America’s Hidden Stories is a cool new show airing on the Smithsonian Channel starting March 4. I edited the episode on “Pearl Harbor’s Spies.”
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As part of an ongoing project with our amazing downtown association Montpelier Alive to highlight the wide variety of fun activities for all ages going on here in the Capital City we filmed the Ice on Fire Central Vermont Winter Festival. It was a total blast, everyone had a great time and we wanted to capture a sense of the wide variety of activities held over the course of the winter afternoon.
Ice on Fire: In Progress clip
We filmed the Ice on Fire Winter Festival in North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, Vermont last weekend as part of a project for Montpelier Alive. It was lots of fun and we’re working on a little video of the event to give them for promotion. The “blanket toss” was so much fun I put together a little teaser.
Tonight “Coal’s Deadly Dust” broadcasts on PBS, for the series FRONTLINE in collaboration with NPR. Directed by Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Reported by Howard Berkes, the film investigates the rise of severe black lung disease among coal miners in Central Appalachia.
The film is co-produced and edited by Well Told Films principal Chad Ervin.
Coal’s Deadly Dust
The Newest film edited by Chad Ervin, produced and directed by Elaine McMillion Sheldon and reported by Howard Berkes, made in partnership with NPR “Coal’s Deadly Dust” is broadcasting January 22, 2019 on the PBS Series FRONTLINE. This is the first film edited entirely at Well Told Films’s new location in Montpelier, Vermont.
SEASON 37: EPISODE 6
FRONTLINE and NPR investigate the rise of severe black lung disease among coal miners, and the failure to respond. This joint investigation reveals the biggest disease clusters ever documented, and how the industry and the government failed to protect miners. Also in this two-part hour, FRONTLINE presents a report from Yemen.
Winter S’Morestice Festival
This is what happens when I’m in charge of making home videos. Wanted to test the new camera’s slow motion, ended up being a handheld, slow motion, 13-degree temperature test.
I am working with the production company The Film Posse putting the finishing touches on a new two-hour film for the PBS’s American Experience, “The Battle of Chosin,” about the grueling and, by many, forgotten campaign waged by a group of American and allied soldiers against incredible odds, in sub-freezing weather, isolated and surrounded in the mountains of North Korea. It’s not to be missed, if for nothing than the amazing first-person testimony given by the men who lived through the ordeal.
It will be airing this fall. I will add more info and a sneak peak when it becomes available.
I’m a bit late posting this but was happy to see a series that I frequently work for, PBS’s FRONTLINE, nominated for 18 News & Documentary Emmys for 2016. FRONTLINE is always one of the best shows on television and it is a pleasure and honor to work with these great people whenever I get the chance.
I was especially (selfishly, sure) happy to see two program that I worked received nods. “Being Mortal,” a critique of the medical approach to end of life care and a contemplation on approaching the mortality of ourselves and those we love with a focus on personal priorities and values in mind. It was a privilege to work with the great director, Tom Jennings, who captured a nuanced portrait of the brave subjects of the film, who agreed to share their most intimate moments with the world. It was also a great pleasure to edit the film with one of the best editors in the business, Steve Audette, whom I’ve admired for years.
The other film that I had a (admittedly small) hand in making was Ken Dornstein’s 3-part capstone to his decades long quest to track down the perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing, which claimed the life of his older brother, “My Brother’s Bomber.” I worked in various roles over a couple years but jumped on in earnest to help create the motion graphics for the film, bringing to life some of the mountains of document and photo evidence that Ken used on his quest. It’s always a treat to get to see how other film editors approach their craft and this was no exception. I was able to lend a hand to one of my other favorite editors, Brian Funck, whom I’ve known for years and we work for many of the same people but tend to pass like ships in the night. The entire team was so passionate and committed to the project and their roles that it was a blast getting to jump aboard with them and help bring this epic project into port.
Hey, it’s not all documentaries about death and/or destruction for me! I got a great palate cleanser by cutting several episodes of the fun and stylish “A Moveable Feast with Fine Cooking,” which airs on PBS, and has many episodes available online.
Like an athlete who benefits from developing both the fast twitch and slow twitch muscles, it’s beneficial for an editor to work on a variety of content, pushing yourself to master working at different paces and in a variety of aesthetic styles. You need to take a totally different approach to every aspect of your work, from the organization of footage to your workflow and editing pace. I find that this keeps me challenged and fresh and each style adds to my toolkit for subsequent projects.
Moveable Feast combines learning novel cooking techniques and recipes with the experience of traveling to a wide variety of culinary destinations where you are taken through the personal process of some interesting local chefs.
I take great pride in the fact that I limited myself to only one food metaphor in this entire post. Cheers! (OK, two now.)
