch would like to see the technology to advance to a point where it would bring back some of the spontaneity and serendipity of the past. One of the values of linear editing is the ability to see every frame of film while shuttling through footage. You would see thing that would otherwise go unnoticed “If you want to go ten times speed, it can’t speed up the duration of any single frame. It gives you the illusion of ten times speed by showing you one frame out of every ten. But that means that you’re not seeing ninety percent of the material. In the linear systems, when you put a roll up on the Steenbeck and press ‘high speed,’ you’re seeing every single frame. It’s just that the duration of the frame was 10% of what it normally was. You can see a lot, even at that high speed.” He acknowledges that it’s something beyond the current state of technology, but is still not unimaginable for the future. In the art of filmmaking, the future is still not determined as much by technology as it is by the imagination, creativity and needs of the industry’s most brilliant craftsmen like Walter Murch.