Cinereach Blog

When Your Editor Lives Abroad: Post Production Advice from RFF Fellow Nadia Hallgren

A post by Nadia Hallgren

One of the main things I have learned working on Love Lockdown is that you should not trust the United States Postal Service to deliver anything on time! I’ll give you the back-story: After much debate, I decided to ask London-based Editor and Director Yusuf Pirhasan (LG 15, Kate Modern) to edit my film. Yusuf and I have worked on projects together in the past, we’re good friends, and as an editor I trust him implicitly.

My only reservation on having him cut the film was that he lives in London, and I live in New York. After much debate, interviewing other editors, and asking around for advice, I felt Yusuf was still my editor of choice. Not only is he a talented editor and storyteller that has special experience with short form content, but he’s a great friend that will work tirelessly on my project, forgive me for not getting enough cutaways, (maybe not), and will understand that I have a very limited budget.

Oh yeah, back to the USPS. I cloned my hard drive and sent one to Yusuf who four weeks later had still not received it. The Post Office had no clue where it was. Realizing I already wasted a bunch of time and should have done this three weeks earlier, I bought another drive, cloned the film again and sent it via FedEx. It arrived three days later. The original hard drive surfaced six weeks after I originally sent it. It had been stuck in customs, and they made us pay 50 pounds to get it back! Back to filmmaking: I spoke to my mentor Annie Sundberg about my editing situation since she is also cutting a film with an editor that lives in another country. She gave me some great tips on how we can communicate, and exchange footage in the easiest way possible.

Technology has made it possible to do this long-distance edit in a painless way. My editor uses yousendit.com to upload new cuts of the film. They download fairly quickly, allowing for a quick turnaround to view them and get back to my editor with notes and feedback. We use Skype to videoconference and discuss scenes, and key issues of the film. So far, so good. The edit is now going as well as a documentary edit can go.

I have also learned from this experience that I would have liked to begin editing the film earlier, during principal photography, instead of waiting until after. If I had been assembling scenes as I went, it would have made it easier to figure out what pick-ups I needed and grab them as I went along, and while I was still frequently visiting my subjects. I learned this the hard way because the family I follow in the film has moved since I was last shooting with them. This makes re-shoots in their previous apartment impossible.

This round, I’ll be in London working with Yusuf in-person, which will make communication a breeze, and I’ll have no reason to get the United States Postal Service involved.