About Episode
Film editing is a magical art form that very few people truly understand. Frankly, there are people within the film industry that don’t understand the power the editor yields in shaping the finished product.
In this episode I have an in-depth conversation with Steven Hullfish, a feature film and tv editor, instructor, and author of multiple books on editing (and the entire post-production process) including his latest book Art of the Cut. Steve and I chat about his journey preparing for and compiling over 50 interviews with editing legends, and beyond just the interviews themselves how he was able to find a narrative within all of his various conversations that led to amazing insights into the process of film editing and storytelling. We talk about many different areas of film editing well beyond the basics like understanding story structure, pacing, timing, rhythm, the process for reviewing dailies, and much more.
If you’re interested in taking your knowledge of editing to the next level and you want to truly understand what it takes to be a magician in the edit bay, this interview is a great first step, and then picking up a copy of Art of the Cut after you’re done listening is a great second step.
Episode Highlights
- Steve’s journey from college student to post-production master
- The addicting rush of increasing your editing efficiency
- Determining which of the 4 types of editors you are
- Steve’s strange techniques for parsing through interviews
- Asking the questions that editors never get to ask other editors
- Common industry misunderstandings about editing
- Strategies for fighting editor’s block
- Creative advice from the industry’s greatest editors
- The subjective art of watching dailies
Useful Links
About Guest
Steve Hullfish is a feature film and TV editor, with credits including Courageous, War Room, Champion and the theatrically released feature documentary, Clinton Inc. In addition to Art of the Cut, he is the author of five other books, including The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction and Avid Uncut. He also trains editors and colorists around the world.
Transcript
Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Steve Hullfish, who is a feature film and TV editor, trainer, author. I mean, you’re you just kind of cover the whole gamut of all of the top skills in the film and post production industry. So it is a tremendous, tremendous pleasure to finally get you on the show today.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. Thanks for asking me, I’ve listened to your podcast for a long time, and I love the company I’m in.
Zack Arnold: Oh, cool. I appreciate that. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but you’ve been helping me test one of my more advanced email workflows, because I have an automated system that helps me follow up with people. And it’s taken us probably about six months to actually make this happen. And this just proves my point that if you really build in some systems to make sure that you get towards whatever that goal is, my goal was, I’m going to figure out a way to get this guy in my podcast. And thanks to that automated email follow up system, here we are. So
Steve Hullfish: Yep, it’s been persistent, and it’s not because I don’t want to do it. It’s just because, you know you’re you’re a busy guy, and I’m a busy guy, and it’s tough between the interviews that I do and the interviews you do for us to finally have a chance to talk. But I’m glad we are,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s usually the way that it works. I’m finding now that the lead time between the time that I say, Oh, this would be a good person to have on the show, and when they’re actually in front of the microphone is like three months. That’s how nuts it is trying to get people in this industry to talk. Well, can you do it like one in the morning? I think I’ll be done with work by then.
Steve Hullfish: Yep, I’ve got my list of people that I want to interview for art of the cut goes goes out to August. Yeah. And I know I got to start like, at least three months before I actually want to publish before I for me to start pestering people to get the interview, and then that’s about how long it takes to have it work out.
Zack Arnold: It’s crazy. I mean, we could talk about publishing schedules all night, but what I really want to do is kind of talk about your background as an editor, as a trainer, all the different things you’ve done as an author. And then I really want to dig in deep to your latest book, because I think it’s going to be fascinating. But where I want to start is just making sure that people actually understand who you are, what your background is, and kind of where you started. So let’s kind of give the the elevator pitch version of Steve whole Fish’s journey to this podcast.
Steve Hullfish: Sure, I went to college back I think you and I are about the same age. I’m not sure. I might be a little I’m 53 and I, when I went to school, there really wasn’t editing gear. I mean, you, you couldn’t, you didn’t actually learn anything in college that was technical, at least where I was, even though I was a TV communication major. And by the time I was sophomore, I was working professionally in the industry, full time job, and that was back in the tape to tape days for me, that was three quarter inch. And then finally, going to beta and Digi beta. And in 1993 I was working for a TV station, and I was key to getting us into Avid, which we I think we looked at media 100 back then, media 100 and avid, and we chose avid. And then I went to a post production company in Chicago, and at that post production company did national TV spots, and most of what I did there was The Oprah Winfrey Show, they have about 30 in house editors, and then they went outside to about three editors at post facilities in Chicago, and I was one of those. And then eventually I ended up working for Oprah at harpos Studios. I also worked for Bill Curtis on investigative reports and cold cases. That was more online work, but I did some offline work too, and I got into feature films on the movie called courageous. I can’t even remember what year that was, but people could look it up. And then did another movie that was that did very well. Number that courageous was the number one new movie in America the week it came out, and war room was the number one movie in America the week after it came out. And I’ve done a couple of smaller independent films since. That’s that’s basically my editing career.
Zack Arnold: And what are you doing currently?
Steve Hullfish: Currently, I’m working on a feature film called The Reliant. I’m editing on Avid. It looks like my next movie might be on FCP X, which I’ve owned since it came out, but I have struggled to learn it. I’ve edited on every single platform out there. I’ve edited on Avid. I’ve edited tons on FCP seven, Sony expre Quantel edit box. I did a little bit of time on smoke, not much fusion illusion, which was an avid product that came out. And then obviously all the, not the linear editing time that I spent Grass Valley and Sony editing. But I. Just, I haven’t had the time to wrap my head around FCPX, but my next film might use it, and then the film after that looks like it’s going to be premiere. So I’ve done features already in Final Cut Pro seven premiere and avid so I’ve kind of jumped around a lot.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, well, so the short version of all that is that you basically run the gamut. As far as all the tools are concerned, you’ve actually been a trainer of many of these tools, as well as in the color world. Is that correct?
