Coyote v Acme

0:00Hello, and welcome to the Art of the Cut podcast brought to you in partnership with Boris of Facts. I'm Steve Hulfich, ECE, I'm a working documentary feature and TV editor. For over a decade I've interviewed nearly 600 of the world's best editors. Welcome to episode 37 of season 13. Today on Art of the Cut, Karsten Karpeneck discusses the editing of a film that is very unusual. Kiyote vs. Act. Firstly, it's a combination of live action and animation. And second, the studio decided not to release it after it was already completed. Only years later did another company swoop in and pie the distribution rights and decided to release the film that had been languishing in a vault for almost three years. Karpeneck has edited numerous films including Rambo, Last Blood, Escape Plan 2, Hades, and an episode of the TV series E-Siders. He was also a previs editor on Teenage Mead Ninja Turtles out of the shadows.

1:03Today's discussion includes topics like the benefits of prevising an entire movie, the iterative process that shapes a film, and the scene that was scripted for the middle of the film but ended up as the inciting incident. Before we hop into a discussion with Karsten, a message from our sponsor Boris of Facts and their acquisition of Audio Plug-in Powerhouse, Isotol. If you edit video for a living, you know audio issues can slow you down. Re-recording or waiting on ADR isn't always an option when deadlines are tight. That's where Isotope RX comes in. I've relied on RX and my workflow for years, and tools like Dialog, Isolate, and Spectral Repair are life savers. You can strip out background noise or room reverb in seconds, clean up raw dialogue right inside your edit, and keep things moving. It's hands down the fastest way to rescue production audio you might have considered

2:05to be unusable. Head on over to Isotope.com slash RX to grab a free trial and see how much time it saves you on your next cut. I've added in my analyses and DAWS for over a decade and use it all the time. Finally, for students and anyone else interested in practicing their editing skills, Ace, the American Cinema Editor, has a new program giving you access to actual daily's from big budget Netflix projects. The program is called the Ace Editing Experience, and provides access to unedited daily's from the old guard, Queen's Gambit, Lemony Snicket, and more. Check it out at ACEeditingExperience.com. Now, Karsten Kaepernick discusses editing, Kiyote vs. Atman. Karsten's so nice to have you on Art of the Cut. Congratulations on a really interesting movie to talk about. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. I'm assuming you had to cut this like a typical animated film.

3:08Is that correct? You started with storyboards? Yeah, we started with storyboards and in pre-production, I was working from home for years, still COVID. It was March 21 when we started. Even though Dave was an LA, and I was an LA, we still worked remotely because of the entire situation. We started with storyboards like you would with any traditional animated movies. It was different from that process that we didn't just do a storyboard animatic, but we actually transposed those storyboard animatics into a previous scene. We used frame store in London. Whenever we had an animatic for a scene that we liked with like 10 forces and storeboards and all the usual things sound effects, then we would send it to frame store and they would create a 3D pre-vis of the scene. With a little CGI wily blocked in as well, then once we had that, I was cutting on top

4:10of the storyboards basically that. Once we were happy with that 3D layout of the scene, we would remove the wily and any other Loonitunes character. Our animators and story artists would then draw what we called sketch vists on top of the 3D animation to indicate the Loonitunes characters in their key poses. In hand drawn images, as alphas that we would stack on top of the video basically. The goal of the entire thing was that we would end up with a 3D pre-vis version of the movie where 2D animated drawings of the Loonitunes characters would be on top of it, where the 3D would represent what would become the life action and the 2D could be used as a performance reference for the shoot later on. It was actually for me very, very helpful later when we were shooting because most of the time in movies like this, and this was Kustafarius idea to do it this way because he learned from the shoot of Tom and Jerry, where they didn't have that, where when you're on set,

5:14you often just simply don't know what the animated characters will do. This is a usual problem with the effects movies where the infamous tennis ball on a stick appears and actors have to just kind of like, I don't know what's going on, follow the direction. But we basically kind of mapped out. We knew the timings and the actions of the characters and what the scenes was about. So it was a great reference on set for Dave to show to Will. Here is what Wiley does in that scene because Wiley always has like some agenda on his own and a life of his own. So he could really kind of get a feel of what his co-star, even if it wasn't on set visually, was doing in the scene and I think it really helped us that way. Sometimes we even like, one-to-one match camera shots. There's a great crane shot with Tweety being introduced that we literally matched from the previous one to one and we worked because we had alphas of our drawings. We could even lay that onto the playback monitor on set and just like really see it timed out in real time. It's kind of, we didn't always do that,

