Nonlinear Editing Killed Them, Every One

At the Exploratorium, Tricia is raising her arm and creating digi-trails in real time.

We’re here at San Francisco’s Exploratorium to see Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest exhibition. One of his many kinetic sculptures struts its stuff. Jaw dropping!

Eventually we wander off to, dare I say it, explore the Exploratorium. We enter an empty room and see ourselves projected in posterized color with digi-trails following our every move.

“OMG,” I say to Tricia, “It’s SqueeZoom from the 1980s. You can’t do that these days.”

The Big Squeeze

At home, I dig out my old videos from the SqueeZoom days. The Molinare 1980 showreel is packed with them—trails, trails and more trails. Then, so hip and of the moment; today, crude and dated. But love is blind and I love them all. (Watch the 1980 Molinare showreel, hosted by James Smiley here. )

My Vital Industries SqueeZoom edit suite with four VTRs is £400 an hour. Booked almost seven days a week, it pays for itself in six months.

Tonight I Get High

From the Molinare showreel

Tricia and I live on the top floor of Molinare, our video facility. I love my new toy so much that on the rare occasion when it isn’t booked, I sneak downstairs with my own VCR and plug into SqueeZoom. Tra la!

I am the Wizard of Oz! Effect 51—trails galore. Effect 67—the image does multiple repeats. Finally I feed SqueeZoom back into itself and out comes endless streaming, changing colors, digi-trailing to infinity.

Where’s my copy of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown?

Ampex ADO

Four years after SqueeZoom, I buy an ADO (Ampex Digital Optics). Sadly, SqueeZoom can’t rotate the picture XYZ and can’t do perspective, but ADO can and more.

It’s $150,000 and as revolutionary as the SqueeZoom was in her short life.

Today, late 2016, I buy an ADO control unit on eBay for $29.99 including shipping.

Ballet Trails

From the 1985 Quantel Encore promo

My favorite trail video is the ballet dancer in my 1985 Quantel Encore DVE promo—$160,00 a snip but so beautiful.

Vintage Treasures

You can’t do these effects anymore—not in Adobe After Effects, Apple Motion, Boris FX, Apple Final Cut Pro X, GenArts Sapphire, Red Giant TrapCode, Tiffen DFX, you name it. Sure you can make wishy-washy trails and blurs and a zillion cute particle effects, but they don’t even come close to these real-time hardware-created babies.

Digi-trails—gone the way of Bakelite ashtrays, lava lamps, VW T3 vans, Sinclair ZX computers … and whatever happened to Arthur Brown?

Goof Off and Die

I’m co-owner and CEO of Molinare, the largest video facility company in London.

Clive Burke is a Molinare client. He’s always in with his twin carousel slide shows. He loves his Electrosonic ES3601 slide projector presentation system.

Enter the Elevator

“Clive, film is so much better than a two-projector show.”

“Funny you should say that. I have a job for Pearson’s Pottery in Chesterfield.”

I need time off from being a suit and tie executive to get back to my craft. Hey, it’s only two days.

Going Down

Clive likes our film and tells his famous brother, James Burke. James hosts a science series, Connections.

Down, Down, Down

A few weeks later—yes, I should be running Moli—it’s another shoot, a corporate about Perkins diesel engines. We are in the noisiest factory ever with brother James. The factory is so loud that I can’t hear him clearly on my headphones.

When I check, the sound is unusable; that’s never happened to me before or since. So bad that if Perkins has any sense, they will fire me and sue for Burke’s fee.

Ground Floor

Incredibly, the Perkins people are delighted and want me to do another job.

They liked my awful film! These Perkins guys are idiots, but then again, so am I. Alarm bells should be ringing. Ding! Ding! But no, I’ll do the gig. Not a two-day wonder but two weeks away in Scandinavia!

Rutschebanen roller coaster at Bakken

First day in Denmark, the two Perkins guys and I are on the Rutschebanen wooden roller coaster at Bakken, which is bigger and better than the one at Tivoli Gardens.

In the afternoon, it’s the Carlsberg & Jacobsen Brewhouse tour. At night, we do Copenhagen.

Next day, I check how many boatyard locations we are visiting.

“Let’s see, five in Denmark, six in Norway, six in Sweden and five in Finland.”

“OMG, that’s 22. I don’t have enough film to shoot them all.”

“Stefan, this is a PR exercise. They’re really excited about our visit. We don’t have the budget for more film. Shoot two in each country, pretend to shoot the rest.”

Six Feet Under

We arrive at a boatyard; the owner is pleased to see us. My 16mm Éclair camera has an empty magazine. The red light comes on. The Perkins sales rep does a long interview but nothing is shot. I’m faking it. I feel bad, very bad.

