I had a chance to cover the seminar “Inside the Cutting Room: Sight, Sound & Story” earlier this month. Organized by Manhattan Edit Workshop, the City’s leading edit training operation, the day-long gathering pulled together multiple generations of top editing talent.
Whether you were interested in the still nascent concept of transmedia (although the Tribeca Film Festival did feature it for the first time this year) as shown in “Hotel 626”, were curious about the sound creation and editing challenges of Life of Pi, or wanted to hear from editors who worked on classic films by Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen, well, this was the place to be.
But if you couldn’t make it and still wanted an idea of what these storytelling luminaries discussed, please read the full article by clicking here.
For those not sure, I’m including the beginning grafs to give you the sense of what it was all about. The rest of the article can be found on the Editors Guild website link above.
“Inside the Cutting Room: Sight, Sound & Story,” Manhattan Edit Workshop’s celebration of all things editing, took place this past June 8th. This marked the first time the edit training company presented the daylong event. Considering how complicated it can be to organize such programs, MEWshop (that’s their web address) did quite well, with panels that moved along with nary a hitch.
Held at The French Institute in mid-town Manhattan, a crowd of some 300 professional and neophyte film editors, enthusiasts, and students spent the day attentively listening to five panels that discussed everything from new Internet-enabled formats like transmedia to the old practice of cutting and splicing.
Josh Apter, founder and president of Manhattan Edit Workshop, served as the amiable MC during the day; he covered for the usual technical glitches that pop up in any event with innumerable video clips to present. Apter also announced that the popular editor’s training facility would be moving into new headquarters later in the year.
Interactive Media: Blurring the Line between Post and Production
The day began with a panel that explored transmedia, a welcome addition to such events that recognized that new forms of narrative are still to be explored. This past April New York’s Tribeca Film Festival recognized transmedia storytelling for the first time, giving this nascent form some official recognition.
Transmedia storytelling or narrative continues to be a slippery term to nail down. One straightforward definition is that it is an approach to story telling that happens across multiple digital platforms and formats.
On the panel were Oscar Tillman and Adele Major from B Reel along with Evan Schechtman from @radical.media. Gordon Burkell, founder of the website Art of the Guillotine, moderated.
Tillman and Major discussed one of their major web-based projects, Hotel 626 created in 2008 for Frito-Lay. The snack company was bringing back two older flavors of Doritos, and their marketing department wanted a new type of ad campaign to promote them. Tillman and Major created a unique approach to engaging the young audience the advertiser wanted: an online game that featured a twist on those childhood books that placed you at the center of attention.
Game players, trapped in Hotel 626, were required to perform a series of tasks to escape. Tillman and Major brought players into the narrative by taking the player’s picture at random times and then at some point in the game, that picture would appear hanging in the room of a crazed murderer as if the player was to be the next victim…
