Saving Time by Being Free
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
No Film School: You have a long doc resume and then made the pivot to narrative. How do you feel like doc editing influences your narrative work?
Geoff Richman: I actually think it has a huge part in it, to be honest, because I did so many years on docs. It's defined my whole process. In documentaries, there's no script. You're writing the story as you go along, and everything is possible at any point in the process. So it's like you can shift lanes. You can change the story. You can change the direction of scenes.
I feel like that's a very useful tool when moving it to scripted, because there's this bible of the script that you sort of can gravitate a little bit too heavily to. If you come at it from a more documentary frame of mind, then anything could be anything as needed at any point in the process.
So there's a lot of experimenting with structure, reshaping scenes, repurposing things in a completely different way, taking footage that was intended for one thing, and using it for something completely different, and just all the tools of the toolbox from documentaries I find very helpful creatively on a narrative level.
Documentary Freedom in Narrative
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: You feel like scripted directors are open to that level of flexibility?
GR: It's more of like when you're doing an edit, and it's not working the way you want it to work. You have to find a way to fix it and to make it play for the feeling that you want, or with getting the story beats across the way you want them to.
You have to be open to trying any number of experiments to make that work, and so that could be anything as simple as recutting the scene with slightly different performances, or changing the angles within a scene. But it'll also be at a much more macro level of like if you're looking at holistically at the entire episode or the season.
For instance, structure plays a huge part in making the story unfold the way you want it to. That's everything in documentary editing. Structure is how you tell the story. It's not about picking the right take of a performance. It's about structuring it in such a way that the story unfolds the way you want it to. I don't know any director who would say “No, don't do whatever is necessary to make it work”
Episode Structures
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: Traditionally, the people I know in post in older linear TV can't really move from material episode to episode. But now that we're in a binge-viewing world where things get edited all together before being released, are you able to move scenes around from episode to episode, to go and say, “Hey, I know this is supposed to be in Scene one in Episode one. But I'm feeling like we could pull this stuff out of 5 and move it up, and that might be helpful” the way you would in a doc?
GR: Definitely. We're looking at it from the point of view of the whole season. And so it really is like an A to B of 10 episodes, not just each 45-minute to 60-minute window that we're looking at. We have to make this episode work with a beginning and end of its own. But we also have to keep in mind where we're going.
Keith, Joe, and I, the 3 editors—we work very closely on making sure that the movement and the arc and the flow of the whole season is working well. So you're not shifting to a different episode and then suddenly losing the thread.
Freedom
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: That sounds actually really freeing. But also it might take a little longer than traditional episodic.
GR: You can make the counter argument actually take less time. Because if you're open to moving things, if you're open to doing all of these experiments, you can find that you are sort of working your way out of problems a lot faster. The less you have to work with, and the less maneuverability you have, the harder it can be to solve problems. We can have freedom to experiment, and those experiments can make us arrive at our goal quicker if that makes sense.
A lot of times in the editing process where the episode is working really well, but there's this like one window within which it's not working, and it’s like “What's the window that we're playing with right now?” It's like this, whatever 10 or 15-minute section in the episode, things are falling flat or just not resonating. It’s not building. The larger the window that you're looking at, the more options you have to do different things to correct.
Visual Design
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: One thing about severance is the visual design is obviously very structured. It's very elegant looking at the progression in the way in which something like the innie to outie transition changes over the course of the show, how much is that part of the conversation when you guys are working in post, or how much of that is like it's done in production and in post, you're just moving to a pure story kind of structure.
GR: The visual design on this show in particular is so much a part of the feeling of the show. And so it's obviously a part of everything we're doing in the editing, because the visuals are telling the story just as much as the dialogue. So our choice of angles. How long we want to sit in each shot. The type of music we play over the shots is all guided by what we're looking at and how we're feeling. The visual design of the show informs all of that. We're not going to hold on a shot for the 30 seconds if it's not something visually interesting that tells us something for the story. All the decisions we make in editing can be connected to how the visuals are telling the story.
That Opening Sequence
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: The music cue for the opening of season 2 is such an interesting choice. Do you remember anything about how that came up in the process?
GR: That was Ben. What Ben does is he creates a Spotify playlist at the beginning of the season of a whole bunch of songs that might be appropriate for this season.
As we start actually diving into specific episodes, they'll create a short list of songs that might be appropriate for specific scenes. He's very much involved in choosing music for either what's possible or specific songs for specific scenes.
For that scene, we did try it with score just to see what it would feel like with something from Teddy's toolbox. But that song, just nothing kind of did it the way that song did it.