6:17but that was a cool thing as well. So it sounds like you were on set yourself? Yeah, we shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the spring of 22 for three months. I was, technically I would say, I was next to set. I was working out of a building next to the stage. Dave sometimes called me over. You plan out and you have the previous, but it doesn't always, obviously, translates 100% and if we have to change coverage and things like that, he sometimes called me over to make sure that everything's good, edit-torally. What didn't happen very often, I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of being on set. I'm an editor for a reason. From chaos, I like to create order. And the set is always feels like a war zone to make that decision. It's just okay, I was waiting and it's interesting and it's exciting, but I'd rather focus on the edit. But I was there, obviously, and it was good because Dave would come by and we could review things, obviously in a tidely manner. He was feeling good when he finished the day. Of course, I stayed up

7:22to camera. We were working really hard. I had net-thorn, my first assistant, additional editor on configuring the movie. Rod him on during the shoot as well as an assistant editor and additional editor then as well. He was helping me assemble the movie in parts because of a lot of stuff going on and converting the previous. So, yeah, that was pretty great. The main crew, though, was in London because the entire post and post shoot was in London. What kind of scratch voice actors did you use early in and when did you get finals? It was an iterative rolling process. We would have, Eric was basically doing 90% of our voices. Andy Milo did Granny, but he did, obviously, everybody else pretty much. We had regular sessions with him every time we changed the cut and changed ideas. We iterated quite a bit on what the Loonitunes were saying and scenes would change. There's things we can talk about as well where we entirely recast and reverse scenes that were

8:25shot in live action, but then we used the different Loonitunes character in that scene later on in post. We needed Eric quite a lot to do these voices because it was so really hard to do for an editorial crewist temp. He was always game and just a great collaborator. He has a booth at home. So it was always easy to basically just like, can you do a session and then he would be on for a couple of hours and we record some new lines and cut them in. Originally, what we started with was a table read. I was my first video that I worked with which had the full cast already, which was cool. Eric again was on that call, Zoom call. We couldn't do it in person again, COVID. One of my favorite memories of the whole production was sort of at one point, Eric had to speak multiple Loonitunes characters in a row. So he had to talk to himself and he was like just going wild and everybody was just like, Lama guesses their jaws would drop and then once he was

9:26done, we stopped the table read. People were just tangously applauding him because it was so incredible to see him do that. That was really great. So that was the first voice past temp scratch audio. It was actually like that Zoom recording. Quality wasn't the best of it. So we zoomed and then things changed. We were a year in pre-production. The writings would change. We would implement that. My cut would inform some of the re-rides. It was a very collaborative process. So every time a dialogue changed, we need to pop some stuff out. Joe Cobden, who was a good friend of Dave's and long-term collaborative he played. Boghorn in the final congressional climax in a green suit as a big chicken is the term that a little girl in a test screening said, I like the big chicken. A fall corn is really cute. That kind of stuck. But Joe basically played Kevin in the previous base that the role that Will later acted in the movie. So he was always game as well to

10:32try the lines and bring in. My wife's an actress Courtney Hawkins. So she did a couple of voices throughout the thing. Her voice is still in the movie as well. The carrot festival commercial. So I would do a lot of things too. There was actually a moment where we had a couple of major dialogue re-rides that I wanted to mock up the edit quicker than we could get Scratch ADR. So me and my wonderful German accent did multiple voices. That was only ever seen by Dave and Chris. We jokingly called that the German edit. When you show it to people that you trust, this is stuff that I feel obviously self-conscious about. It's not something I would show to an audience. But Dave and Chris are good with looking at something that is rough and they can extrapolate what the outcome could be and the potential could be of an edit. I think it's an important skill in generally when we work with collaborators like directories and producers, being able to see the potential and knowing because you always refine the edit. It's never finished. If you have a temp sound,

