Tag Archives: Eddie Hamilton

Aug20

Eddie Hamilton

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The Jadoo team have had the great privilege to work with the very passionate and very talented Eddie Hamilton. Eddie’s credits have included Kick Ass and X-Men: First Class. He’s somone who’s dedicated to his profession and creates world class results that have been seen by millions of people around the world. Eddie’s love for films and filmmaking is so contagious that anyone who comes into contact with him can not help but love movies too! While on the shoot of Jadoo we managed to sit down with Eddie to have a chat about his love for film and editing.

What is the role of an editor?

The role of an editor is take all the footage that is shot by the crew and put it together to tell the best story possible. When you’re editing, all you’re thinking about is character and story as that’s all the audience are thinking about when they watch the film. The audience cares about the characters and wants to find out what’s going to happen to them. Everything else is secondary to that. When I’m editing scenes I’m just thinking about the characters and the story. After that I’m thinking about making sure the shots look nice, that they’re in focus, that the warderobe looks great, that the lighting looks great, that the makeup looks great, the sound is great! Making sure that all the crews’ best work ends up in the movie. But the most important thing is character and story.

How did you get into editing?

I started to realise that I might want to work in the film industry when I was about seven, and I remember very clearly watching Star Wars on TV for the first time. My parents never took me to the cinema so I only watched films on television and it came on in nineteen eighty. My parents recorded it on a betamax tape and because the film started at eight pm and ran till ten pm, and my bedtime was nine pm so I missed the second half of the film. But the next morning I got up at four O’clock in the morning and I snuck downstairs, fast forwarded the tape to the right place, and I watched the second half of the film with the sound right down so I wouldn’t wake my parents up. I remember at about five thirty in the morning when the film finished seeing peoples names going up at the end and thinking, these are real people, they must work in film… I want to do this! From that day on I was a total film nut and read about film and watched as many films as I could. I initially thought I’d want to be a director, which is what everyone thinks when they’re that age but when I was about seventeen I started to think editing would be more appropriate for me.

What was it about the script that made you want to be a part of Jadoo?

The story is a very familiar story but it’s set in a very unique world of this kind of restaurant business in Leicester and it’s a unique glimpse into the Indian culture in Leicester and how the families who live in this environment relate to each other. Fundamentally, it’s a very simple and funny story that can appeal to a lot of people, and a lot of the best films are simple stories well told, and I think Jadoo is one of those.

What is it like working with director Amit Gupta?

 We have very similar tastes cinematically and I really respect him as a writer and a director. To have that healthy respect for each others opinion means that we can be very creative, try a lot of things out and not take it personally.

How have you gone about editing Jadoo?

When I watch the material that Amit has shot I try and remain very independent of the emotion from the set and I let the material speak for itself. I will gather my own opinions on what the strengths and the weaknesses are of the material that has been shot. Occasionally I’ll get a feeling that something is not going to earn its place in the finished cut of the movie but at this stage, generally I will put everything in that Amit has shot. I feel it’s respectful to the writer and director of the film, in this case same guy. It’s important to give each scene a shot at earning it’s place in the film. But I do have my own opinions on what will come out and occasionally I will do another cut of the scene and try something out by removing a couple of lines of dialogue where I feel the rhythm of the scenes around it would dictate that it would be a good idea. Obviously I could be completely wrong and a lot of times I am, but you try things out as the most important thing when editing is to leave no stone unturned in the quest for the best film!

Do you edit with music?

I try and edit with music a lot, especially later in the editing process. Generally what happens for the first half of the shoot I’ll just be putting the scenes together as they are and maybe using the occasional bit of music.  In the second half of the shoot I’ll start to build the film as a whole in the computer and I’ll start to feel where music needs to be present to act as a transition or to heighten some emotion in the film. By the end of the shoot I’ll have built the whole film with temporary music where I think it should be. I think it’s important to use music as much as possible when editing.

Can you talk through your workflow? 

Our workflow in simple terms is this: The film leaves the camera, it goes to the laboratory, it gets developed, it gets put onto high definition video tapes and it gets digitized onto hard drive that we have in the editing suite. The sound comes straight from the set into the editing suite. My Assistant using a sync clap at the top of each slate will sync the sound and the picture together and prepare a little graphical window of all the shots for a particular scene. That allows me to see what has been shot for each particular scene. I will cut the scene together very quickly, not watching all the footage but just having a look at maybe one wide shot and then starting to cut the scene. I found it very useful to have gone through the process of cutting the scene before you watch all the footage for the scene. I find it more helpful having a pass of the scene, even if it’s only five minutes just quickly throwing the scene together, then you know what your looking for. Invariably you’ll find little nuggets of gold that you’ll need to make the scene really work! I will slowly build the scene up on my own and then when the film is finished shooting, I sit down with Amit, we work through the film for a few more weeks. We then show it to the producers, they came in with their notes and then a few weeks later we start showing it to small test audiences of twelve, fifteen people. We listen to what they say, we recut and then we’ll show it to a few hundred people and every time we screen the film we are very sensitive to what the audience is telling us about the pace, the story and whether they understand it or not. Every time we screen it we want the jokes to get better and to get more laughs. Hopefully by the end of the process we have a great film!

