Art of the Frame

Two shows share this feed, and the pairing is the point. Editors on Editing is the interview strand, hosted by Glenn Garland in collaboration with American Cinema Editors and Pro Video Coalition. Each episode brings on the editor of a recent film, with a spoiler warning up front, and then stays inside the work. Joel Negron, whose credits include 21 Jump Street, The Nice Guys, Thor Ragnarok, Jungle Cruise, Cocaine Bear and Transformers Rise of the Beast, discusses cutting Project Hail Mary. The conversation lands on Rocky, a character with no face, and how rounds of sound experimentation produced something audiences cry at. Fist bumps between an actor and a puppeteered carapace turn out to be an editing problem. Axel Geddes, a second film editor on WALL-E, Toy Story 3, Turning Red, Lightyear and Elio, and lead editor on Finding Dory and Toy Story 4, describes cutting Hoppers without a script. Animation editors sit in pre-production, production and post at the same time, sometimes for four years, and he is candid about the nerves that come with that. Andy Jurgensen walks through moving from assistant editor to associate editor to feature editor across a long run with Paul Thomas Anderson, including shorts and music videos, then cutting One Battle After Another. Garland asks the question assistants actually want answered: how does anyone make that jump. The Alan Smithee Roundtable is the other half, monthly and conversational, with Katie Henson, Michael Kamas and Scott Simmons. It is brought to listeners by Film Tools, and the agenda is whatever happened in post-production that month. Storage prices come up often, with real receipts pulled from old orders and a four-terabyte SSD at around eight hundred dollars. So does the bigger economic picture. One exchange has Henson arguing that the streaming bubble is bursting and that private equity has no appetite for the down years an entertainment business normally rides out. Conference reports arrive from the HPA Tech Retreat. The hosts also let ordinary life in: a six-day power outage after an ice storm, a colleague absent for a dog's vet emergency, an admission that they are figuring out how to run the podcast themselves. The register shifts between the halves. The interviews are focused and admiring, the roundtable is wry and prone to tangents about cupboards full of old drives. What holds them together is a working professional's view of the industry, where a cut is a craft decision and also a job performed under shifting economics.