Cutaways and edits
Coming from an agile development background, I’m used to rapidly changing variables and the best of planning not always being appropriate once you get on the ground.
Such is the case with Bonny & Clyde, with many of our early technical production decisions having to be changed once we started to edit the raw footage. The first rule of future projects will be: expect your plans to change, and be prepared to adapt on the spot.
One of these changes is our use of cutaways and edit points. Because we don’t want to interrupt the cast once they’re performing each 15-20 minute take, we don’t reshoot anything for B-roll or alternative angles. For most takes we even use exactly the same framing, so we can intermix different takes depending on the dialog and emotions we wish to use for the episode. We’d originally planned to use two cameras, but decided against it because we had too many other things to concentrate on with such a small crew. Get the process to work, then scale it up later.
We’d always wanted to have as fews cuts as possible, to give the illusion that it is a documentary, shooting as things happen, so we have a standing rule: if the take is funny, let it run without edits for as long as possible.
This means that any time there’s an edit throughout the series, it is usually because we have to for technical reasons, such as:
- Characternuity - In rare cases, a character will say or do something that contradicts the series or character arcs. In most of these it’s usually a really small detail that they’ve forgotten, because the episode in which it was mentioned hadn’t been released yet.
- Corpsing - In a few cases, the improvisors will break out of character and laugh, because the situation is so funny. Quite a few of these are hysterically funny, and it’s unfortunately we’ve been unable to use them. You’ll see some of them later when we start releasing out takes and behind the scenes footage.
- Tension/raised stakes - When we get to within a minute of the 5 minute mark in editing, we start looking for moments when the tension is increased, or the stakes are raised. Stakes are all about increasing how much the characters could lose, or could gain, making the audience more concerned about and for the character. A lovable character in a situation where they’re about to get found out or caught, usually undeservably, is the ideal. The more they struggle the better, and the more they compound the situation themselves the better.
- Interview/back story - Often the interview footage highlights a certain trait or historical fact, which adds to the intensity of the live action. The most obvious to date was when Clyde built up the fact that he’d done all the planning for the initial job with Bonny. This went on over a few episodes, until we finally saw the unclimable wall. Of course we then raised the stakes even more by having the phones stuck over the unclimable wall, and so they couldn’t even stay at the wall, we made a savage dog guard them. However, interview footage is usually only used as cutaways so we can use…
- Live action from different takes - The dialog is improvised, and it changes from take to take, so we end up with funny moments scattered across different takes. Most episodes are thus a mix of different takes, and most edits are for this reason.
It is rare that we use an actual cutaway, establishing shot or similar as a way of editing. In fact we actively try not to do this, for creative reasons.
Of the above issues, we also use quite a bit of audio dubbing to remove characternuity and corpsing.
An example is in episode 6, Kev. When Bonny is talking about Kev being “in tyres”, the video from this take was the best, but the original audio contained some characternuity problems. We already had the dialog about tyres from another take, which was funny, but the rest of that take wasn’t funny enough to use as the video. So we took the “in tyres” dialog from the other take, and dubbed it into this one. Note that Bonny is off camera at the bottom of the stairs when she says it.
However, in the audio take, Kev had already climbed the stairs, so we had to dub in extra footsteps of Kev climbing the stairs (taken from yet another take, which had no dialog), and edit out some audio of him opening his toolboox (from the other take) when he hadn’t actually finished climbing the stairs. Once you know the dubs are there, you can spot them easily enough, but for most people they shouldn’t really notice. If you can’t spot the 5 edits, listen for the sound of a generator in the background, which was in one of the takes, but not the other. The problems with guerrilla filmmaking…