It was a long-awaited pleasure to cut my first film for the PBS series American Experience. Even better that it was this dark and thrilling tale of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in progressive North Carolina in the 1960s. I’m glad I got to cut this film for (fellow Tennesseean) producer/director Callie Wiser and feel that she crafted an intriguing and nuanced portrait of ‘the banality of evil’ in action, told mainly through the Carolina Klan’s charismatic leader, Bob Jones. It is easy to ascribe terrible deeds and attitudes to a morally “bad” other but in Klansville, USA, we see how hatred can take root in a disenfranchised population, left behind by social and economic changes.
And with that I’ll stop trying to sound smart and give you the description from the website where, at this time, the film can be viewed in its entirety:
Having been dormant for decades, the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) reemerged in the U.S. after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, gaining momentum in the U.S. as the civil rights movement grew. That the Klan would rise once again wasn’t surprising, but where the reincarnation took place was. North Carolina was long considered the most progressive southern state; its image was being burnished weekly on CBS by the enormously popular “The Andy Griffith Show.” In 1963, North Carolina salesman Bob Jones chartered what would become the largest Klan group in the country, which, under his leadership, grew to some ten thousand members. In the process, the group helped give the Tarheel State a new nickname: “Klansville, U.S.A.”
Last fall I worked on a three part mini-series for PBS called Coming Back with Wes Moore. The entire team was very passionate and really invested in the show, which sought to show the trials and triumphs of veterans returning to civilian life.
Our hope was that the series manage to show a wide swath of experiences and hew a nice line between the unsettling / upsetting hardships of reacclimatizing to life with physical and/or mental scars while also showing the amazing triumphs of will and perseverance that lead many vets to not only merely fit in, but thrive in this new chapter in their lives. Here is a review from the Baltimore Sun.
My part was story editing about half the ‘characters,’ and doing fine cutting and finishing on all three episodes. It was a really eye-opening experience personally and a great joy to work with this talented team, our guiding light always being the intelligent and compassionate vision of Wes Moore, the show’s EP & host.
FRONTLINE dispatches teams to Cairo, going inside the youth movement that helped light the fire on the streets. We follow the “April 6th” group, which two years ago began making a bold use of the Internet for their underground resistance-tactics that led to jail and torture for many of their leaders. Now, starting with the “Day of Rage,” we witness those same leaders plot strategy and head into “Liberation Square” to try to bring down President Mubarak. Also in this hour, veteran Middle East correspondent Charles Sennott of GlobalPost lands in Cairo for FRONTLINE to take a hard look at Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-the most well-organized and powerful of the country’s opposition groups-as a new fight for power in Egypt begins to takes shape.
Our recently finished project was a very challenging one to complete. It is featured in a blog on the Avid Community:
Here is an article on Avid’s website describing the edit.
Describing the editing challenges in a discussion on the Avid Community forum I say:
Hi everyone, thank you for the praise for this project. It was a very challenging undertaking and required a team effort, frequently around the clock. Our Post Supervisor, Chris Fournelle is working on a detailed account of the workflow to be shared with Avid & the community. Also, I believe they’re going to have Chris do a presentation at NAB and have some of our sequences and media on-hand to demonstrate.
I’ll try to address some of the questions that I’ve seen thus far in the discussion. Media type: We cut the whole thing in DNX-145 and its PAL equivalent. PAL media was imported / captured into a PAL project then moved over to the offline project. All four of the offline editors worked in the same Avid project, splitting our bins into folders.
I didn’t do the pictures in After Effects this time. In the first segment we had the larger aesthetic issue of contending with the shaky, rough footage acquired in Cairo. We usually aspire for a very smooth, classy feel to our pictures, interviews, etc. Things made in that style looked very strange when placed in the verite-style footage though. So I made a ‘handheld’ effect using the ‘Shake’ effect from Sapphire. I put this effect on all our interviews and most still images. On interviews I also added a push using the resize effect. I felt that this gave the interviews a similar feeling to the rest of the footage. For the stills I just imported them at DNX-145 and animated them with understated moves using the 3D Warp.
Because of the fast timetable, with each choice I wanted to weigh the potential issues I might cause down the line so I tried to keep everything as ‘within the box’ as much as possible. In other words I didn’t want to have to answer questions about missing pan & zoom pictures in the middle of the night.
Other assorted details: the Canon f footage required us to buy the camera to capture. Most footage was file-based so the greatest technical challenge of the whole project was to was to copy over the footage (which was hastily put onto a drive in the middle of the chaos over there), keeping it in a coherent system so we could tell what it was and when it was filmed.
But the most challenging issue for me was that, once all of this happened and it was in the project on the unity… it was still in arabic… So for any sound-ups between interviews, people chanting, etc. I would have to call a translator into the room and make sure that they were actually saying something relevant, finishing thoughts, etc.
Anyway, hopefully this answers some of the questions and provides a little more insight into the process/workflow. When Fournelle has the more thorough explanation I will forward along. Otherwise, I will keep an eye on this board and answer anything else to the best of my ability.