11:37even if you spend a lot of time scoring and tracking everything, but every time I go then later to a mixed stage and you hear the final, the improvements are so staggering when it's polished and the color is done and everything is finished. So I always have to remind myself when something plays in an earlier stage, you know it's going to fly later. So it's a good thing. Did you have access to the full Looney Tunes sound effect library? We did have the sound effects like all the Hanna Beveira, so stuff of sound effects as well. And we pulled all the original cartoons as well and pulled things. Sometimes we didn't have clean tracks for those because this just doesn't exist anymore. Sound effects were sometimes hard to come by because you had score of the cartoons on top of it. But usually the score is luckily a little sparse so you can always pull a cool explosion. It's actually really interesting when you temp score something like a wily exploding. The first instinct might be because you're making a big feature film that put a huge explosion that is modern into this. We're blending things,

12:41we're doing different things, but sometimes a simple classic wily pop that was from an original cartoon might actually be funnier. It's sort of about the effect. So we have the original roadrunner meet me in there, of course. We really tried to stay as close to the cartoon as possible. So yeah, we didn't use any of the score and the score obviously was a big, big, big challenge. I would absolutely say it was the hardest movie to temp score in my career, simply because it doesn't fit a mold. It is a courtroom drama of 70s conspiracy thriller Loonie Tunes family comedy. So you kind of stuck into world if you're doing a horror movie, there's a million scores for horror movie. There's a million scores that you can pull from and it totally will kind of sit in the pocket. Here it's sort of you're having a dramatic scene that

13:44is played straight and the comedy comes through some of the absurdist clash of having Loonie Tunes character in the scene. So what do you go for with the score? Do you lean into the dramatic score or do you lean into the comedy? And we, I always think usually, wasn't more playing it straight. And so we just got temp scored with things like spotlight, dark waters, succession, dramatic scores in the beginning when Wily Good speed up after the first big chase, like I think we had Munich in there at one point. But John really was just curious. It was very funny to us. There's this fine line where you want to feel something, you want to honor the pain that he goes through, but you also want to laugh about it in a way. So it's a really fine line. But if you if you go too much too dark, it'll undermine the comedy eventually as well. It just will feel heavy, which is not great. And if you lean into a comedy score, it usually undermines the if sincerity and authenticity of the emotion. And we didn't really want a movie to be like cynical.

14:47We didn't want this to be some meta comedy. This is a sincere movie. Is this Mr. Smith goes to Washington? It's all the president's man with Loonie Tunes. So, and yes, even price, the fantastic score. I'm absolutely in love with it. I did not envy him for that challenge. And he totally knocked it out the park in my eyes. Like he managed to honor the movie, honor the stakes, honor the emotion, but also added a little bit of whims of quality to it. And that Loonie Ness, so everyone has probably seen online that the meat made choir that he posted. And that these kind of elements where you have like a straight or an astrayed dramatic scene, but there's this little bit of meat made back. And it just it lightens it up even if it's subtle. And you don't, you don't maybe actively notice it in the moment, but it helps it to be pushed by me above that moment where it just feels too heavy. One of the first places where I noticed temp score that was supposed to sound more like a dramatic film was when

15:52coyote goes back to his layer after the missile attack. Can you remember what you attempt with or do you remember the discussion with you or maybe the director and the composer about the music at that point? That was exactly one where we really originally we really, really leaned into the dramaticness that we used the John Williams Munich, one of the cues from the Munich score. It was funny to us and we really liked it, but it does play super dramatic. And we tried several things. I think we I'm sure we had a dozen things that we tried. One that we really loved was Johnny Cash, Ninety Shnails, Covered, Hurt. That played super fun, but then became almost like a show stealer because it becomes so meta, you know, about like the lyrics and him, like Hurt, yeah, feeling the pain and all that. It just like it just didn't, it just became distracting in a way. So we kind of abandoned that and then Steven did a beautiful score piece that we then felt

