#516 – Behind The Scenes Inspiration

This week I had the privilege of watching two excellent films; tuner and Wild Horse Nine.

Both had excellent editing and interviews with those behind the helm will be coming sometime soon.

A few weeks ago I asked the question, who are the editors who make you want to edit?

Watching both Greg O'Bryant and Mikkel E. G. Nielson's excellent handiwork made me want to edit.

Who makes you want to edit?

Hit Reply and tell me: THE FILM and THE EDITOR, I really want to know!

But first...

In this Issue of Cut/daily, I'll share resources designed to give you a jolt of editorial inspiration and add further fuel to the flames of your love for cinema.

New Free Plugin – SUPERCUT

This week I built a fun new plugin called SUPERCUT, inspired by the Betacam SP decks of yesteryear, and it does one thing; create supercuts.

Available for DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro SUPERCUT reads the transcript of your active sequence and then with the push of the big red button instantly builds a supercut of the word or phrase you've searched for.

It's perfect for finding the best take of a word or phrase, finding frankenbite substitute syllables or simply making supercuts.

• Scroll through results with the jog wheel
• Adjust the padding around cuts
• Toggle the look of the interface

You can play with SUPERCUT and download it for free here.

Please share SUPERCUT with your editor friends!

Why I watch so many trailers

I was interested in interviewing the editors of tuner and Wild Horse Nine because I'd seen and really liked the trailers for both films on one of the other sites I run: This Week in Movie Trailers.

Sending out TWMT's free weekly newsletter with the 10 most watched new trailers released that week - and scouring the 40-50 other trailers that came out that same week for hidden gems - means I have a pretty good feel for what's coming in film and TV.

This really helps identify projects I actually want to see, helps me sound ‘well-read’ in industry conversations and puts a finger in the wind of bigger potential trends in the industry.

For example, when the Laika Studio Teaser for Wildwood came out it did phenomenally well. Like, unimaginably well.

In fact, it's sitting at the top of this year's TWMT Top 20.

I saw this as an encouraging sign* that people still want to see handmade artistry and craft they can't see any other way.

*Or that Laika invested incredibly heavily in paid views, more than Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Avengers: Doomsday and The Odyssey.... but that seems... unlikely!

Handmade Artistry

Ex-Laika stop motion animator and digital creator Kevin Parry sits down with LAIKA's Head of Character and Practical Effects, Oliver Jones, to discuss the technical challenges and artistic beauty of hand-crafting an audacious project like Wildwood in an era of accessible AI - and why so many people latched on to that teaser.

KP: Letting people into that process has always been a big part of it. And I think it's going to be increasingly a big part of marketing and showcasing filmmakers.

OJ: Why do you think that's so important to people, in terms of letting them in?

KP: I think it just comes down to human effort and ingenuity. That's what people love to see.

When the marketing of say, an AI movie, is, “We spent this many tokens generating videos,” that means nothing to no one...

I think there's going to be a massive shift in respecting stuff like stop motion and handcrafted filmmaking.

I think the pendulum is going to swing, I hope.

OJ: I feel it. I mean, yeah, Wildwood came out with the teaser just recently.

KP: Massive numbers.

OJ: It really surpassed, I think, a lot of our expectations. Not because we don't know what we've done is amazing, right? We know how ambitious and how beautiful it is.

But the fact that it kind of caught something at a time when people are thinking about what is real and what's not, and how do they appreciate handcrafted mediums.

It's a real bellwether, I think, to where we're going as an industry. And hopefully people really get on board with supporting handmade movies.

The whole series, Made by Humans, is well worth a watch featuring conversations with some of the industry's most talented animators and practical effects creators, of today and cinematic history, including:

• Brad Schiff, LAIKA Animator and James Ortiz, Creator & Puppeteer of Rocky in Project Hail Mary
• Brian McLean, LAIKA's Director of Rapid Prototype and Zach King, online illusionist and YouTuber
• LAIKA’s Visual Effects Supervisor Steve Emerson and ILM veteran visual effects filmmaker Jeff Mann
• LAIKA's Head of Model Shop Keith McQueen and legendary stop motion pioneer Phil Tippett (Jurassic Park)