KPOP Demon Hunters

Hello, and welcome to the Art of the Cut podcast brought to you in partnership with Boris

of Facts.

I'm Steve Hallfish, A.C.E., I'm working documentary feature and TV editor.

For over a decade I've interviewed more than 550 of the world's best editors, welcome

to episode 12 of season 12.

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Nathan Shaw about his ace and Annie winning editing

of the Oscar winning Sony Pictures Best Animated Film K-Pop Demon Hunters, currently available

on Netflix.

Nathan's other work includes Overwatch, Origin Stories, World of Warcraft, Harbingers,

and additional editing on penguins of Madagascar among many other projects.

Today's discussion includes how the movie itself rejects ideas that don't work for it,

how animation sometimes has intercutting that isn't scripted and finding the right spots

to take the foot off the gas pedal for just a moment, before we hop into our discussion

with Nathan a brief thank you to our sponsor Boris of Facts.

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And now Nathan Shaw discusses his Ace Eddie and Annie Award-winning editing of the Oscar

winning best animated film, K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Congratulations on your Ace win, that's exciting, and an Annie, correct?

Yeah, back to back, same place, six days apart.

That's awesome.

I want to talk about some specific locations, but what I really want to get at is the overall

ideas about editing or editing animation.

So one of the first ones is the Dun Dun Dun, I don't know, every song is actually called.

I just have to kind of make them up.

So that was how it's done.

How it's done.

So how it's done, just talk about not only do you have to kind of manufacture the pace

of the editing, which is kind of anime-paced, super exciting action-packed, but you're

also controlling the pace of what happens inside of each individual shot.

Exactly, yeah.

Before we had that final song, you know, we had a demo that was close to the same tempo

as the finished song, and that was actually one of the first sequences I had worked on.

It wasn't the very first, but it was definitely, I think, in the top five or six.

And so what usually happens in animation, just to break it all down, is that, you know,

the average is to blank canvas when we start, and then a storyboard artist will, the directors

will basically pitch them a sequence of the movie, in this case, being how it's done

or the airplane sequence.

The storyboard artist will draw just in Photoshop, black and white storyboards, and so for that

sequence, we had so many different revisions and so many different ways we were going to

start it and stuff like that.

There's thousands of storyboards that I had to cut, and so then within each individual

shot, there could be, depending on how long the shot is, there could be up to 10 to 16

storyboards within that one shot.

And so we're talking about storyboards that are on-screen for sometimes less than two

or three frames.

You know, in a slower sequence where they're just talking, you know, a hold on a board

for a second or two-ever little dialogue is, but in such a jam-packed high tempo and

high-paced sequence like the airplane fight, getting all the way down to stage, it was

just frenetic cutting, you know, just crazy amounts of little tiny cuts within all those

shots.

Editing a sequence like that was super fun and a huge challenge because not only was it

an action sequence, it was also a big musical number where they're changing locations many

times.

You know, they start on the plane, then they're falling through the sky, then they get

down to the stage, and you're learning the story of these girls and seeing them fight

demons for the first time.

One of the hardest things to do when cutting music, especially in animation, is letting

time within the music for storyboards.

Whether that be an extended instrumental bridge or something like that, it's just really,

really fine-tuning how to make sure it's not just a music video type of thing that we're

actually getting through the story.

Finding those pockets of space to have dialogue within a song was very, very challenging,

not just for that one, but for all the songs in general.

Did you find yourself doing music editing to be able to open up those?

Yeah, one hundred percent.

One of the best things that I had on this feature was an in-house sound editor, Orrin

Yaakobi.

It was great because once we were done with the demo and we'd actually started getting

first couple of versions of what the song was going to be, because none of these songs

that you're in the movie were done before the movie started.

We had some demos, and so the entire time we were changing the story, the songs would

also have to change in vice versa, so having Orrin in-house was great because what that

managed to do was like, I would have my cut and avid that was, you know, all right, we're

good for the moment, we're going to begin the latest version of the song in a couple

days.