Steve Hullfish: That’s true, and I love training. My dad was a teacher, and I really enjoy it. I’ve taught for my training clients, our Turner networks. I have taught there dozens and dozens of times I was probably going there three or four times a year, for three or four years, as they would cycle through their editing department, or as I would have something new to train, and they also jumped back and forth between avid and Premier and Final Cut and back to Avid. So I helped train as they made each one of those transitions. NBC Sports in New York. I trained there a couple of times. Right before everybody went off to the Olympic site, I went over there and did some training. Trained in Vietnam, the Vietnamese TV station, TV company, it’s a communist country, so the media is run by the government, and so TV department there I train Whole Foods, Golf Channel versus network, a lot of networks. It’s a lot of color correction training. It’s also editing training, and I want to be on La sounds like in a month to do resolve, train the trainer. So I’m really looking forward to I’ve color corrected on resolve, but I haven’t done a ton of editing and resolve, and I’m gonna learn how to train editors in Resolve.
Zack Arnold: Yes, and I’ve heard from a few people that there are some some very, very attractive features and ways of working and resolve that have people seriously considering it in the NLE conversation, I personally haven’t even touched it, but that’s kind of the whispers that I’ve heard.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah, it looks really interesting to me, and they’ve got some really nice tool sets for me. The big thing that I need to kind of learn from them, and I don’t want to bite the hand that might end up feeding me. But a big part of why I like Avid or a big part of even premiere. Why premiere is a good editor is it allows you to organize your material very easily, and that’s a big part of editing. As much as you don’t, as much as you want to think about all the creative stuff, if you can’t find what you’re trying to edit, you’re in big trouble. And resolve, I think, has some issues. I just need to learn a little bit more about it, maybe. But that might be one of the weak points with them, is just kind of project management and media management. But I’m sure I’ll learn all about it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And as anybody that listens to the show regularly knows, as soon as I hear the words organization or workflow, I have a tendency to go off on 90 minute tangents about things like Trello and folders, and I’m not going to do that because I’m actually building an entire Linda course right now. It’s all about organization and productivity in post. So that is like, at the that is like the top of my brain right now is building out an entire year’s worth of content to get editors more organized. But I’m not going to go there, because I could just dive down that rabbit hole forever,
Steve Hullfish: And I could go with you. So sign me up for that. Course, when it comes out,
Zack Arnold: Well, I don’t know if I’m gonna have anything I can teach you, because it certainly sounds like you know your way around all this stuff, and you have have been in the industry a lot longer than I have. But hey, if I can teach you one or cool new little fancy tricks, then I’ll take it.
Steve Hullfish: That’s all you need. And I tell you once you when you decide that you’ve learned it all, you are dead in the water, pal, that’s what I say. So that’s one of the things that I try to tell trainer. Like, I train a lot of very high level people, and most of them are really happy for that someone is investing in them. So I don’t really have to push my services on them, but I do explain to a lot of people, hey, you know what? We’re all professionals. You know many people I teach have been editing for 20 years, and what can you teach them? But if you can open up your mind and learn just a few small things, they can really change the way you approach things. It can, it can make a few minutes learning a few new things can change a day by hours sometimes.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s that that’s something that I talk about all the time. With your health, obviously, because I’m not a big fan of the, you know, crash diets and crazy exercise programs, because nobody ever gets through that stuff. But if you just make small changes, then you can see results. And it’s the same way with editing. I love that you’re saying that you don’t have to learn everything. You don’t have to know every button, you don’t have to know every menu setting. But if you just figure out this one little tweak, and you have that light bulb moment of, whoa, wait a second, that just saved me, like, five minutes. So maybe I can find a way to do 10 and then 20, and you kind of start to go down that. Rabbit hole, and then you end up, three years later, having a podcast about editing an organization, which is kind of how I ended up here. You know, it’s like a drug. It’s like, oh, wait, I can save another 37 seconds if I put this thing over here and assign this keystroke.
Steve Hullfish: That’s right.
Zack Arnold: So one thing that I wanted to talk about a little bit, given that you have such a varied and wide background, is, I don’t know if you read this post, it was kind of going out around viral. It was a while ago. It’s probably, I don’t know, six months ago now, but there’s this concept, and I don’t know if I completely agree with this, but the concept of that there are four types of editors, so I don’t know if you remember when that went around. So basically, it was written by a producer. So it’s, it’s a little tongue in cheek, it can be a little condescending. So I’m not really endorsing the article, but the idea has some merit, and the four types are basically the musician, the technician, the painter and the storyteller. So the musician, of course, you know, that’s the the editor that has a guitar in the corner and it’s all about the music and the sound and whatnot. Then the technician, that’s the editor that’s really all about, am I using the right tool? And I should be using this plug in i This is the best vector scope, and I want the this resolution monitor. And then, of course, you have the painter, which is somebody that’s really into the visuals, into the colors, all those other things, and then you have the storyteller. And I’m curious, because I want to go deeper with this with just because there are so many other editors you’ve spoken with, but just for you yourself, given you have such a wide varied background, what type of editor would you consider yourself, given you’ve done so many things? Because this is a tough question for a lot of people. Lot of people to answer.
Steve Hullfish: Wow. For me, it’s very simple, because I would say I am 25% of all four of them.
Zack Arnold: Wow, interesting.