16:57was kind of the perfect middle ground that that kind of nailed that sweet balance between honoring the emotion, making us feel the pain, but also underlying supporting a little bit of the comedy of it all, basically. So yeah, that was a that was an interesting sequence for sure. You used some previous coyote cartoons as flashbacks were those scripted and did you have all of the cartoons actually in your avid? Did you cut me avid? I'm assuming you're pre-production was cut on Adobe Premiere. It was a small team, Josh Steel helped me out for a couple of months, but it was like there were for a lot of times it was just me, honestly. So I would get photo shop file, previous files in it. And I really liked the dynamic link function to go into Photoshop and manipulating plates when I was doing things. But then during production, we switched to avid media composer. Simply because it was a large crew. We had Chris Sarah's our first assistant

17:58and Lily or a second assistant and we had an editorial trainee, Annie, and we had the effects editor Rod and assistant, the effects editor Freddie. And so we had a music editor as well. Like we had a Connor on our music editor. And so there's a lot of people that have to access the project and having the Abyss just rock solid there. It wasn't a problem basically. There was a little bit of trouble for Ned and for Chris. I felt bad for them because they had a port from Premiere to the previous animatic that was a little bit of a task that wasn't too pleasurable. But we all got it going. So I had all the cartoons in the avid yes and we regularly reviewed cartoons for reference as well. Just to get inspirations or timing, what makes it funny, like really trying to figure that out. We did not have it scripted or in the animatic that we would

18:58use the actual cartoons in the movie that was a post decision. And it came from two experiments really. The first thing we shot was actually those advertisements that will does to camera as a lawyer. I think they've been posted as a marketing gag where you just these typical late night lawyer ads that we made. And when we cut those, we did those while we were sort of in post as well in the edit. And yeah, while we were doing those, we had the idea why don't we cut actual cartoons on top of it. So that wasn't the scripted idea either. But let's do it. And we did that. We really liked that. We made them black and white. I think when you look at it online, they're black and white there. And it's just kind of a fun little thing. So that was one. And then we played around with like teaser trailer ideas where we used the cartoons and we used the hurt track again for that. It was just something where we're playing and experimenting with some marketing ideas on the side. And that

20:00eventually led to I don't know who said it first probably Dave. It was saying like let's let's try it over. It's like non-diogenic. It's just it's an interesting experiment, I think, because like you're you're it almost plays like a lash bag of Wiley's memory in there basically. That's sort of what it's supposed to do. But it's also a bit meta. But we all kind of loved it. And it just like having the silver, the parachute silverware joke gets me every time. I just absolutely loved that one. Yeah, so that's how that basically came to be. Can you fill us in on the easter egg of the name of the law firm of Avery Jones and Maltese? We have a ton of easter eggs in the movie, obviously like Dave was really really wanted to honor the the history and of the original cartoons and the artists behind it. So the law firm is named after the legendary one artist, Texay, Richard Jones and Michael Maltese. And yeah, it's a fun little thing and I saw a tweet recently

21:08as well. Like obviously people are picking up on stuff like this and get excited. I think that's it's a really nice thing for the fans too. Did you watch any Looney Tunes as research? I absolutely did. Yes. So all the cartoons basically I also grew up on my dad's 80s almost and he's in Germany. They're not film buffs and things like that. When I told them that I've got this new job and I'm going to cut a Wiley Coyote movie and his response was meet me. And it's just it's a beautiful example of how global these characters are and how the love they are. Like it's just something I grew up with and enjoyed with my dad when I was a small child. And so that's really fun. But I watched them all before I started. But then I think the biggest use case for them was mostly when we were really trying to build some of the gags and then just like really trying to figure out if something doesn't land or why it doesn't land, what's what's the reason? And it often comes down

22:11to timing or just like the simple placement of a sound effect clearing out other things before or how the music accentuates the thing. There's just so much to learn from these masters how they build these scenes and how they build tension, they build anticipation and how they then break your expectation and then land another thing and there's always then usually a hat on a hat but in a good way where you think it's done but then another rock fall done instead. So we definitely tried to find inspiration from the originals as much as we could. We talked a little bit about how much the script changed as you were working was most of the change happening during that previous stage, the storyboard phaser, did it go much deeper? There were some structural changes in in pre-production where we moved some like the midpoint for example was moved to become the inciting incident. The settlement offer by Akmi in the original version was in the midpoint and

