In the cutting room with Catching Fire editor Alan Bell

In this special fxinsider feature, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire editor Alan Bell sits down with fxguide for a wide-ranging discussion on the film, his process and the tools he uses.

 

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Cutting the District 11 speeches

An early and pivotal moment in Catching Fire comes as Katniss and Peeta make a ‘victory’ tour around the districts. At District 11, Peeta delivers an emotional speech after which Katniss follows the salute by a man in crowd that leads to his death. “With a scene like that,” explains Bell, “the first thing I do is watch everything. I certainly watch all the circle takes. I will often have a discussion with the director during dailies. You have to find the anchor, and because Katniss is the center of the film, she is the anchor, even though Peeta takes the lead.”

Bell cut the scene by building up on the speeches first. “It’s trying to find those moments in dailies,” he says, “trying to decode what the scene is about and what those nuggets are, because they’re very easy to overlook. The scene is building up to this giant faux paus Katniss makes which leads to death of the old guy who salutes her.”

The training room sequence

In this scene, Katniss takes on a series of holograms with her archery skills. The challenge for Bell was to the edit the sequence without the threats (which would be added later via visual effects from Fuel). Bell did have a stunt actor video mocking up the scene for reference, but after an initial edit, director Francis Lawrence noted that it wasn’t quite right. That led Bell to quickly devise his own rough in-edit previs for the threats.

Above: watch a clip from the training room

“I realized because we didn’t have anything to see how the timing was, it was hard to really know if the timing was right,” he says. “So – just because I’m crazy – I built the set myself in Cinema4D, got a Microsoft Kinect and hooked it up to my computer and did 3D tracks by hand. I knew the dimensions of the set so then it was relatively easy to do camera match moves.

“I just acted out with stick figures with little tubes with balls for joints,” he adds. “I made each threat and put them in the position of what I thought they were going to be in. Once I did that, I showed that to Francis and we could see where we had to adjust the timing. Then we got (VFX supe) Janek Sirrs in and we worked on it together some more.”

Editing toolkit

Bell cuts on the Avid. His cutting room is set up like a screening room with a HD projector and a 120 inch diagonal screen. He works with a 24 inch Cintiq Wacom tablet and an Apple Cinema Display. On location the editing team had five Avids and almost 36 terabytes of storage available to them.

With a strong history in visual effects, Bell also makes significant use of temp and final effects during the editing process, such as split-screening takes or other minor performance manipulations. For this, he tends to rely on eyeon Connection and its bridge between Avid and eyeon Fusion, a tool he says saves him ultimately hours in housekeeping.

“The thing that’s unique about Fusion, Connection and Avid is that it really saves time and that not only can I tell what I did a year ago, when I actually have to do it, all I do is put an end mark and an out mark. I just drag a plugin and I throw it onto a layer in the timeline and a message box comes up and says how many layers do you want? Then I export those clips and all three of those clips get exported into a predetermined path. I don’t have to worry about where it went. I’ve already preset that. Then I hit edit an effect. Fusion opens up and there’s a comp there with three merge operators. I get to work, do whatever I have to do, I hit render, don’t have to set a save or anything. And as soon as I hit render, I can go back to the Avid and start working again. As soon as it’s done and propagated, it’s now in my timeline.”

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