Temp Score
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: So that was the 1st thing you cut it to, and then, no matter how many other options you tried, nothing else ever worked.
GR: Pretty much. I actually think they played that song on set as he was running because they shot that over many months, not consecutively, but like pieces over the course of like 4 or 5 months, and at a certain point before they finished shooting the whole thing we knew that we were going with that song, so I'm pretty sure I'm almost positive they actually played that song during shooting of certain segments of that run.
Intergrated VFX
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: Can you tell me about how your workflow might’ve been changing over the last few years? Are you cutting more sound with picture, or are VFX collaborations changing?
GR: I've always been a big fan of doing a sound edit during the picture edit, I just feel like sound just changes so much as far as how you're immersed into the story and the world. And it also changes the rhythm of a scene, like specific sounds, like just even opening a door, dropping a paper on a desk, or picking something up, or footsteps from across a room—they all change the rhythm of a scene, so I find it really helpful for me to do that stuff while I'm editing.
As far as visual effects go, my workflow has definitely changed a lot. We have this amazing visual effects editor named Matthew Huber. That allows us to very quickly mock something up, pass it over to him and he will then make it completely presentable. It's not the finished version. We have the VFX vendors who do that, but like he will give us something that is screenable.
That could be anything from fluid morphs, very complicated split screens, comps or green screen. All that stuff is in the cut before we even finish the assembly. As we're cutting, I can send him a shot and be like. “Hey, I mocked up like what I want this split screen to look like” and like he'll make sure the two sides are tracking the right way, and that it's a seamless split and whatever is done in a way that's presentable all, and then he'll pass it back to me like within a day or two, and then it just becomes part of the edit, and then, of course, the edit keeps changing for a lot many, many times over, but then we'll just keep sending stuff back to him. He'll refine it. Send it back to us. And it's just always in the cut. So we're not working in the edit with sloppy-looking effects.
Better Decisions through Smooth VFX
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: That helps you make better storytelling decisions because you're seeing things closer to the final.
GR: Oh, yeah, it's not the final, because we have the vendors doing the final, but like there's nothing distracting you. There's nothing pulling you out of the story. Obviously, we can all watch rough cuts. We all know the process. We can all look at a green screen and not have it take away from understanding the edit. But cumulatively, it definitely feels nice not to have to think about “Oh, that will get fixed later, will that green screen be filled in with something not green?” you know, and it's like he kind of takes that whole step out of the process of watching our rough cuts.
Remote Workflow
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: We’ve also seen a lot of post moving over to remote workflows in recent years.
GR: Most of the edit for severance is that I've been remote. I do go in sometimes whether it's to the studio while they're shooting we had an edit room set up there and also at Ben's office. We have an edit room set up there and at Goldcrest, the post facility, where all the computers are physically but most of it by far is remote. So I'm at home.
NFS: And how well is that working? I mean, I feel like it's really been cracked in the last five years where now it just doesn't feel like the sort of sneaker net struggle of a decade ago. It's just starting to feel kind of mostly painless.
GR: I actually felt the difference even between season one and season 2. The technology we're using to remote into the systems at Goldcrest is, I find, already so much better. We're using this system called jump desktop. It's just software but we can log into different computers that are at Goldcrest.
Multiple people can have access to the same computer. If my assistant needs to jump on and do something, you could jump on my computer. And yes, of course, there are times when the internet is laggy, or the connection is not as good as it could be. But for the most part it's pretty amazing what you can do.
Once you fill the screen with your remote system, it just feels like you're sitting in front of the computer that you're remoting into, and also the ability to not even have the hard drives next to you like you could sit with a laptop and be connected to like 80 TB of footage. Because it's just you're remoting into a whole different system.
Local Hardware
'Severance'
CREDIT: Apple TV+
NFS: So you don't even really need to worry about your local hardware at all.
GR: You can use a pretty old system to log in, because all that really matters is the system that's running AVID, and that's at the facility. Even that we have a Mac Mini at Goldcrest. But what we're using to remote in only has to be strong enough to run, jump, desktop.
NFS: The amount to which post lives on Mac Minis is crazy to me.
GR: I mean, there's a convenience factor because they're so small. And they can slide in on a tray. They don’t take up much space on a small desktop. I feel like all the computers now are all fast enough to run editing. and then some. You can't really go wrong with any system. And so the Mac Minis like do more than they need to. I’ve got one right next to me here, and it’s so small. So Severance was cut mostly on Mac Mini remoting into another Mac Mini.