23:15it was kind of decided that like having Akmi kind of reach out with a settlement offer right away make more sense and it makes widely really active in causing the dilemma that Kevin and Phases that he now is like kind of stuck in because widely rejects that settlement as we know from the trailer also. That was like the biggest structural change that was sort of a collaborative effort that we found when we looked at script versus cinematic and how the movie flowed, those structural changes didn't happen anymore in post like we did make the movie we shot but we had to kind of make changes that were obviously the usual thing when you get feedback in test screenings or studio feedback we were trying to address some notes and Dave has mentioned that recently as well like for example we didn't have Bugs Bunny in the movie at first so the the shooting script did not have Bugs Bunny it was something where would Dave felt early on that Bugs is a show stealer you know like he

24:19he can take over a movie and so he wanted this to be a wily coyote um road run a movie and really wanted to feature him but we also quickly realized that it's a bit of a missed opportunity as well we reconceived a scene featuring Bugs that had previously a different lunitons character so those were interesting editorial challenges and it also is something that I really love from an editorial perspective when you shoot something that is fully life action you kind of stuck with what you have like there is obviously you got some tools you can do a reshoot obviously or you can do ADR you can try to recut it and lift some lines here and there but when half of your cast is not there it really opens up some remakes options like so we you know we would then work together and write new dialogue for the the characters in sanny with like Bugs and then I would provide her with like

25:22okay this is what I have well in this case in Lana and how can we combine these things so it feels natural and you're not feeling like those characters were never in the same place like it needs to obviously feel authentic and and matching so those were those were fun and um and yeah like generally speaking what sanny really owned was sort of the the emotion and the deadpan sincerity and and really carrying the drama in her script and she did a beautiful sophisticated script that really is the foundation of the entire movie and then our story artists would then hitch the looney tunes they would come up with sidegags and additional things on top of these scenes and they were also funny um and I think they they kind of owned the voice of Wiley and the other characters so um so it it was very much a collaboration and on two sides of the things like the written word and the visual explorations of the the the animators and and story artists um that

26:29that kind of come together to to create the whole when you actually shot the live action how much coverage was there or were you really locked into what you would determine with the pre-vis and the storyboards well coverage they really didn't want to shoot this like um and animated movie he really wanted it to feel real so um you know we shot it anamorphic and uh cinema scope and really tried to mimic movies that you know 70s movies and all the president's man and uh and David Pinter's Todeak and um succession was also like Dave that's a big fan of succession and like the so that there's a famous succession scene with the congressional hearing so if you if you look at that that was definitely visuals the dept feel of handheld and kind of dirty with people in foreground and kind of making it feel real and and realistic so and having you know there's blurry background cartoon characters we didn't try to keep the frame clean and things like that

27:30like it really made the effects people's life harder of course but we really tried to push there and not just like a lucky shot of get a clean played and you know like obviously some of the plates are clean i'm not just saying we're not doing um any of that but we'd really tried to keep it real where that that was really kind of finding a grounded way to tell the movie um and yeah we had Dave Barclay sometimes um filling in as a puppeteer as well so in addition to our reference that we had from the animatic like sometimes if we needed to like act something out of timing so we would shoot a couple of times with wily puppets and then remove the puppet reenact it with um it get in proper take then um without um the puppet in it so um get a clean one for visual effects that's sort of the biggest things in regards to coverage i think that the largest scene was by far the congressional hearing um we had a lot of cameras and a lot of takes and i think we had a total of like almost 24 hours of footage on that sequence i think the original cut was like 16 to

28:3118 minutes i think the final version is about 12 they're obviously subscenes within it it's not like one big thing but it's um it's a fairly large um sequence on very nice fun to cut when you do a scene like the Tasmanian devil scene in the courtroom did you find when you were shoot when you had the coverage that you wanted to change things up a little bit from the way the you'd originally cut it or and you could still because the animation came later correct the final animation came later final animation came later um this is in fact another scene where when we shot the movie taz was not the witness in that scene um that was a decision that we did in post and we we had a really really fun character that was actually an original character that Carlos Lada Bach our head of animation drew a sheep that um sheep was the head of um PR my wife voiced it even in the temp and it was really fun everybody liked it but when we screened the movie

