Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

Last week, Alec and I went to California to visit with Jason and talk post-production shop. It was a Friday evening and the three of us were sitting in Jason’s editing studio talking about things like multi-angle editing and color grading. Jason generally has a rant about how much better AVID is than FCP because that’s what he uses at work. At home, he uses FCP like the rest of us financially-challenged filmmakers. He was showing us what he’d learned at an Apple presentation about multi-angle editing. They’ve been touting multi-angle editing for a while but I’d never seen it used. He stepped through it and I was excited. He said (and I agreed) that there wasn’t all that much need for it in his type of work.

However, while we were in Zambia, the National Arts Council brought five (5) Native Storytellers in from other regions in the country. All five spoke a different language. There were about 25 children making up the audience. This was definitely NOT a highly-controlled nor highly-choreographed recording session. On top of that, this was the second weekend in Zambia so the student crew were all continuing to build their skills in all of the different pieces of equipment. To maximize our odds, we ran four (4) cameras during the shoot. Two cinematographers were on the storyteller, one was on the audience and one was handheld. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on a different continent. So, next week, I’ll be cutting the Zambian Storytellers using this method. I can hardly wait. If you want to check it out, you will want to read Steve Martin’s well-illustrated and very clear tutorial on Final Cut Pro Multi-Angle editing.