We leave Denmark and make our way up Norway. There’s a lot of partying, saunas, drinking and shooting with no film. Next is Sweden—yep, more partying, saunas, drinking, more no-film shooting; followed by Finland, did I say party? Then suddenly the two from Perkins have to leave.

I’m stuck in Helsinki. Whaaa!

Shame and Pain

If I had let Clive Burke stick with his beloved ES3601, none of this would have happened. These two shameful works of crap were the last films I made for eight years.

They got a name for the winners in the world,

I want a name when I lose.

Kiss Your ‘Cinema Paradiso’ Goodbye

Cinema Paradiso (1988) is an Academy Award-winning Italian film about a young boy and his projectionist friend.

FYI: The world has changed. The movies you see at the cinema are no longer projected from 35mm film. Instead, the moving images are coming from a computer hard drive. The DCP (digital cinema package) stored on the hard drive is a collection of files containing digital cinema audio, image and data streams.

DCP is also a TLA. What’s a TLA? A three-letter acronym, like IBM, TSA and WTF.

A DCP has TIFF format video in (here come the TLAs) XYZ color space, with audio in PCM multichannel WAV encrypted in AES 128-bit in CBC mode, all wrapped in an MXF container. It’s TLAs from start to finish. Not for humble DIY folk like you and me.

Who You Gonna Call? Do Busters!

David’s double-width master has two SBS (side-by-side) 1920 x 1080 L & R frames.

My film WBAS (We Built a Ship) has been selected for screening at the NMFF (New Media Film Festival). They want a 3D DCP.

Before commissioning a DCP, I decide to get a 3D Blu-ray (BD3D) made.

I do a search and find Sony Creative Software DoStudio 3D. At $20K, I wonder who has bought Do software. I discover a link to user David Courtice, CEO of DC Creative in L.A.

I Need a BD3D

I USPS a PNY 256 GB USB 3.0 flash drive with separate left- and right-eye ProRes files.

“Stefan, I have your USB drive. The masters you sent are 1080i 29.97. The only acceptable frame sizes/rates for BD3D are 1920 x 1080 @ 23.976 fps progressive or 1280 x 720 @ 59.94 fps progressive. I suggest we downconvert to 720p/59.94 and then encode.”

“OMG, what a PIA! OTY, David, make the BD3D at 720p.”

MNG (Meet and Greet) F2F

A feature-length movie is about five 2,000-foot reels of 35mm film—all replaced by this single hard drive.

I have my full-length Blu-ray duplicated copies; now I need a 17-minute DCP for the NMFF 3D screening in Los Angeles.

I jet from SFO to BUR and meet David F2F. He’s running a boutique facility with editing, color grading and sound design rooms.

To convert my film to 24p, he makes and renders a 3840 double-width master in Adobe After Effects. It takes a day to cook. When finished, he breaks it back into separate left and right files. There follows a litany of XYZ, TIFF, MXF, PCM and WAV work—you don’t want to know. David speaks TLA like a native.

We go to indieDCP in Burbank. They make the final DCP. We put on our passive 3D glasses for the preview screening. No longer Cinema Paradiso, now Cinema DCP-o.

We Won!

At the NMFF, our DCP is presented on a huge screen. The 3D is great; folks in front of me duck as 3D sawdust comes spewing out. WBAS is awarded Best 3D. Yeah! “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World).”

My thanks to David (DC Creative), Bryan (indieDCP), Brandon (drone pilot), Tricia (producer and second camera), Alan and all the crew at the shipyard.

Right Back Where I Started From

Yay! I’m back at BBC Ealing. I’m so happy! I run up the stairs to the room with all the FOMs. “Hi Fred, hi Derek, hi Simeon. I’m an editor now!”

Simeon is the film operations manager for editors. We go down the stairs to the BBC canteen. He can’t wait to tell me about the strange and wonderful ways of BBC editing.

“Stefan, we’ve got Ampex VR1000 videotape recorders. Right? Well, they cost £40,000 and are bloody useless. Video editing is a disaster. You can’t splice the 2-inch tape. They say you can, but in practice you can’t, and it ruins the tape anyhow. The show you’ll be working on, The Wars of the Roses, is a 35mm telerecording [kinescope or kine in the United States] from live cameras.”

Hey Bra’ What’s Da Kine?

“A telerecording [kine] is film. Film, we all know and love. A 35mm synchronized camera shoots a 405-line cathode ray tube. It shows a negative image so the processed film is positive. Are you following me?