29:35we all felt that the scene was good but it didn't say um i don't think it was anyone's fault per say what we kind of figured is that it had to do sort of that the sheep wasn't an a-list luni tones character and like people are there for the characters and it's a really fun scene and we all basically agreed like why are we not featuring one of our stars in the scene like this needs to be we were joking like you know you would have George Clooney and so you would have like you know you would have a character that resonates with an audience more and not a new character while we're fighting against the audience is it's like a concert when the band plays a famous song that they know they're great and if they play a new song they usually enjoy it and they're supportive but it's not the same moment as when the hit comes you know so we were we were thinking porky for a while and i think Ryan Delaney who um was our animation producer he i think he suggested tags

30:36we all started laughing at the idea because obviously he speaks gibberish and that makes the entire scene even funnier um so yeah and that's then that's exactly then what we do when once once the task is clear we go in and try to make it work so if you look at the scene from a metaphor perspective there is like at one point he gets a catapult and out of his seat that was in the script because the sheep was doing it but we needed a better exit so him spinning out and getting getting out that was all kind of average we stole and cheated and made work and things like that and so originally because I originally the sheep was carried out by PJ and his is at me team like unconscious sheep was carried out so that it just yeah the footage is sort of different and that's the fun part about editing obviously when you kind of try to find ways to tell a new story with the existing material and and and creates a magic and then someone watches it and they have no idea that it was completely rejiggered it's it's a really fun scene and the crowd

31:38pleaser um kids love it too um it's just it's it's great since you're able to kind of feel the story in a real way using the table read and using story reels at the beginning how close was your first assembly of the movie it was longer simply because you know when you have live action footage usually um there's just a little bit of length added when things happen in real time on set but it wasn't exceptionally longer I don't fully remember I think our first cut was a little under 110 I think the final is 93 minutes right now so we we lost some time I think the biggest two changes are bugs and tazs and then there was some lifted scenes of course um there's a originally we had a scene early on where porky actually and his lawyer and and Kevin are talking we kind of trimmed that out and made that just a walk and talk in the aftermath basically where he's trying to talk to porkies that it's like a and try to get him to um come to the office like so there's

32:41micro trims and scenes there's lifts there's rejiggering of scenes recasting in this case of scenes so it's the final output is definitely different enough from our previous that I would say it's fairly different um not structurally per se but um but we obviously worked for a year and a half on the movie to improve it in every single capacity so um watching the if I watch the animatic now that we finished before the shoot I would probably look at it I was like okay the lots of work to be done at the same time while you're in it obviously it all it all feels incremental like you're just you're just just laying away to try to find the best movie possible and we were relentless the days relentless and the artists were relentless we were we were always trying to find little things like like like I'm one of the voices of the spiders before the daffy scene those spiders were a pitch idea that came up at some point like can we can we add some

33:42more 2d elements and um kind of create a little bit of a fun moment there so it's not just the crane down to a car arriving but you it feels more off our world and so you have that little mocking sequence it's just really cute and funny so those kind of things like really finding moments that we can enhance in any way and like Carlos Lada Bach for example we did a lot of stuff in in 2d as well like it's hand drawn to the like if people wondering like yes wily is a two and a half the greedy rigged character and um but um from production economics it's just not possible to completely hand draw an entire movie but then also ironically when you deep into production it's also economically not advisable to then create new characters like like bugs and be able to dump that on the VFX team that have a absolute full plate and delivery schedule so Duncan studio stepped up for that one and and hand drew and bugs for example for that scene that

34:49bugs is in and um it i i i i love i love those little touches and i think the the effects team that deneg the deneg we effects team did a really great job and i know some people with keen eyes and very like very deep and animation backgrounds they'll they'll probably figure out the differences and can point out to it but um but i i think generally it's a really great result that we got that lens seamlessly with the between the different approaches of getting these lonely two-in-ones characters on the screen can you remember approximately we we know with the final length of the movie is the first assembly after you've got plates and all that stuff and then what was the final length of the story real version when you went into production do you remember that? Thank you was around a hundred um a little under i think um the final cut is definitely the shortest version of the maybe that we had in general speaking i also grew up on movies that like are tight-90 i don't have a problem with that i think family movies specifically i don't