Orrin would then get it, he'd bring it in, he'd compare it to my current cut and be

like, hey, it's either longer or shorter in these places, and we'd work together and

he'd be like, hey, the song is 50 frames longer in this one section of this part of the

song.

Would you prefer I take away from here or add to there?

And so usually I would say, oh, I'd just send it back to me with black spaces where the

new parts of the song are, and then I would cut it together and then I'd have to be

like, well, hey, what's you guys added in the music?

It's kind of breaking up this dialogue we need in this section.

And so we either have to move all this dialogue to a later part, which might change all the

choreography and how we've got from A to B to C to D, or you guys might not be able to

extend the song that much, you know?

So it was a very back and forth effort between the directors myself, everyone on the music

team and the music editors and our music producers and everybody.

So it was never just, here's the song, make it work, it was always just back and forth

constantly.

Because, you know, the entire time we're making these movies as well, we have to have audience

screenings and, you know, there's executive notes and stuff like that.

And so if there's also something just not working with the movie, we have to pivot and

try to change that, which then can in turn start this whole process over and over again.

It was like, well, now we have to reconceive what they're saying or what their motivations

are in the scene or the information we need to get across to the audience.

And now because we had to change that, maybe now what they're singing, the actual lyrics

to the songs don't really line up with that either.

And so, you know, it was just constantly going back and forth and back and forth.

So everything was just microscopic to make sure every detail was hitting when it could

at the right point, at the pace we wanted it to.

It was a lot of fun, but it was definitely one of the biggest challenges I've ever done

in my career.

With a movie with this much action and pace to it, you've definitely found places to create

some dynamics of both volume and speed.

Genu, the main villain, Demon, when he arrives, the pace changes.

You've come out of this crazy how it's done music piece and now you're coming into for

a moment, a little breath.

Exactly.

And, you know, that was something that the director's, Chris and Maggie, I talked to them a lot

about.

I was like, hey, we are explosive off the bat in this movie.

We can't always be at 11, you know.

There's can't always go to 11.

And we're like, all right, well, we've just done this amazing opening.

We know what the girls are.

We know what they do.

The audience needs a break because so much of this movie is quick and high action and

high pace and quick snappy dialogue that I was always very careful to make sure that

we weren't exhausting the audience.

That scene moved around a couple times.

We tried it in a couple different locations, but the thing about Kpop was when we would

try things, the movie would reject them.

If we tried to move a sequence, the movie would be like, no, it doesn't feel good there.

We'd know right away.

We'd all kind of look at each other.

I'd turn around to my chair and be like, when the movie rejected it, did it reject it

with the voice of the main demon guy?

It was.

It was, it was, it was, he actually came through and, you know, we heard that in our heads

and we all got to be sad.

We cannot do this.

Exactly.

They're like, no.

I don't dare you.

So you're saying that the movie was rejecting things when you tried to move them?

Yeah.

And we had all the Sajja boys and Guima, you know, the main, main villain to introduce.

It just made sense when we needed to take breaks.

We would fill it in the edit room.

We'd be like, okay, am I getting lost in action fatigue?

Am I getting lost in dialogue fatigue?

Am I confused about who this is or what's going on?

And so I'm really proud of our real one.

I think the, the last shot in real one is when Rumi's on the roof and she's lost her voice

and she hits the roof and the Hanmoon kind of spreads.

And I really think we set up everything really well throughout real one and, you know,

we changed stuff all the time, but having that sequence there, it's also a funny sequence,

you know, like there's a lot of good gags under stuff like that.

We had some humor with the girls eating and some other places up to them and, you know,

it was a good time and everything, but it's always nice when you can kind of sit and

land a joke and have the audience kind of laugh.

And if they're laughing, they don't miss a line of dialogue and having something nice

and slow, which is great.

But it was also a great just position between the two worlds.

