The editing tools...
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Late nights in New York. At the age of 18, sat in a darkened room, a hall of Steenbeck editing tables in a cellar on Union Square. Wrapping up the last touches of my diploma film at two in the morning, I had magnetized a copy of Ennio Morricone’s “On Earth as it is in Heaven” from “The Mission” as a possible piece to use in the film… Myself and ten or so other students were growing more and more tense as the morning deadline approached. I turned the volume up on the table, wound the magnetic tape around the sprockets, and played the track on the table’s loud-speaker. It probably pissed the other students off rotten, but to me it was beautiful. I was enjoying my last moments with the table. The payphone in the hallway rang, it was another one of the students, a tall bearded Canadian chap, I forget his name, he’d wrapped his edit that afternoon, and wanted to know if anyone wanted to camp out in the street to get tickets to go see the David Letterman show, I answered, and I said yes… I spent a last hour tidying up the film, and got a taxi to the studios, where we were two of four people queuing until 9 in the morning. It’s a little story, of little consequence to anyone but me, but I don’t think you get those stories editing in an office on a laptop.
The table itself is a beautiful piece of machinery, and an incredible piece of engineering. Heavy too. Julien, the editor, and I had to lug this table up step by step to the first floor, where we were fortunately able to squeeze it in the elevator. It was close - a question of one millimetre, and only then when I sat on top of the table and angled it so the doors could close… It needs a little work, Julien and I are going to look under the hood, (literally, the top lifts up in the same way as the bonnet of a car…) we’ll probably have to change the belts that drive the wheels and ensure that everything runs at a precise 24 (or 25) frames per second… I have some old bits of film from my New York days that I can test it out on. If we decide to shoot (widescreen) super 16mm, we’ll have to go under the hood again to fit a lens so that the film projects onto the screen correctly. But those are decisions still to be made…
The Steenbeck
The Splicer
You don’t cut the film with the editing table itself, the table is really just a means of playing back the film at it’s precise speed, a designed work desk to watch, to fast forward, and rewind… To cut the film, you need a splicer, which is, effectively, a very precise set of scissors. That action of cutting the film has a specific feel and sound to it. And the fact of having to cut the actual celluloid makes you really think about what you are doing before you slice it.
I tend to have incredible luck, and this splicer is a perfect example. Returning home for Christmas, my mother told me about a man I should meet, Clive, who had bought a car from her. He happened to be a collector of old projectors. So I gave Clive a call. We chatted about the differences between film and digital, about his collection, about the Steenbeck and about TRAUMA. I mentioned I was looking for a splicer, and he said he had one he could give me. Sure enough, a few weeks later, he has dropped a splicer off, we speak on the phone, and he asks me a question I hadn’t though of: Did I want a cement splicer or a tape splicer (do I want to glue my film together of tape it together?) So I asked him the difference… Cement is a little more precise, and doesn’t get caught up in projectors so easily, it takes longer as you need to sand down the celluloid for every single cut you make… Of the two, it’s the older way of doing things. Tape is quicker and easier, but it can get stuck in playback, and in any case, the quicker easier option isn’t what this project is about...