Steve Hullfish: Honestly, I’ve got the guitar in the corner. I’ve got a mandolin at work. I am a musician. I’ve recorded albums. I love music. I also think of the musician editor as somebody who’s very involved with pacing and dynamics of editing that you need to, you know, have big moments and quiet moments, and you need to have, you know, just like a piece of music. One of the reasons why music is so interesting is there has to be both variety and a pattern that is constant, right? Because if music was just music has to be both predictable and always different, right? It’s got to be both. And that’s the way I think editing has to be. You have to have pace, that is, you know, that people are going to be able to understand and kind of follow along with. And then you have to surprise them. Every once in a while, if music was all surprises, it would just be chaos. And then the technician, I’m definitely a technician, you know, you’ve probably people, if anybody knows me, they’ve probably seen multiple training videos with me talking about waveforms and vector scopes, and as we’ve just talked about, I’ve trained on virtually every editor NLE out there, and that doesn’t even include After Effects and Photoshop and InDesign and illustrator and OmniGraffle. I mean, you name all the things that we have to be able to understand as as editors. And back when I started, it was all linear, and you had to know time based correctors, and you had to be able to thread a one inch machine and time things. It was very technical. So I’m definitely in that category. And the storyteller, I can’t imagine anything in my life. You know, in my editing life that’s any more important that I think of myself as a collaborator in storytelling. And I love telling stories. If you know me personally, I can tell stories all day long. I just love to tell stories. And then, of course, you know, I’ve done two books on color correction, and I love visual imagery. And before I was an editor, I was a photographer, and I I do a lot of photography, and so I absolutely split myself in perfect quarters for that, for those four types of editors,
Zack Arnold: Well, it sounds like you’re maybe 2424 2428 with the storyteller being maybe a tiny bit more, but
Steve Hullfish: Okay, yeah, I go with that. I’ll go with that. You know me well,
Zack Arnold: Yes, but we’ll just based on the conversation we’ve had for the last 17 minutes. So
Steve Hullfish: Yeah,
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And I remember when this came out, it was so clear where I fit in, where again, I feel like the article can be a bit condescending, and it comes from a non creative point of view, coming from a more of a producer type role, but it really was pretty spot on the more that I thought about it, minus the tone of it. And for me, I would say it was, it would be weighted like 80% storyteller, less than. 0% painter, because I have no interest in color correction vector scopes like that. Like, it’s funny, I just had a conversation today with a producer, because I’m going to be starting a pilot soon, and he was talking about, well, you know, we’re probably going to be finishing everything in the AVID to deliver to the studio, and we have some temp color correction. Like, you’re going to have to hire somebody. Well, maybe we can, like, No, you’re gonna have to hire somebody. I don’t know anything about color and that’s a very, very conscious decision, because as soon as you learn another skill, people are going to expect you to do it for free. They’re just gonna, oh, well, you’re already here. Can you do some titles? Can you do graphics? Can you do mixing, all of which are services that I pretty much provide for free, but I decided I’m not interested in color correction. I’m just never gonna learn it, so I never have to do it.
Steve Hullfish: You and I are gonna have to sit down sometime. You’ll love it.
Zack Arnold: Oh, I think it’s an amazing art form. I have tremendous respect for people that do it, but I have no idea how it works. It’s like brain surgery for me, like I have no idea how to do it.
Steve Hullfish: Well, one of the things you mentioned was storytelling and so, so I would agree with you, like, I mean, I’m being a little facetious that I’m four. And four, you know, 25% of everything. Because when it comes down to it, storytelling is the thing. One of the main set of filmmakers that I work for their first movie that they did, and I hope they don’t hear this, but, but even if they do, I think they will agree was a bad technical effort. I mean, they just didn’t know what they were doing. It was their first movie, but it had a great story. And so they made this movie for $20,000 and they sold 750,000 DVDs.
Zack Arnold: Wow I want to know how they did that. That’s amazing.
Steve Hullfish: I am telling you how they did that. They did it because they were great storytellers.
Zack Arnold: Well, that’s fantastic. I mean, I’ve, I spent years putting together a documentary film that has almost the exact same story, where I pinched every penny. Technically, it’s not great, it’s it’s fairly well shot, but a lot of it is like VHS archival footage. But for me, it was all about story. I just kept pounding story, story, story, except I’m about 749,950 copies, short of 750 so that’s the part that that I find interesting. But yeah, I would say that at the end of the day, when you look at all four of those like I said, I’m about 80% storyteller, 0% painter, somewhat of a technician, if you’re if you’re talking about organization being a form of being a technician, then I’m interested if it comes to the actual different NLEs like I have, I don’t honestly think I’ve actually jumped in and learned in depth a new NLE for years, basically, when I transitioned from Final Cut seven to Avid that was my last major transition. But as far as the musician part, I don’t know how to formally, really play an instrument other than piano. I kind of dabble in just kind of teaching myself piano. And I have a friend of mine, like, when my kids do piano lessons, sometimes I’ll do it myself, but I can’t really play much. But to me, all four of those serve story like that’s that’s really the master, no matter what it is that you’re trying to do, including color, color, serve story, because it paints an emotional palette that serves the story.
Steve Hullfish: Yep, exactly. That’s kind of my point with a lot of those. So I don’t know whether it’s an interesting discussion. We can go for a long time, but my question for you would be, as a technician, one of the things that I think of is you know how to use your NLE, not that you know how to use 10 or 20 or 30 in a vector scope and a waveform and that you could code, but when you get on your system, are you able to efficiently do what you want to do, what’s in your brain gets translated immediately into Okay, I want to shorten this sequence. I want to trim this I want to find this footage. I want to put this together. You can do that. I think of that as a technician. You know, it’s the button pushing aspect of our business. So I think, you know, you’re probably a great technician. Same thing with music, although you might not be. You know, the old saying about only the only thing I can play as a radio, even if you’re not a musician, if you understand pacing, and if you understand the right piece of music to go in to tell a story, then I think that you’re the musician type. And as far as the painter, you said visualist. To me originally, I’m certainly not a painter. I’m awful artist, terrible, but I do when I’m looking at footage. When I’m looking at a shot, I know, man, that’s well composed. I want to use this angle in my edit, or I don’t really this, this shot of, you know, this head on shot of this actor is not complimenting them. I’d rather use the raking shot. I think of that as being the painter side of me, going, you know what composition, color, all of those things, and they all play into I think you’re right. They all do serve storytelling. And that’s the ultimate master. And all of this is storytelling. And so all four types of editors, I’d say, if you’re. So if you’re any of the ones other than storyteller, you’re in trouble.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I would agree with that 100% that if you because there are many editors that I’ve run into, not so much at the TV level, but especially when I was coming up in my career, that really were about 98% the technician, where I’ve actually when I was learning in college, and I was sitting behind an editor. Basically, they were being fed time codes by a producer. And the producer would say, All right, go to this shot. Okay, there’s my endpoint, go to the shot. There’s my out point. Cut it in. Oh no, move the shot over. They were an operator, that was it. They were just a technician. And I remember thinking, Wait, that’s what an editor does. Well, that’s not what I want to do, like, I just want to make stuff so that that was kind of an eye opening experience for me that I will never forget, but that that having been said, where I really want to go is talking about your latest book and talking about, I mean, you, you pretty much have spoken with and interviewed the top names in this industry, Like across decades. So talk to me a little bit about your upcoming book in your art of the cut interview series. Let’s start to dig really deep into that.