You saw how dark and slow and just not fun world that these demons live in compared

to all the bombastic energy and lights and colors you see of the girls' world.

So it really helped having them back to back like that.

You really got the differences between, you know, the Sajiboy's and Huntrix.

Also in that sequence, there's a really quick flashback as Gina remembers his family.

Talk to me about deciding how long that flashback should be because it's short.

It's very short and a lot of the things in this movie are very short.

So if you blink, you miss them.

And for me, I really don't like to give away that much to the audience.

I always want the audience to be asking questions.

And so having a flashback that's so short like that, people are just like, oh, I wonder

who that was, you know, it's not a flashback and saying like, oh, hey, here's Gina's

mom and his sister and all this kind of stuff that happened because we're also doing that

later down the road, you know, he's about to give his own backstory.

So it kind of just act as, you know, kind of like a flashback appetizer.

It's kind of like, hey, more information will be coming, but you don't get to know what

it is right now.

Maybe we have so much information and, you know, unless you come from Korea or Korean

lineage or Korean background or anything like that, most people aren't going to know

a lot of the history of this kind of stuff.

And so when we do go into more heavy Korean folklore, I always wanted to make sure that

people had time to really ingest it and ways to keep the audience interested is always

having to mask questions instead of someone saying, oh, okay, now we're here now.

Okay.

Now I know this information.

Okay.

So to me, that's kind of a pace killer when you're in the middle of a sequence.

And so just having a little woof, woof, oh, whoa, wait, there's more, oh, wait, I got

to go back to this now.

And then your brain remembers what they saw later without having to like sit down and

process a bunch of stuff while all this other new information on screen is still coming

at you at the same time.

I watched the film twice.

I watched the first time and I didn't, when I was making my notes, I didn't have that

flashback mention.

And then I watched it the second time.

I'm like, oh, there's a little flashback that looks like all the flashbacks that are

later, like you said, you're subconsciously remembering, oh, that's what that little

flash was earlier.

In storyboards, how do you indicate some of the big fast, snap zoom type moves like in

the golden song?

A lot of effects in avid.

In storyboards, we do so much comping with the tools that we have in avid, you know, we

will use every tool that we can, basically, you know, animate, picture and picture, three

warp, everything just to give as much dynamic camera moves as I can and even slow cameras.

Like when you're cutting storyboards and you're just on a, maybe two different boards of

someone acting, like very like solemnly or sadly or intently, if you're just on that

board for a couple seconds, the dialogue's interesting, but it's amazing what a very,

very small push-in will do when you just have storyboards and nothing else is moving to

really impact the emotionality of the sequence.

And so anytime I think there should be a camera move that I'm able to accomplish in avid,

I will always put it on the storyboards just because I wanted to get as close as I can

do it before production takes it over and we actually have the, you know, the 3D spaces

and the actual cameras moving around because you know, it's all feel and when you have

the storyboards, we can draw a motion on the storyboards, but anything else, you know,

they're obviously not in color, they're not animated, stuff like that.

So anything that I can do on my end to push the emotionality, I always try to do that

kind of stuff.

And, you know, it's not just camera moves, it can be simple stuff like making like vignettes

on the flashback or doing those little white flashes when they have flashbacks or if a

sequence is really going crazy like when she's on stage and, you know, the whole entire

world Caesar for who she really is, you know, adding inverted colored panels to make it

more crazy, you know, and stuff like this.

So anything that I can, that avid has that lets me enhance panels in any way, I always

do that.

And some of the storyboard layers we have are just like eight layers in the avid of crazy

stuff.

My team needs to be very, very technical and know all the features that avid has to offer

because if I assign out a task to one of my other editors, I'm like, oh yeah, do this,

this and this.

They know the kind of way I work and they're all very good editors as well and use all

the same tricks.

We have that same type of camera language and things throughout every sequence.

So one sequence wouldn't just play kind of flat and the other one has all these bells

and whistles in it.

