The cutting room in Ouarzazate suffers from a poor mains electric supply. Not only do we have power cuts that causes Gez, our first, to burst into a panic and shut down the computers before the UPS run down. But we are also getting lots of low level electric shocks and tingles. Touch any two different bits of metal and you get a shock. I’m told it’s because we have a poor earth, which isn’t helped by the tables all being plastic. You can feel the static on the table top all the time.

So my brilliant solution to this has been to go bare foot for the last 7 weeks. Everywhere around the hotel is nicely tiled and the cutting room is just outside the hotel so I haven’t felt the need to wear anything on my feet for allmost the entire time. It has helped with the static but the day to return to London has arrived and with it the need to put the shoes back on.

What a strange feeling it is. I now know how toddlers feel when they have to put their first pair of shoes on. I understand those faces they pull. The weight of the things and loss of freedom to the toes. It’s such bad idea even if clearly necessary. This does of course highlight that my first Moroccan leg of the A.D. adventure has closed. No more warm sun, huge fresh fruit breakfasts and fantastic couscous. But as I have a great cutting room in my house, I can start the fine cut at home. Picking up normal family life where it was dropped to indulge this strange but thoroughly fascinating job of telling stories.

It’s one of the reasons that I try not to visit the set. If it looks the part on the dailies then, just like the audience, I’m convinced it really is a cannon, statue or a castle. Lift it up like superman does and you can never quite get that suspension of disbelief back. Once I’ve done the first assembly of the material shot on the set, is not so bad going to see it. Reality, such that it is, belongs with the images I have seen on the screen. The sets then take on the appearance of replicas of the real world I’ve seen through the window of my screen.

It’s like visiting Universal Studios and seeing the plastic shark that mechanically jumps out at you, good but not real. Unlike the monster from the deep that went eye to eye with Chief Brody in Jaws, that was real.

I still find it completely magical that one moment I’m sitting on the runway at Heathrow, in the grey gloom of September and only a few seconds later, I’m up above the cloud base looking at a glorious sunset that’s invisible from the ground.

The adventure begins.

A few hours later and it’s Casablanca airport for a plane swap. I can’t help humming, “You must remember this”. Movies totally frame our lives!

I’m traveling with my co-supervising editor, Rob Hall, our producer Gina Cronk and the Show-runner Richard Bedser, but we have an extended airport lounge wait. No idea why, that just seem to be the way here. It takes until after 2am before I’m in the hotel and very unexpectedly, it’s raining.

Sunday morning and it’s still chucking it down, I could stay at home for this. It turns out to be a very serious storm that has transformed our sets into mud baths with some of them cut off by fords that the 4x4s can’t cross. Our first day of filming is in jeopardy. The locals haven’t seen anything like it, continuous heavy rain is not what happens in Ouarzazate. That’s why film crews flock here. While we sleep, it stops, dries up and dawn breaks with a blue sky. Cue  lights, camera, “Action”.

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The tools of the trade.

As the hire companies started to take over the supply of gear, I used both Media Composer and Lightworks, depending on how many systems were required. The more work stations that were needed, the more likely it was that Avid offered the best platform. Band of Brothers had the maximum at that time of 13 Avids linked together. In straight forward editing though, i.e. low VFX requirements, the Lightworks was unbeatable to me.

If more manipulation of the picture was required, then grab the Avid. My last time on Lightworks was in the USA in 2003/4 on Little Black Book. It was a multi system but the networking was quite a problem. That’s when I converted to Mac and eventually became a full time Media Composer user during the edit of Its a Boy Girl Thing, while in Toronto, Canada.

Soon, the new kid on the block was Final Cut Pro. FCP became a viable way to finish a film, not just offline it. I used it on one feature shot on film and one on HD Cam. Caught in the Act, which was directed by the BAFTA winner Matt Lipsey. This HDCam project was off-lined on my Mac Pro’s and then conformed into them at full resolution. We did a full audience test screening at Theatre 7 in Pinewood with 200 people and me sitting at the back driving it all off FCP via a Kona card. It looked and sounded as good, if not better, than the film test versions I did for Little Black Book in L.A. And at a fraction of the cost. Once the picture was locked, we did a file transfer to a Baselight grading system at Molinare, in London. Progressing to a full D.I. and Film Out to 35mm neg for release prints. Every frame of the images on my local cinema screen had gone through my Mac. Very impressive.

Now, I have several copies of MC5, Adobe CS5 and a couple of FCP’s. I run all three on my MacPro or MacBook Pro. £60k can be replaced by an investment of only £4k, stunning value.

So, what do I think of all the options. Well, just like in so many walks of life, I try and use the right tool for each situation. It’s difficult to specify exactly which system and when, so I mix and match as I feel it necessary. All have features that are good, save time and help creativity. However, I’m quite sure that the last few years of development have been so spectacular due to the competition between platforms. I fear that may slow in the future as Apple appear to be killing off FCP for professionals.

But, for me at least, the bedrock of all my decision making in the cutting room comes straight from all I learned using good old fashion film. I can’t quite say why this is, but organisation and focusing on the material are two of the central reasons. I know it would be painful to cut again on a Steenbeck with only two audio tracks and no ability to manipulate the picture as you go. But as a tool that allowed you to play with storytelling, film was way ahead of its time.

John