Steve Hullfish: Well, I have to say, I don’t like to brag about things, but this book is one of my proudest accomplishments. I have written at this point, six books, and two of them, I’ve done second editions that were basically complete rewrites, so it’s basically more like eight books. And of them, I am the most proud, like people say, Oh, they’re all my babies. No, no, this is the beautiful child. This is the chosen one art of the cut. And the interesting thing is, if you’ve been reading, if anybody’s been reading the art of the cut series, you think, oh, yeah, those are some pretty good interviews. He asked some good questions. Yeah, it’ll be a decent book. The things that I was struck by is, I did all those interviews. I’m the one that conducted them. I researched them, I transcribed almost every word. It was a quarter of a million words, and I took those quarter million words and and organized them. I actually did it the old fashioned way. People will be disgusted by this, but I couldn’t think of any electronic way I could do it. I printed them all out on paper, and I cut them up into into paragraphs based on what the topic was, and then I put each piece of paper into a pile, and I made these piles, and I was like, Oh, I’ve got about, you know, I’ve got some big piles and some little piles. And then each one of those piles became a chapter. And it wasn’t until I combined them back, you know, from 50 separate interviews an hour to two hours a piece with some of the great minds in editing. And that was enough of an education, but then to see okay, now I have 50 great editors all talking about pacing, or 50 great editors all talking about storytelling, and not only storytelling, but this aspect of storytelling, or this aspect of storytelling. And when I started seeing the threads tie together, that’s when I started learning stuff. I’m like, I did these interviews, and it wasn’t until I saw them played back to back to back to back in topics that I saw the value of the book. That’s when I went, Oh my gosh, I really have something here. I really think it’s going to be a seminal editing book.
Zack Arnold: Well, you realize how meta that is, right?
Steve Hullfish: Oh,
Zack Arnold: Because, because what you were doing is no different than the craft that you’re talking about in the book, where, like a lot of editors, you’ve got all this crap thrown at you, and you’re like, I don’t really know what this is yet, so I’m just gonna start throwing it in piles, which are now digital piles, but you just throw it in piles and see what stacks up where, and then all of a sudden you have that spark, and you’re like, Oh, I get it now. And then you’re off to the races, and you’re in the zone for four months. We’ve all been there.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. And I didn’t even think that I was going to write anything original. I was just going to literally, each chapter was going to start with an interview question, and then it would just go off on a tangent. But I learned so much in the course of doing the interviews and then writing the putting the book together that when I was done, I thought, I’ve really got to give an overview. So every chapter has a little essay. Some of them are bigger than others, but they have little essays that kind of get you ready to absorb the material you’re about to read. And I’m amazed at the amount of information that’s in there and the value of it, and how much I’ve learned as an editor just in the last two years from doing a series.
Zack Arnold: Well, I will be 100% honest with my audience and say that I have not even looked at this book. I have not gotten an advanced copy, but just based on this five minute conversation, this is the top of my. Editing reading list, because this, this, this kind of stuff, fascinates me, because it’s I have read some of your art of the cut interviews where you do them on pro Video Coalition, correct? So I will look at them. I’ll read through them, like, oh yeah, this is super interesting. And that’s an interesting topic. But understanding the process of taking so many different viewpoints and putting them into one, I see the value in that too. And it’s very funny, because that’s really and maybe I’m like, you know, pulling the curtain away and then kind of revealing my secrets. But that’s kind of what this podcast is, where, originally I didn’t say I’ll just talk to a bunch of people and record it. I was thinking, I want to build this into this giant curriculum of knowledge from experts, and that’s what I’m in the process of doing right now. Part of it is building the program that talks all about movement and the science of creativity, and that’s building off of interviews. And there’s a whole slew of interviews that are going to build into other topics and programs as well. So I think that you and I have brains that work in a very, very similar manner. The one thing that I’ll say, those the next time that you want to print out 4000 pages and cut them into paragraphs and put them in piles, you and I need to talk about Trello, my friend, because Trello is the tool that would have done all that digitally, which is the way that I write stuff.
Steve Hullfish: Okay,
Zack Arnold: So that when you were saying, Oh, I couldn’t figure out an electronic tool, Trello is the one that would help you. But I won’t beat the Trello drum too much
Steve Hullfish: Trello, because I’m sure there will be a second edition, because I’ve already interviewed six Oscar winners that aren’t even going to be in the book. So
Zack Arnold: Don’t you hate that where you just you work on something so long and you’re like, oh my god, this is so great, and then a week later, you’re like, man, now I already got to fix it. Ah,
Steve Hullfish: Yeah, Thelma scoon maker, I’m like, She’s killing me that she’s not in the book.
Zack Arnold: That’s amazing. Well, yeah, I’m, I’m in awe of all the people that you’ve been able to sit down and interview and get information from, and I want to go there next. So now that you’ve not only done all these interviews with these huge names and the ones you mentioned, that’s like a tiny, sliver of the type of people that you’ve talked to. But let’s talk about first, just what your approach was with the interviews. Then I want to dig deeper into the revelations that you started to have when you started to piece them all together. But let’s just start with what was kind of your intent going into just the individual interviews, and what were you hoping to get out of them?
Steve Hullfish: Well, I had been I’d cut two feature films at the time that I started the series, and in the introduction of the book, I explained that one of the inciting incident for this series was the Oscars two years ago when Lupita nwongo won Best Supporting Actress for 12 years, a slave, and in that speech, you can find it online. It’s on YouTube. She thanks her editor. And I thought I have got to meet the guy that gets a shout out from an actress in the movie, and that, of course, is Joe Walker, who just cut a rival. And that was really the beginning of it. I’d interviewed Mark Sanger, who won the Oscar for gravity right before that, but Joe was interview number two, and that was really when I realized it was going to become a series and not just kind of a one off interview, because I’d interviewed a couple of people before that. I’d interviewed the Big Bang Theory editors, and I’d interviewed David helfen, who cut weeds and I interviewed the Glee editor and done a few
Zack Arnold: Which one was that totally interrupting? But which one did you interview glee? Yeah, it would have been most likely either Joe John or doc. Which sound like dwarves? Joe John, Doc, sleepy editor, like, sorry, Joe. He’s probably listening, but
Steve Hullfish: I can’t remember.
Zack Arnold: Anyway, sorry, I did that. That’s, that’s one of my old hoods. So that’s why I was asking. But anyway, continue.