We always try to make sure everything has what it needs.

So the whole movie kind of looks the same as well.

I mean, obviously most sequences are drawn by different storyboard artists, but either

way, the feel of the editing and the way we do things, you know, I like to keep it consistent

across the entire movie.

If a few small things don't feel right, a lot of people would be like, it was good, but

something just felt a little off.

So, you know, I really like to have consistent editing language throughout the whole thing.

That's interesting.

I just didn't interview with Hopper's editor.

He sent me a bunch of the storyboards from Hopper's and some of them looked very different

from different artists.

Does that throw you when you're looking at very different storyboards?

For me, no, just because I've been doing it for so long, it's kind of like when I open

a sequence, I just know who drew it.

These are Steven Neriboards or these are Alex Boards or these are Maggie Boards, you know,

or something like that.

And so the one thing we tried to avoid is that we don't want to switch between different

storyboard artists or drawing styles within a sequence because sometimes that's really

hard for the audience and not just the audience.

Sometimes it's really hard for just a lot of people to be like, hey, we're watching the

characters that are on model, but they're drawn in this style and then all of a sudden

for a couple of panels, they all switch to different things.

And that's really jarring and, you know, one of the most amazing abilities I've seen

throughout my career is story artists who can draw at other people's styles, you know,

because a lot of times these storyboard artists aren't on the film for the entire time,

like the head of story is and maybe a couple others would be, so if we have a big sequence

that's drawn by one and then we insert a 22nd part of it from someone whose style is

completely different, maybe that'll work because it's such a long section, but if you're

just switching from every other shot to different styles of drawing, we really try to avoid

that, just so at least within the sequence it's consistently drawn in one kind of way, you

know, so.

We're talking about the differences between regular editors and animation editors, and one

of the differences is, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong or in your opinion, is when

I get live action stuff, if I've got two scenes, I might decide after they've been shot

to intercut them.

But for you, you're choosing to intercut before they get shot, essentially, right?

Yes and no, I'll get a sequence, spending if I do the first pass on it or one of my associates

does the first pass on it, you know, we'll cut it together, and a lot of the times we

just review these sequences on their own, because we're building them one by one, and then

occasionally we'll be like, hey, do we have act one?

And we watch act one, hey, can we watch act three?

Hey, when can we string the movie together?

And so sometimes sequences that are written or boarded like, hey, and then this is going

to intercut, we say, okay, but a lot of the intercutting will always happen in the edit

room.

It's like, hey, we're here, and we're kind of like, you know what, this sequence is good,

but it's just kind of slow, but everything that we have in it, we need to have happen.

So then we're like, well, what if we intercut it with this sequence, you know, and then

that way it's the same amount of action for both, but on their own, they're not that

great.

But if we intercut them and maybe cut it to like, they're actually talking to each other

in a different sequence or something, that's a really fun way to do it.

And I mean, one of the things that always happens the most is you could write your movie and

have all your sequences in order, one through whatever, but that never happens to an animated

movie, you know, we go from sequence 100 to 400 to 300 to 500, 600, 700, 800 to 1200, then

back to 900, like we were always rearranging or writing new sequences.

And so if you looked at it on paper, you're kind of like, oh my god, who came up with

this plan, you know, it doesn't always, it doesn't look very cohesive, but it's all based

on the story and how it feels.

And so, and a lot of the times I will be in the pitches where the director's pitch back

to the storyboard artist and the storyboard artist will then in turn pitch back to the directors

and they'll get notes and everything.

There's a couple of rounds of that before he even comes to edit.

So I'm already seeing what they're doing and then I will bring up to the directors in

the meeting.

If there's an opportunity where I think we might need to intercut or do something like

that, be like, hey, you know, just watching their pitch back.

Maybe if we did this and this, what do you guys think?

And, you know, there's two routes they go after that, they're like, well, let's get everything

they've done into edit first and let's try to edit.

