February 06, 2010

One movie that had Park City audiences buzzing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Casino Jack and the United States of Money (opening on May 7, 2010). This daring documentary takes a piercing look at the lies, greed and corruption surrounding infamous Washington, DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his cronies. Casino Jack marks the third feature film collaboration between director Alex Gibney (Oscar-winner for Taxi to the Dark Side) and editor-producer Alison Ellwood and co-editor Lindy Jankura.
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February 03, 2010

Writer-director-editor West (whose next project is actually Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, the sequel to Roth’s debut) pays meticulous attention to every detail of the film—from the dialogue and clothing to the lighting and camerawork—to seamlessly transport his audience back a few decades and make The House of the Devil feel like a film shot during the golden age of horror and only recently rediscovered.
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February 02, 2010

James Herbert is director Guy Ritchie’s go-to editor. The two have worked together on, among other things, the films Revolver, RocknRolla and now Sherlock Holmes. Over the years they have developed a sort of shorthand that helps keep the process a pleasant and productive one.
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February 02, 2010

Thelma Schoonmaker has been director Martin Scorsese's editor of choice ever since their shared career-defining turn on Raging Bull. With a collaboration spanning almost four decades, Schoonmaker recently won her second Academy Award and has been nominated for three others in the past. She took time off from her work on the upcoming crime drama The Departed to rewind with us.
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January 31, 2010

Showcasing films at the Sundance Film Festival is becoming par for the course for veteran editor Brian Kates. In his eighth trip to Park City for the 2010 fest, Kates saw his latest project Jack Goes Boating—a film from first-time director and Academy Award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman—get its world premiere.

Though Kates’ presence at Sundance has become as consistent as the quality of his productions (which include films like Nights in Rodanthe, Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages and Lee Daniels’ debut film Shadowboxer), he still understands how blessed he’s been to work with some of the most talented artists in the industry.
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January 28, 2010

HBO's The Sopranos has unnerved and delighted audiences with engrossing tales of dysfunctional wiseguys and their codependent families. From season one, veteran A.C.E. editors, Sidney Wolinsky, Conrad Gonzalez and William Stich, have been cutting this controversial drama. After the current fourth season - which is shooting on 35mm but is cablecast in HD - is finished they will have collectively cut 52 episodes of The Sopranos from over five million feet of footage.
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January 20, 2010

On January 10, one day after receiving the Editors Guild’s Fellowship and Service Award from director Lawrence Kasdan, editor Carol Littleton, A.C.E. treated her fans to a screening of Kasdan’s debut film, Body Heat, the first of her eight collaborations with the director. The talk and screening, held at the Billy Wilder Theatre at the Armand Hammer Center in Westwood, was presented by moderator and author Bobbie O’Steen and organized by American Cinema Editors president Randy Roberts, A.C.E., and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
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January 13, 2010

Walter Murch is one of the most admired and respected editors of our time. His inspiring book, In the Blink of an Eye, is a definitive theoretical text on editing. More than just a great film editor, he is also one of the most renowned sound mixers in the history of cinema.
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January 10 2010

There are various stages in the digital video workflow process, however, one of the most critical and challenging is encoding, since this step has a direct impact on the ultimate quality of the viewing experience. With the many complexities that are involved in video encoding, this step can make or break the end product if the “right” solution is not selected.
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January 10 2010

When director James Cameron realized that editor James Cameron, A.C.E., was going to need a larger team to help navigate the brave new world he was creating for Avatar, he turned to two editors who, in their own right, have themselves often been at the leading edge of technologically challenging projects: John Refoua, A.C.E., and Stephen Rivkin, A.C.E.
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January 10 2010

One thing James Cameron, A.C.E., will never be accused of is not having big enough dreams. It’s a good thing he writes them down. The Terminator, created in the late 1970s out of a fevered dream in a Rome hotel room, was the invention of a young, unknown director, who had to wait nearly six years for his vision to gain a studio. Then in the mid-1990s, Cameron, in almost Edgar Rice Burroughs-like fashion, imagined a fully realized alien world called Pandora (actually a moon, to be precise), and wrote the story and screenplay for Avatar––which was just released December 18 by 20th Century Fox in 2-D, 3-D and IMAX versions.
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