35:51need to make a family movie that it's over two hours um the changes in runtime are really just darkening tightening trying to find the the the perfect flow of it my point in in asking the question is kind of the idea that some films i know i talked to a lot of people about the first assembly and the length of it is and many times you're you're at like double the end runtime or you're you know i've cut enough films they almost are always 20% too long 35 30 minutes on a two-hour movie that gets cut out but because you have the opportunity of cutting with this cutting a story boards looking at it in context it's having the uh table read you're able to get a number down that way instead of having it and up after production i see where you what what you what you what you're referring to i i think we had to be more disciplined there it's just not that we couldn't

36:53go on set and then completely improvise different timings and things i think having the animatic and having this invisible cast where we predetermined at least the ballpark of what these characters were doing at the time and because it required sometimes rigging special effects rigging on set it's we couldn't deviate too much from the original scene that we set out to shoot so i think that's probably why the assembly sort of landed in the ballpark that's the main reason i think it's just having a clear blueprint yay wiley um to shoot the movie and following having these alphas of our lunitunes characters actions to guide the shoot i think that probably kept us from going to overboard on things that's i think the main reason i never felt like i had to fight the runtime there's there's generally just you go to a test screening and then when people say like okay drags and spots then you look at scenes like okay why does it drag there and then you

37:57try to find the way to do it but um eventually when you get a small minority saying it drags and spots and then you look at the scenes that they um like point at when they say it drags and it's seven different scenes and no one agrees on it and it's just like okay we're fine if obviously if there's ten people that point at the same scene you know you're okay we we've got to tighten that for sure you know i figure out what what ball is people uh i did an interview a couple of years ago with a japanese editor working for a japanese production company and they pre-shot the entire movie and how i figured that out was i said oh well how long was the first assembly compared to what you ended up with they said well it was exactly the same length i'm like i've never heard of that in all my years i've never heard of that and they said oh well it's because we pre-shot the movie with iPhones and substitute actors and they were able to like go oh we don't need this scene and they cut out all those scenes without shooting them with a crew that's an interesting

38:58approach and i um having done both animation and like that reproduction of like having an animatic and looking at the cut and looking at stories at the story and evaluating things i think it's really helpful i i wish more life action movies would do this as well because a lot of the times with when you edit a lot of the time your job is to fix some of them not fixing them but there's story issues that pop up it made it's just even the greatest script i've read it once you visually translated you see things differently it plays differently it's nobody's fault doesn't mean there was a mistake in any way it's just like it's it's an piece of art it lives in breeds and you have to mold it and shape it some of those problems that you've faced in a life action movie that doesn't have a temperature demo shot or an animatic um you'll just run it run it in post and there's also an efficiency thing i'm determined it i i just see i see every movie that i've ever worked on you trim

40:00multiple scenes and 10 15 20 30 minutes out of the movie and if you look at that what how many shoot days that were you could have earned yourself multiple days or more time on the other scenes that actually make the cut so there is a there is an argument we have to do that a bit more but i also understand obviously it's economics and time and all of that but um but yeah i i i'm a big fan of measuring of twice and cutting ones and and it's also really fun for an editor honestly i i think that what's what's beautiful for for animation and and that pre pre this animatic pipeline that happens in an animation much more is that you as an editor you if you have a great collaborator like Dave you can put on many hats and advise the movie in many ways so there are things where i had an idea for a shot and it became a shot i had an idea for a gag and it made it in for example the they was gonna laugh because i never shut up about it but the porky gag at the end of the

41:03daffy scene um it wasn't scripted it was just that daffy is is drawing and um i just felt like we needed a button and i i looked at plates that we had and had an idea and i marked it up with temp voice and i presented it and and they've liked it and it made the movie and when that test screened and i was so scared this was the first time that i like you make it something that is supposed to be comedy um i hope it is and then the audience kind of laughed and i was so relieved because you like obviously you don't want to we don't want it to land with a thought and then you cut your own joke but um it it survived and that was kind of fun um to see that you know we haven't really touched on this and i don't want to go too deep on this it's also why the cancellation kind of hurt quite a bit is this it's so much more than a job you're you're spending you know years of your life and your own creativity and your passion and and all these sensibilities and all that work goes in and so you you're really connected with the the movie when it when it is finished and it getting