Steve Hullfish: I wanted to also have a chance to bounce ideas. I mean, it was very selfish. You know, I thought one I’d read a ton of interview. No offense to anybody that writes for the big trade publications, but I heard interviews with other editors, and I’m like, why are they asking these stupid questions? There’s so many interesting things about this movie that I want to know about, and so those are the questions that I asked. I asked the questions that I thought other editors would want to know. And sure enough, that’s been the overwhelming response. I mean, I get, I get many, many emails every day like, Oh my gosh. How did you know that is the exact question I wanted to ask. And I just did in an interview with the guy who cut the lion, which I got to recommend to everybody. I went to go see it twice yesterday. That’s how good this movie is. I paid to see it twice. Lion, that’s the true life story about the guy that gets adopted to Australia, and then he finds his adoptive mother back in India, even though he didn’t know her name or where she lived. And great, great editing. But I asked that guy a bunch of questions, and he goes, You are asking. Asking every question about the hardest decisions that I had to make as an editor. So I obviously was touching on a nerve that, you know, I understood, and I think a lot of people do, you know, when they read the interviews, I can watch the movie and go, you know here, this must have been a really hard scene, or this must have been a pivotal moment that you were trying to get to. Or, you know, editors kind of know each other, and you know what the challenges are. And if you have a an eye for placing yourself in somebody else’s shoes and going, how did they end? Like, I just, what was the other movie? Moonlight, interviewed the moonlight girl. And I’m like, isn’t it a challenge to edit a movie that has so little dialog? She goes, oh my gosh, yes. You know, that was, that was one of the big challenges, you know, someone so many people, you talk to editors, and you’re like, Well, how do you decide on pacing? And they’re like, I kind of base my pacing off the dialog. There’s no dialog. Where’s your pacing coming from? You know
Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that one of the things that you realize talking to editors, when you’re an editor yourself, like you said, You’re not asking the questions, like, how do you deal with having so much raw footage? Like, that’s the kind of thing that a journalist that doesn’t understand the process would ask, like, Wait, so you let me understand this. Like, they shoot the scene multiple times from different angles. How do you how do you process all that? Like anybody that does this for a living, like, Yeah, we all do that. But I think that one of the really cool things about an editor talking to other editors is that you can pick a really innocuous scene that most people would be like, yeah, no, that was a normal scene. And you’d be thinking, all right, I could tell that that scene was crafted from scratch. It wasn’t written that way. I could tell by the way you use this line of dialog or that look, I could see that it was kind of cheated and it worked well. Those are the kind of things that only other editors are going to be able to have a conversation about,
Steve Hullfish: Right? And those are things that I notice a lot like, I’ll say a pretty typical one. You’ve done enough editing to know this too, where I can look at a montage sequence and go, was that supposed to be originally, like, 10 minutes of individual scenes that you decided you couldn’t have 10 those 10 minutes in the movie, and so you turned it into a montage like, yep, that’s exactly what happened.
Zack Arnold: Yep. That’s how I paid my bills for years. Is somebody says, well, this isn’t working. Can you just cut together a montage? Sure. I’ll just hit the montage button. Give me a minute. Yes, it’s funny, because every time that I do speeches or do trainings or whatever, it’s usually pulling out those types of scenes where I’m explaining, here’s what it was supposed to be, here’s the original version, and here’s what I ended up being, because that’s really what, in my opinion, exhibits, the very easy to see power of being an editor, but you have so much more power as an editor with the really subtle stuff, where you’re manipulating emotion, but nobody realizes it. That’s the subtle art that most people don’t see.
Steve Hullfish: Yep, absolutely, I completely agree.
Zack Arnold: So I love your approach to doing these individual interviews based on the idea of it’s an editor talking to other editors that really is digging into the minute, little decisions and the micro decisions that we have to make that most people don’t even understand as part of our jobs. It’s funny, I was just having this conversation with somebody yesterday or the day before, because they were fascinated by what I did for a living, and they said, I don’t even really understand what you do. I know that you make movies and you live in front of a computer. And I said, don’t worry, because even a lot of people in the industry that aren’t in post production, they don’t understand what we do. Like there are people that make films that don’t understand what an editor does.
Steve Hullfish: It’s exactly right, and it’s one of the things that I’m excited about this book. It’s one I hope it helps inform the rest of the industry, not just other editors. Because I think upcoming editors will go, Oh my gosh, this is a wealth of information. I think that experienced editors will see all kinds of wisdom in here, and also not just wisdom, but like for me, it was also validation, like I’d be talking to Oscar winners, and they would go, that’s exactly how I do it. And I’m like, Really, that’s how I do it. I’m just a goofball, right? And so it’s great validation to see someone else using the same methodology you use, or using the same creative prompts that you use. It’s just great validation. But my dad, who’s a teacher, and my brother, who’s a writer, they both read this book, and like I said, I’ve written six other books. And they said, This is the first book you’ve written that I understand. And they also said, I think, you know, a movie buff would love this book because it really opens up the curtain and shows you, this is, this is where the movie gets made. I mean, honestly, this is where the movie gets made. And if you didn’t realize that before, you will realize it by the time you finish reading this book, you’ll understand that.
Zack Arnold: Now, if we could only convince the people that put the budgets together of this. Yes, the whole world of filmmaking would be different, because unfortunately, everybody doing all the line items. We are the afterthought. Oh, yeah, well, the movie’s done. We’ve shot everything. Yeah, just go put it together.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah?
Zack Arnold: But yes, no, I agree with that. And that’s the whole reason that I chose this profession, is that when I was 789, years old, is like, whoa. You mean this stuff is actually put together, and you can, like, move the pieces and add music, like that was fascinating to me.
Steve Hullfish: A lot of other the people that I talked to was one of the interesting things I found in a couple of interviews was people that really didn’t want to become editors. Like that was not their goal. And these are big time editors. These are guys, you’re like, I thought you would have wanted to be an editor from the time you were two. They got into the industry, and then, you know, they wanted to be directors, or they wanted to be cinematographers or something, and they said, when they realized how much time the producer, the producers and the directors spent with the editor, they’re like, that’s where I wanted to be. But you can be on set every day for your entire life, and no one will ever know your name. But when you’re the editor, the producer, the director, they spend months with you. That’s the place to be if you want to be in the center of the creative action.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And to really have, I truly believe that outside of the director, the editor probably has the most impact over the final product, and really what happens to it, and that, I don’t want to devalue at all, all of the other key areas, like costume design or cinematography, like every area has its place. But the analogy that I use is, if you’re building a house, everybody’s creating their own stacks of lumber. You’ve got your two by fours, you’ve got your two by sixes, you’ve got, you know, all the other different pieces, and everybody’s crafting the best version of that lumber they can. But at the end of the day, they throw that entire pile of building materials on one person,
Steve Hullfish: Right?