Or if they're like, oh my god, you're right, that's a great idea.

Why the storyboard artist is still boarding that sequence and they're able to, hey, can

you also draw these insert shots or whatever we need?

The term on my current film that everybody uses, you know, it's always just wet cement,

you know, it's never actually dry.

These things are just always, always evolving and always changing.

And it's not just in storyboards.

Once I get it into production and have previous or what we call sandbox or layout, when you

actually get the, you know, 3D environments with real quotation marks, camera language,

like I can do a whip pan in three frames in storyboards, but, you know, when we're actually

in the model that's been built, that might take eight frames or something.

And so I do a lot of constant adjusting of time and spaces, once we actually start to

get the shots in production and then even in animation, I'll still be tweaking things

because the layout might have had a certain length, but then in animation, they're like,

if it's a fight sequence, they're like, we're actually going to have her jump off this

and then this and then just jump off a frame.

And so it's like, all right, so I'll extend that shot or sometimes I'll trim that shot.

And then sometimes animation will want to extend a shot, but I'll have to tell them

no, which I hate doing because it's like, well, it's not based on the length of the shot

or the action in the shot where we're cutting.

It's based on the dialogue, you know, is what we're cutting.

And so in those instances, I would say, hey, if this is a dialogue every scene, you're

not going to get a lot of extensions unless there's like a natural break for us to do

something that the animation would need to be extended for.

So it's usually in action sequences and stuff like that where shots really get pushed

and pulled all throughout the pipeline all the way until lighting.

But when that's really, really, you know, on top of each other dialogue, I'm usually

very, very protected over the cut because the dialogue is driving the cutting and not

the action type of situation.

And so there's just, it's just like I said, it's always what cement, it's always moving

through all the departments and we're never really done until they say, hey, you have

to be done.

On Jonah, they had the classic sign over the main producer's door that said, no film is

ever completed.

It's just abandoned.

Yeah, that's very true.

I mean, if we'd still be working on it, if we could probably.

I started talking about intercutting.

One of the specific examples that I saw was when Rumi is talking about her patterns and

there's a flashback to a talk she had with kind of her guardian.

One of the hardest things was Selene in the movie, you know, and knowing Rumi's history

about what happened to her mom, who her dad was.

And Selene was her aunt or...

Yeah, Selene was not a blood aunt.

Selene was in a band called the Sunlight Sisters, which was like the prior iteration of

Huntrix, more like a 90s type of version of it.

Basically, she was Rumi's mom's best friend in the group or whatever and became her guardian

after Rumi's mom was no longer in the picture.

We had a lot of sequences where we tried to give more to Selene's story and make her more

involved in many different ways in the beginning and the middle and the end and it goes back

to what I mentioned earlier, like the movie would just reject it.

It would just seem like, hey, we're just trying to like, you know, really wedges us in here

and it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the movie and it's a lot of information

that is good information to know about the characters, but it wasn't ever really necessary

for the story we were telling right now.

And so the good thing about that is, you know, there is a lot more story to tell if we make

more of these, but it was just really hard to figure out how much they actually needed

to know.

So when we decided upon that flashback, we just needed to make it a little, a little

more about Rumi and really one note, Selene.

Like she was very much just like, hey, nothing can change until your patterns are gone.

That is your only goal in life.

Anytime we really tried to make her more than that, we were having to add more and more

and more to the movie and that our runtime would get too long or then we'd be like, wait,

we kind of lost focus of what we were doing here and stuff like that.

And so at the very beginning of the movie, you know, the way we do some of the exposition

is kind of do it really fast like her mom died when she was young, but Selene who was

a sunlight sister with her mom raised her, you know, and made her this superstar.

And so we got to just give you the only bits of information you really, really need

to know.

But it really helped having Selene be so stern because anytime we needed to remember

right, Rumi was kind of trying so hard no matter what it took is because it was this

one thing that was just burned into her brains and nothing can change until your patterns

are gone.