42:11erased from an audience for an audience to never be seen it just uh yeah it's it's it wasn't a pleasurable feeling um you know it felt like a breakup of sorts you know that i i didn't have a control over could you explain to people that might not know what happened what happened it's a complicated story but i think we all we all now in hindsight know that um that hollywood is currently in bit of a funk uh due to economic realities that were caused due to the streaming war and um back then it all started with the Warner discovery merger and there was the cancellation of that girl and scubi-doo which i i really want to my heart goes out to scubi-doo because they have not been rescued and that girl has not been rescued we had a happy end but those crews also offered the same fate and the their movies are not coming out right now so my heart goes out to them it was basically um a time of belt tightening corporate belt tightening and um the streaming model was proven to be expensive

43:14and not bringing in necessarily the revenues that were thought and you know i'm not an economist but basically borner at that point changed their um strategy and they just wanted to rely on big budget features like like doing and uh our movie while we're hopefully punching a bubble belt with like this is a 75 million dollar budget it's it's it's sort of mid-range budget for for a studio like one of brothers and spending the spending for p and a is a big is a big ask good you have to spend 30 40 millions in marketing costs to push a movie out and i think there was just at that point with the studio regime change and the merger and and all that restructuring i think that sort of where that decision came to be um it was obviously devastating for us in a way and i'm glad that eventually um catch up stepped in and purchased the distribution rights from um from Warner and um Warner agreed and the movie is now finally coming out we we had good test results

44:18with the audience and the critics are currently obviously um the audiences that have seen it um are agreeing with what we always felt that we had a good movie i'm glad that for everybody involved that audience get to see it now and um it's out there even if it took a few years yeah but it's crazy that that decision was made after the movie was made yeah it was it was finished yeah like web-ramp post-production in July 2023 in London went on a cruise and uh came home to London uh came home to LA and um and yeah the writer strike was just about to be finished and i just figured yeah it's what a time to be alive i got a studio movie coming out in theaters so it's gonna pick up in the spring my career is gonna like explode it's all gonna be great you know and then obviously um we had to pivot a little bit um but yeah it um again i'm i'm just i'm just happy especially also for Dave who my journey was a little over two and a

45:19half years but he developed a script with Sammy before that he he was on this movie for almost you know and he's been he's been fighting the good fight since the cancellation and then repurchasing and now he's he's been very much involved now in in marketing and things like that this movie has been journey of a lifetime for him and covering almost like a decade probably for him you know it's uh it's uh it's uh it's been a long road i didn't realize that the movie was beta or this original script was based on a new york or article did you ever read that yeah that was the first thing um i've read um it's a it's a really funny piece it's such a great idea um of just like uh writing a a courtroom document um like a legal document of a lawsuit and um yes i was written in the 70s i think it's it's it's fairly um it's it's been out there um we actually there's a little easter egg in the movie if the yeah we have a little easter egg of the new york or article um visibly in the film in one of the scenes it's in the check-in scene with cherry and when

46:23Ken um checks in wily into the motel he he at one point gets frustrated with the process that's down on um on a couch and starts reading a magazine and that's the new yorker magazine that actually has the article in it the that it's the cover of the actual new york and magazine that is a great little easter egg thank you for that and thank you for this great conversation it's been so interesting to hear about the very unusual production of a movie that's it for our cut this week thank you so much for listening you could also like to read this interview and see images from carsten's edit suite in the post process plus the trailer and a clip from the film check out for us fx.com slash blog slash aotc for there's a ton of great expert content for filmmakers of all types also my latest part of the cut book conversations with documentary editors volume three is now available on amazon and on roledge.com thanks again to carsten

47:27cavernick for discussing coyote versus acme thanks as always to our partner borris facts to see how their award-winning post production tools can elevate your work low visit borris at fax.com and definitely check out isotope rx and borris affects this full suite of audio tools i'm steve hallfish acme thanks for listening and please tell all the editors and filmmakers that you know did to get more great art of cut interviews every week please subscribe on your favorite podcast app and follow at steve hallfish on your socials