Zack Arnold: Or two people, yeah. So, so now that we’ve talked about kind of how these individual interviews worked, now I want to talk about some of the insights and the kind of light bulb, aha, moments that you had as you were piecing them together, beyond just your approach to the individual interviews, because you break it down like you sent me the table of contents, and there’s a whole lot of different areas. So what are some of the revelations that you had once you started taking multiple interviews, putting them together, and seeing these different chapters,
Steve Hullfish: I have a bunch of them, and as matter of fact, I just created a Word document with 216 of the best quotes that really taught me something. And I haven’t really gone through them too much. We obviously can’t do all 216 quotes, but
Zack Arnold: Yes, I would be editing that down.
Steve Hullfish: One of the things that I that I thought of after I wrote the book was I did an interview with Joe Walker, and he mentioned this card set called Oblique Strategies. Have you ever heard of it?
Zack Arnold: No, I haven’t.
Steve Hullfish: You really got it. You got to buy it. I bought one, and within two weeks, I’d already given it away to somebody that I, you know, care. It was my brother. I cared a lot about him, and he’s a creative guy, and I’m like, he you need this set, and I will go buy another set. So now I bought my second set of these Oblique Strategies. And what they are is that’s a card set, kind of like playing cards, and it was created by Brian Eno, the musician, and when he was trying to write songs, he came up with all of these creative prompts, like ways that would help him get past a level when he was trying to write and he was kind of getting blocked, or he needed a new idea. Or Now, what do I do? And he came up with all these strategies, creative strategies, and then he created a card deck where each card has one creative strategy on it. You can kind of shuffle the deck, and you flip open one like you’re sitting there is an edit, and you don’t know what the next step is. You don’t know how to get past a creative hurdle. And you look at one of these cards and you go, make your beginning your ending. Okay, I don’t know what that means, but I’ll give it a shot, and it’s really cool. So what I wanted to do was take these 216 quotes, which are really powerful quotes. I mean, this is these are distilled out of more than a quarter of a million words, at this point, probably a half a million words, and they’re some of the most central things that I learned out of the group. One I know you’d appreciate from Eddie Hamilton, be meticulous and organized with project structure,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, baby.
Steve Hullfish: There you go. Organize it the way you would cut it from Dan Zimmerman,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s a good one.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah. A lot of editing is simply a process of organizing and narrowing down your options. Tom McArdle, but there’s, I mean, I have eight pages of these where it’s just little pieces of wisdom. Mary Jo Markey, who cut Star Wars, if you can live without them, you probably should,
Zack Arnold: Ooh, I like that one. That’s a that’s a bumper sticker, right there.
Steve Hullfish: They’re all bumper stickers. Keeping objectivity is the key to the editing process. I thought that was interesting.
Zack Arnold: Yeah,
Steve Hullfish: Right. I mean, that’s a big part. That happens to me all the time. I’m working with a relatively new producer on the movie I’m working with right now, and he’s watched he’s watching these scenes now as I’m doing this rough cut, and he’s watching them dozens and dozens of times, and he’s spotting these little things that I’m like, no one will ever see that in a million years. You just got to let that go. Just people will be in the story. They’ll never see that stuff. You just have to be able to keep your objectivity. You can’t get into the weeds with this stuff.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s one of the most common questions that I hear from younger editors that either ask me or they ask on panels where they say, I just don’t understand how to stay objective, and that is a skill set that I feel like you have to learn no different than how to use an avid or Premiere or Final Cut, like we’re so focused on the technology, but in my mind, the technology is so minor compared to the other skill sets that you need, and objectivity is paramount in being really good at what you do.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah, I got things like, you know, Margaret, sick soul who, you know, Mad Max, if anybody could have been seduced by visually interesting footage, it would be her be mindful to keep story moving and not be seduced by visually interesting footage.
Zack Arnold: Wow. That must have been a challenge on Mad Max.
Steve Hullfish: That’s exactly right. Keep all of the things that create the most feeling for each character. Brent white,
Zack Arnold: Ooh, I like that.
Steve Hullfish: They’re all great. Here’s somebody that Tom cross. I was talking to him about collaborating with a director. He said, Be supportive, assuage fears and steer the process in a constructive direction.
Zack Arnold: Wow, very nice.
Steve Hullfish: I know they’re just great things. And so what I would love to have these on a card where you just, you know, you got this little card deck sitting by your editor, and you. I love this is my one of my favorite. I actually created a t shirt with this on it, from Joe Walker. Working with time is a superpower unique to editing.
Zack Arnold: Wow, that’s awesome. I love it.
Steve Hullfish: I know I have 216 of these. It’s I can’t even possibly get Pietro Scalia, multiple Oscar winner. Edited the Martian, should one moment precede another moment or follow it?
Zack Arnold: Very meta. I love it,
Steve Hullfish: Right? And so you’re sitting here and you’re watching some scene you’re having a problem with, and you you get that little piece of advice, and you’re like, Huh? I wonder what moment in this scene could I flip? I love almost all of these.
Zack Arnold: Yep, we’re gonna have to get you making a card deck out of this.
Steve Hullfish: I think so too. Tom cross, the story is elastic, and you have to be prepared to bend with it.
Zack Arnold: God, these are great.
Steve Hullfish: I know. I just, there’s so many of them. I can’t even
Zack Arnold: Well based off of I mean, these quotes are really, really powerful, and they just barely touch and scratch the surface of the power that an editor has. So before I lose you, because I definitely want to be conscious of your time, and I know that you’re we’re recording this at night, and you’re on the you’re not the East Coast, but you’re in the Midwest, which I don’t even know if we’ve talked about this at all, but I actually grew up in the Midwest as well. So hopefully you’re not a Bears fan, because I’m Packers fan, so we might have to end the show short.