Why is it important to have an editor present in the cutting room while filming?

It’s very important to have the editor around during the filming process and any experienced director or producer will probably agree with me. It’s important to show the investors of the film how it’s all coming along. Whether that’s a film studio or an individual it’s important that they can see how the film is starting to come together and it’s important for the production to know that the story is working. If there’s anything missing I can tell them to shoot it as they’ve still got the locations and the actors. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to fix problems during the filming process than it is, say, six months down the line when everyone is around the world working on different films.

What do you think of the ending of the film?

I challenge anyone, even someone who hasn’t been blessed with much luck in the love department, to not find the end of this film very romantic. It will melt the hardest of hearts and I think that’s really hard to do. Amit the director and the cast, I feel have really nailed it!

Why do you use Avid over other editing platforms?

There are lots of editing platform you can use to edit a film and I choose to use Avid Media Composer. It’s what I like to use, I find it completely robust in terms of the actual software. Very rarely crashes! It does a great job of keeping a track of everything, I can work collaboratively with other editors and assistant editors on the same project. It has been developed for professional purposes. Some software out there hasn’t been developed for professional usage and can be fine for a short film, but when you’re on a very big film with lots and lots of footage, you need to know the software will keep a track of that and when you press play it will play and it will be in sync and work. I can deliver on an Avid Media Composer timeline absolutely world class work to the producers of a film or a film studio.

What advice do you have for young filmmakers? 

I highly recommend, if you think you might want to work in the film industry, watching lots of films, reading any book you can about it. Go and make one short film a week for a year, on your phone and put it on YouTube so that you’ve got 50 films and believe me you will learn so much about storytelling, about what you have to shoot, how to work with actors, how to use music, how to edit, how to light, how to do visual effects and that will be like a film school. That’s all you’ll need to know. Read books on screenplay writing, write lots of scripts as it’s hard to write really good scripts. There are tons and tons of resources online, totally for free. Filmmakers being interviewed, filmmakers giving talks about what they do! I question whether film school is worth the money quite frankly!

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Jul12

Locked Up

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In order to hand over the film to the sound team and the composer the picture editing element has to be finished or “locked”. There’s a basic reason for this: sync.

Each reel – and there’s usually five to six reels on a feature film – is locked and handed on. And we cross our fingers that that’s it for picture editing because the sound design and the music cues all depend on perfect timing. If a few frames change then everything has to be reassessed, re-positioned and checked for sync.

Further changes are not the end of the world but it takes time and therefore money to fiddle with it. 

Therefore the final week of cutting is very focussing. Everyone – from Amit Gupta, the writer/director to Eddie Hamilton, the editor to the whole production team is feeling very close to the film. Perhaps too close. We all have our favourite moments but we also have things that drive us nuts. And the discussions can become circular.

The only way to establish the truth is to test it. Again.

To Thurrock! And a final screening at the Lakeside Vue cinema, in front of workers from Tilda and Ford. We’re all braced for the film to flat-line in its critical reception from this out-of-town, totally “real” audience… and then disaster strikes. The first sunny evening in days and days, and our volunteer audience is decimated.

With real trepidation we run the film in a great big barn of a place to not enough people spread out across the seats in a pattern designed to kill any laughter.

And the film works its magic. Scoring a near perfect approval rating and a wonderfully warm reception from the focus group.

Buoyed up, the next day the team submits its last few notes and the picture is locked. Or should we say “locked”?

Over the next few days and weeks we’ll be negotiating with sales agent and distributors who are bound to have thoughts based on intelligent market experience about what does and does not work: more/less food? The title? The end roller sequence? Nips and tucks, we hope.

And then Lock-Lock.

 

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Jul2

The Gang’s All Here

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On Sunday, from just after lunch until just after midnight, almost the whole team were back together. But this time it wasn’t in a curry-house in lovely Leicester. We were holed-up in a rather swish suite at The Savoy. Slumming it again.

We were picking-up two keys scenes to develop the relationship between Shalini (Amara Karan) and Mark (Tom Mison). Both are busy actors: Amara has just started rehearsing with the RSC and Tom is on stage eight-shows-a-week in the West End hit, Posh.

So, Sunday and part of Monday was our only opportunity to get this done and everyone responded, as always, with wit, enthusiasm and focus.

And why a suite at The Savoy? Well, the staff and the view are two great reasons. Even as a sweaty film crew we were treated like treasured guests; Julia Harris, the director of Entertainment Sales really couldn’t do enough to help. And what a vista: Big Ben, The Wheel and the Thames. All from angles that we rarely see. It says, “We’re getting married” in a very short shorthand. 

It was great to be shooting again. Amit Gupta and his team fell into lockstep instantly. Roger Pratt and Tommy Finch lit the space very economically and the crew glided past each other like dancers.