“Peter Hall, the boss of the Royal Shakespeare Company, wanted to do it on the stage at Stratford on Avon. A bloody stupid idea, if you ask me. They had to pull out seating and completely rebuild the sloping stage to make it flat. Why? They could have done it in our TV studios. We had to run in land lines to the center and record it as a 35mm telerecording. Madness…

The Wars of the Roses aired on BBC1 in April 1965.

“To complicate everything, they shot each sequence four or five times, moving the six cameras to different positions. Each pass, the director called the shots, so the cutting is different. Eight weeks shooting with over 50 BBC staff on location and who knows how many RSC people. Did I say ‘madness’ already?”

Binge Television 1965 Style

“All that effort and it winds up in a room here in Ealing, cans and tapes from floor to ceiling. Three three-hour programs—a nine-hour marathon to be broadcast over three days. And it’s all yours, my boy!”

“Gee, thanks, Simeon. But don’t you have a real, full-time editor?”

“Frankly, no one wanted the job. We dumped it on Nobby Clark, but Shakespeare is not his thing. You understand Shakespeare, can do Shakespeare, can’t you?”

“Sure. ‘If she says your behavior is heinous, kick her right in the Coriolanus.’”

“Shakespeare?”

“No, Cole Porter.”

Fire Burn and Keller Bubble

Our edit room has a six-plate 35mm Keller flatbed.

I meet Nobby and look at the half hour he has cut. There’s a freeze-frame that stands out. I try to be tactful.

“Nobby, you can see the film grain suddenly stops on the freeze.”

“I know. I had to extend the scene.”

“Then what you must do is find a spot where you can run the film back and forward, back and forward. That way the film grain keeps moving.”

“Brilliant. You take over. I will look after labels and cut the M&E rolls. Peter Hall and John Barton will be in this Friday night to review our work—no, I mean, your work.”

Nobby has backed out, it’s my baby. I have five days to prove myself before they come.

Fear no more the frown of the great.

To be continued.

‘Z Cars’ It Ain’t

Stefan on speedboat with ARRIFLEX 35 IIC, foreground Ken Russell, inset Oliver Reed

Fred takes pity on me, and for my swan song he puts me on Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film. It’s to be shot by BBC staff cameraman Ken Westbury. I had worked with him before on the BBC television series Z Cars, shooting 16mm. We know each other and get on well.

DAY ONE
The location is Beachy Head, near the seaside resort of Eastbourne. The call sheet says “Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.” It is a long, difficult clamber over the rocks.

We have two ARRIFLEX 35 IIC 35mm cameras, tripods, batteries, a blimp, film magazines, boxes of film and lenses, including a heavy Angenieux 25-250 zoom. Slowed down by all the kit, we finally catch up with Russell, who has raced ahead with Oliver Reed and a bevy of tall blonde models who are practicing their archery skills.

Martyre de Saint Sébastien à la Ken Russell

“Z Cars it ain’t,” says Westbury.

I set up a shot. Russell checks it and seems happy. Then, out of the blue, Westbury turns to me and says, “Would you like to operate?” I leap at the chance. “Yes, yes, please, thank you.”

CULTURE SHOCK
A few months ago I was making films for Australian station TCN9. I had a wind-up clockwork 16mm Bolex camera and a crew of none. Today I’m shooting 35mm film using cameras I have never used before. I have two film assistants and four grips to help—and there must be 50 or more models, actors and technicians here.

THIS CLAPPER IS NOT FOR BURNING
The last night at Eastbourne is a big candlelit procession with hundreds of extras. I do close-ups on a 75mm and switch to an 18mm wide angle. I am walking backwards at night over wobbly, broken rocks. Maybe this is why Westbury asked me to operate…

We get to a cove with a campfire. Our star, Oliver Reed, is there. His fire is dying.

“More wood, we need more wood!” shouts Russell. “Stefan, I want your clapper!”

“No, Ken. I need it.” “Rubbish, you can make films without a clapper. Give it to me!”

“Z Cars it ain’t,” says Westbury.

“I can’t! It’s not for burning!” He grabs my clapperboard and tosses it onto the fire.

TWELVE YEARS LATER
Russell has made Women in Love, The Devils, Mahler, Tommy and many more, while I have built sound and television studio Molinare in London. One Friday night, he arrives to be interviewed. I am waiting at our front door.

“Ken, I’m Stefan. Do you remember me? I was the cameraman on Debussy.”

“Of course. You’re the crazy Australian who threw his clapper into the fire.”

Russell Harty, the talk show host, appears. Ken disappears with him into the studio. Drat! I never had a chance to set the record straight.

“No, Ken, you’re wrong. YOU burned my clapper. You did it, not me!”