Steve Hullfish: But actually, I’m actually originally from upstate New York. I moved here in 1985
Zack Arnold: Oh, so you’re a Buffalo Bills fan, I hope not, because I would know a miserable existence.
Steve Hullfish: Buffalo Bills fan,
Zack Arnold: Good. Well, let’s talk a little bit more about some of the different areas that you cover. So if somebody’s listening to this saying, this is all wealth of information and knowledge, and these like one off quotes, but let’s bring it back down to the level of curriculum, because you really have some really interesting chapters in here where just looking at your chapter list and thinking, Oh, this is not the usual book, like editing one on one.
Steve Hullfish: No, it’s definitely not an editing one on one book. I did kind of go in a little bit in order what I thought kind of made sense, or what I thought was the strongest. And I started out with project organization, which, of course, is near and dear to you. That’s that’s an entire chapter on just how people organize their projects. Most of these people are avid editors, but the book is completely it doesn’t discuss analyze in any way, so every single tip could be read and used by anybody using any platform but project organization. How do you organize your projects? How do you organize your bins? How do you organize even your timeline? How you know, where do you put audio? Where do you put video layers? How do you find things and how do you when you’ve cut a reel and you you do a revision to that reel, how do you organize all of these 1000s of variations when you send off a cut to the studio, how do you trace back the studio’s notes to the right version of the edit that you’ve done and not screw that up. So there’s a lot of project organization stuff in there. It’s not the most interesting way to start the book. So if you want to read the book and be interested right from the top, I think the the introduction is in. Interesting, and the pacing chapter is probably my favorite pacing and rhythm chapter is a wealth of information and really interesting, and has great stuff. Project organization is a little dry, but
Zack Arnold: It’s not dry for everybody. That’s the one I’m I’m like, Ooh, that sounds exciting.
Steve Hullfish: Okay, something might be wrong with you?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, so there’s no question about that. I’m not going to argue
Steve Hullfish: Anyhow, project organization approach to a scene. You know, this is a critical thing. So like you explain you have some stupid reporter goes, oh my gosh, they shot 600 hours of footage. How do you even find what you need to find? Well, it’s pretty obvious that only the footage for scene three is all I really need to work with today. So you know, let’s just find all the clips that do a scene three. And that’s not 400 hours, that’s only 40 minutes. And so now I’ve got a much easier thing to deal with. But even once you’ve only got 40 minutes, what do you do? You’ve got all these different camera setups, you’ve got all these different performances and takes, where do you where do you start? How do you even approach this? And so I asked that specific question to virtually every editor, and it was very interesting. Many people even watching dailies. People have very different ways to watching dailies. And Kelly Dixon, who cuts Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, she said, there is an art to watching dailies. I love that quote. And so even the way people watch them, some people watch them last, take to first. Take, some people watch them first. Take to last take, some people only watch the printed takes, and then they cut the whole thing together. And then once they’ve got the structure of the scene, then they look at each cut that they’ve made and check that against all of the takes that are from that camera setup, because they know they want to be on that camera setup. So there’s all these approaches,
Zack Arnold: And it’s funny, because I know a lot of the editors that I talk to, you can actually get into not arguments, but heated discussions about this process alone, like, Oh, I think it would be better if you do this or that. Like I’ve heard other Well, I do. I have my assistant line up all of the takes of every single line, so I just see the same line over and over and over and over, and I just watch the scene that way, and that’s the best way to do it. It’s like, but for some people, it’s not the best way to do it. So there, I agree with that, like I have a very, very specific way and process for every single scene. When I start from minute one, where I watch the dailies for the first time, I do it the same way every single time. It’s like a ritual, but it’s very different than other people’s. There isn’t a right answer. When people say, Well, how should I watch dailies? There isn’t an answer. You know, you can give suggestions, but you have to find what works for you.
Steve Hullfish: That’s right, and that’s what why. That’s what the value of the art of the cut book is, is that it shows you look, here are some incredibly successful people who cut incredibly great projects that you admire and aspire to, and they all work differently. So do you have to work like somebody else? Absolutely not.
Zack Arnold: Well, let’s talk about a couple more, and then I’ll go ahead and definitely let you go, so you can put your head on the pillow,
Steve Hullfish: Sure. Well, I’ll run through a list, and you tell me if you’ve got one that appeals to you. So we’ve got approach to a scene. We’ve got pacing and rhythm structure, which is kind of the overall pacing and rhythm of a movie, or how the story is structured. And then storytelling is kind of overlapping to structure, but is separate a chapter just on storytelling, performance, finding and sculpting, performance, sound design, music, especially temp music. Collaboration with the director, miscellaneous wisdom and documentary film. There’s an entire chapter with just the five documentary film editors talking about documentary right?
Zack Arnold: And well, and the one that really sticks out to me that I would be very interested in. And again, this is going to be one of those where everybody else is thinking, Oh, that’s what did interesting, because I’m weird, but I love talking about structure, which is one of the reasons that I got so involved learning Trello. That was where the Trello journey started, was learning how to restructure a story very, very quickly and efficiently. Because I love restructuring projects. When I worked on Burn Notice, for example, that was a very cut and dried show where you almost never had to restructure anything. And even though it was a really fun show to work on, I got kind of bored, and I’m like, but I just want to rearrange the whole thing. Can I put the beginning in the end and the end in the beginning and change acts three and four, like just stick to the script, but then I’ll work on other shows where I can rewrite the whole thing from top to bottom. Structurally. That, to me, is so much fun.
Steve Hullfish: Oh, I’m completely with you on structure. And as a matter of fact, I’m fascinated as the beginning of this chapter, I’ve always wanted to do this. Can I do a reading from my book?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, of course. Go right. Ahead.