Even though we were outside on a lovely day on Monday it was much more of a challenge. Tabard Gardens is a small urban green-space surrounded by redbrick blocks of flats. Perfect as a Leicester backdrop.  But, well, noisy. The locals were very accommodating; turning down their music and swerving the set. But something was up in the skies over London, with helicopters buzzing us throughout the shoot. We must have counted fifty fly-pasts.

But when you have a actors and crew who know, like and respect each other, under a director who’s clearly enjoying himself then things start to come together quickly.

We shot-out the scenes, said thank-you to our stars and headed into London for some restaurant establishers and general views of this beautiful capital on a fabulous evening, blessed with spectacular cloudscapes.

And, because Amit’s working with the best young editor in the world, Eddie Hamilton, the scenes dropped right in as if they’d always been there.

Next stop: distributor screenings.

May23

The Cannes-can

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Every May, in Cannes, there’s an odd event.

An enormous Film Festival runs alongside an equally enormous Film Market – and they only rarely deign to form the slimmest of Venn-diagrams; when a film represented by one of the select bunch of favoured sales agents is screened in (or out of) Competition.

And the audiences for the Festival and Market are completely different too, of course. You can’t get anywhere – physically – in the Market without a Market Pass and you can’t get into a Festival Premiere without a dicky-bow. Both rules are policed vigorously by the Cerberuses at the gates.

We took down a gorgeous booklet of photos from our Stills man Jules Heath and a truly funny three-minute reel created by trailer-cutter Toby James and our own Eddie Hamilton. When coupled with a decent set of headphones from the laptop computer it really did make them laugh.

‘Them’ being the international Sales Agents. These are the companies that oil the process of selling independent filmmakers’ rights to the worldwide independent film community.

It’s a relentless job for these Sales Agents – notoriously booking four twenty-minute meetings every hour, ten-hours a day for 10-days. And the very last person they want to see in the world is a producer with a new promo-reel, let alone with a script. It’s just too early for them.

However, that’s our job: to charm, cajole and occasionally barge our way into these offices. It can make you feel a bit like Ol’ Gil from The Simpsons, if you can just catch the eye of the buyer… and then when they see the quality of the material all is forgiven.

We’re not trying to sell the film yet – it’s not complete – just position it in the minds of the right executives so that when we come to screen the finished article we’ve got the buyer in the room.

And ,the film is now tee’d up sweetly for that next stage.

Inevitably we suffered Cannes Foot/Face Ache, the well-documented condition of walking and smiling too much in one day. It would be nice to say that at least we got a Cannes-tan but, alas, it was one of the wettest Cannes on record.

Still, the South of France in May. Can’t be all bad.

Apr24

Transition

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The end comes quietly.

The shoot ended on the Saturday after Good Friday.  And within hours almost everyone had gone.

It was a great last week – including three days in the Peepul Centre in Leicester, shooting the Kings of Curry competition with our fabulous cast and crew joined by the incomparable Madhur Jaffrey and the life-saving Hardeep Singh Koli.

It would have been nice to imagine that we finished the very last shot of the very last day with our 1st Assistant Director, Gareth Tandy, bellowing “Thank you, Boys & Girls. That’s a wrap …!” but it wasn’t like that…

In fact the very last day – as it is on most films, I imagine – was an intense session of two camera crews picking up wide shots of Leicester and micro-shots of food, and the Recipe Book and photo inserts. Lots and lots of precise, fiddly and vital moments.

Lastly Amit Gupta, writer/director, worked with Jules Heath, our over-achieving Unit Stills photographer, directing the cast in a set of amazing stills for the end credits of the film.

And that meant the cast and crew sort of peeled away… cast as they finished their stills and crew as the unit shrank away naturally.

Lastly, it was just Jules and Gaffer, Tommy Finch, shooting a plate shot of a beautiful wedding tuk-tuk.

Then the lights went out.

We’d had a mini-wrap party the night before so almost everyone headed back to the hotel, packed up, hugged colleagues and went to their homes to have an Easter Sunday with friends and family…

But Tuesday after the Bank Holiday it all cranked up again, seamlessly. The Art Department started their wrap process – breaking up sets, returning props and packing tools. The Production and Accounts Team started to put the show to bed and box up the vital documents.

On Wednesday the final rushes arrived and were ingested into the hard-drives and then the mountain of equipment was boxed-up.

CUT TO: Thursday, an office near Leicester Square tube. (We just can’t get away from Leicester.)

Eddie Hamilton, Editor; Riccardo Bacigalupo, Assistant Editor; and Farhana Bhula, Assistant Producer hauled up about eighty boxes up three, narrow flights of stairs to the neat and tidy edit room.

Eddie and Riccardo worked long into the night to set up the gear and on Friday we watched the last rushes with Roger Pratt BSC, Cinematographer and Tim Phillips, Associate Producer.

Elegantly done.

And now we’re approaching the end of assembly. Amit and Eddie start cutting in earnest next week… and then we start setting up the test screenings.

Getting there.

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