Steve Hullfish: Let me do a short reading of the beginning of the chapter on structure. I’m fascinated with the changes that occur after the script has been written and it passes through post. What occurs to be is that the editor is the first person that gets to see the story and experience the story with a continuity of time. The writer doesn’t deal with the experience of story in time at all. The director deals with time, but he or she is shooting out of continuity with no true context. The person that deals with story the way the audience will experience it over time, continuously from beginning to end, is the editor, along with the director, eventually, the experience of the story in time means the decisions made by the writer to tell the story may not work as well as the development team thought they would when they proved the shooting script and it goes on longer, but I don’t want to take up any more time, but that’s about structure,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I would say to talk To that point specifically, whenever people ask me, like, what is the coolest thing about being an editor, what’s the number one reason you choose to do it? It’s certainly not 14 hours a day in a dark room in front of a computer. That’s not why I choose to do what I do, and that’s actually the whole reason I’ve developed this whole program is to beat all of that. But the number one thing that I love is being able to say, no matter how many people see this, I am the first person on the planet to see this, put the first cut together, to sit down and watch it from top to bottom, like I had a you know, I was writing about this recently in a blog post, but I talked about the season one finale of empire, and how I knew that a week from When I was working on a scene, 23 million people were going to be watching it, but I was the first one ever. Nobody saw the first edit or the first cut of that show before I did. And that, to me, is so cool and so powerful.
Steve Hullfish: Yep, I agree. And I also point out the last sentence before we go into the interviews from that chapter is the hard truth is that when all the scenes have been edited and finally assembled into a whole story, that’s when the rubber meets the road and the real work begins.
Zack Arnold: I know, and that’s the worst part, right where? And that’s something that I go through myself, and I know many editors do. And if you’re somebody listening, that’s a younger editor, maybe you haven’t experienced this yet, but you go through, you do your first cut, you watch your first cut, and you’re like, This is genius. This is amazing. And I’m not going to agree with any of the notes that I get. And then about a week later, you’re like, wow, that first cut was crap. That was total garbage. And I need to start over. But when I was young, it took me a while to get to that second part because I was so protective of that first edit and thinking, nobody knows this better than I do. I’ve been through all the material. I know it works. I know it doesn’t. This is amazing. But then what, as you grow and mature, you realize, oh, wow, this is really just when the work begins, is once you put the whole thing together, yeah,
Steve Hullfish: I was just talking to a young editor that just called me for a school project to do an interview, and I explained to her, I’m like, Look, I know how it is in college where you’ve got a paper due tomorrow, and so the night before you do the paper, you write the paper. But editing is not like that. Editing to do it, you’ve got to write the paper a month before the paper is due, because every night, for 30 days, you’ve got to be editing the paper to make sure it’s a good paper at the end.
Zack Arnold: Well, unfortunately, there are a lot of producers and people to put together schedules that don’t quite understand that. They don’t really see that. They’re like, well, this shouldn’t take that long to put together, and then we’ll be done, right? It’s like, yeah, it doesn’t really work that way. The the schedule on the pilot that I’m going to be working on, it was a 15 day shoot with a one day editor’s cut. And like, You’re not You’re crazy, right? You realize that that’s not even humanly possible. It’s like, that can’t be done, like we need to fix. Well, I’m like, No, you can’t do a one day editor’s cut on a 15 day shoot. It’s just not gonna happen. But, yeah, that’s a whole nother topic me going into the the studio mentality, of how something is put together, so I
Steve Hullfish: Didn’t mention it, but there’s an entire chapter that couldn’t fit in the book, but it’s on the web, the companion website for the book that you get for free, and there’s an entire chapter about nothing but schedules.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I thought that’s the last question I was gonna ask before we went was why you had the web only chapters and what those were?
Steve Hullfish: Well, just because they gave me a number of a word count for the book that I had to hit, and I even, they even let me exceed it, it was 120,000 words. And I said, Can I please go to 130 that’s a whole extra chapter, and I still had another 100,000 really good words left. And so I said, Well, you know, I can either trim I can either make 17 chapters, and each one of them can be about six or 7000 words, or I. Can really do really good chapters, and put four or five chapters out on the web, and if you really want to go read them, then they’re there and and if you just want to read what’s in the book, then you read what’s in the book,
Zack Arnold: Right? Yeah, that’s great. I mean, there’s so much value between the book itself, between the web only chapters like I this is really, I’m hoping, for your sake and for the sake of everybody in this industry, that this kind of gets put in the category of something like the conversations or in the blink of an eye, where they’re like, oh, I want to learn about kind of the really ins and outs of editing. Like, what are the quintessential books this, to me, sounds like it certainly could be one of those that belongs on the same shelf.
Steve Hullfish: I hope so. And I’ve read in the blink of an eye, and I’ve read the conversations and where the value of this book is. And merch is an absolute genius. He definitely knows what he’s talking about, about editing, but as we mentioned, not everybody edits the same way. And so the value of this book is you see 50 perspectives, not one. And most books on editing, it’s the author’s perspective that you’re getting, and not much else. And this book, you’re getting a ton of perspectives.
Zack Arnold: Well, on that note, I don’t think I could have wrapped it up any better than that. So let’s let people know how they can actually get a hold of the book, learn more about it, and then find you if they want to,
Steve Hullfish: I can be found. And I am trying to figure out whether to do this, but my email is very simple. It’s Steve at Hullfish.com the book is available on Amazon. If anybody wants to go search for it, I encourage you to to at least look at it. I’m very proud of it, and I think that if you, if you buy that book, you’re going to love it, and you’re going to learn a ton from reading it.
Zack Arnold: Well, I have no problem telling people to go to Amazon, look for the book. I’ll do all the shameless self promotion for you, so you don’t have to do it. This is something that sounds absolutely fascinating to me, and I hope that everybody listening is fascinated by it as well. So on that note, I just wanted to thank you for finding the time to do this conversation, and I really, really hope that it is helpful for everybody listening. So thank you so much for being here.
Steve Hullfish: Zack. It was a pleasure, and I hope we get a chance to meet sometime soon.
Zack Arnold: Absolutely, anytime that you’re back in Los Angeles, you let me know. And if I’m not buried in my dark cave, which is about, you know, 11 months a year. But if I’m not, then I’m happy to resurface. And we should definitely grab lunch.
Steve Hullfish: That sounds good, or, you know what? You can give me a scene, and I will cut a scene for you and and that’ll save you an hour, and then we can go to lunch for an hour.
Zack Arnold: Ooh. I like that idea outsourcing. Yes.
Steve Hullfish: All right.
Zack Arnold: All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here.
Steve Hullfish: Yeah, bye, bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Episode Credits
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Jakin Rintelman, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.
The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.