And so when we finally realized that that's all we really needed, we're like, all right,

well let's make the flashback just more about Rumi focused what she's feeling and just

keep Selene the minimum amount of Selene we needed because a lot of the stuff we had

was really great.

It was really cool and it was fun and it really expanded her story and their story.

But again, there just wasn't time and the movie didn't need it.

I've talked to many people about the misconception that editors, your job is to leave the bad

stuff on the cutting room floor, but so often you're leaving the good stuff on the cutting

room floor.

Oh man, I can't tell you how many times I was just absolutely in love with a sequence

or a part of a sequence.

And then come in and be like, hey, we're cutting that entire sequence.

And I'll be like, why?

And they're like, because this, this, this.

And I was like, that makes sense.

Okay.

There goes weeks, months, however long I've been working on it, my team just gone.

But it's never gone because then four months later, they might be like, I really missed

that thing we had and I'm like, let's watch it.

So I pulled it up and I was like, it was really great on its own, but here's why it wasn't

working.

But here's why I think we could take maybe what it was doing and use that somewhere else.

So many of our edit sessions, I would play them stuff and at least half of them would

always turn into just brainstorming and story meetings and just really trying to figure

out what we wanted to do because we were moving in such a fast pace because we also worked

through two strikes, you know, the writer's strike and the actor's strike.

And so when we were finally able to have writers and actors again, we were running out of time.

So when we liked an idea, we wanted to make sure it was fully thought out and we were

like, okay, here's the idea.

And then Chris or Maggie or both of them, one of them would go off and they'll like try

to write something that night and come back and I'd roughly throw an edit together and

like, here's part of this, here's part of this with a chiron that's just text on it that

says, awesome roomy thing happens here, you know, and then really roughly skeleton it

out to be like, all right, this is what we need.

Now we need to fill in the gaps and see if this will work.

So we try to do it really roughly quickly just to see like, okay, is this worth trying?

Is this not worth trying?

There was a couple really, really big sequences that we had for a long time that they were

fun on their own and someone was really great that everybody loved.

That was a really hard one to cut.

But again, as an editor, nothing sacred to me.

I'm like, yeah, well, that doesn't work.

We don't want it.

See you later.

Maybe you'll come back.

Maybe I'll see you again one day, but probably not.

The other thing you mentioned was the pace of the dialogue, how you were very protective

of the rhythms that you'd created in dialogue scenes.

And the rhythms in this movie are really tight.

The girls are on top of each other, they're fast paced.

And one of them that I loved was the doctor visit when they go get healer on.

Talk to me about the pace and rhythm of that and just, you know, the doctors like he's

standing back and he's in somebody's face and then he's back.

And how did those scenes evolve through storyboards and into layout and the pace of them?

That was one of the first sequences that went into production.

The opening of that changed a couple times.

I think the very first pass, they were just kind of standing in front of the door.

So when they're standing in front of the office and they go in, that always happened.

But before that happened, we need a little tease that something else is happening subconsciously.

And so they're like, we also have to show that they're mega stars.

So we're like, what if they're walking through the market and they're all hiding famous

people walk around.

And then Zoe, of course, is always very bubbly.

She's like, it's right down that alleyway.

But there's a really quick little flyer in the foreground on the bottom right of your

screen.

And you can hear someone go, who is the soldier boys?

So they've passed out all these flyers to kind of, again, it's a really little subconscious

tease that we just threw in there to kind of be like, hey, again, here are the girls that

are hiding from all the fans, which give them all their energy.

But there's a little tease that, wait, what is this going on?

That's about to be like, hey, the biggest soldier boys thing ever.

So then when we went into Healer Hansoff, as we had already had the dinner sequence, so

we got to see them a little vulnerable and a little slower down.

But the most fun thing about this was that you got to know more about Mira and Zoe as

well as characters, because you already had a good sense of who they were just through

their acting and everything that we built up to them.

But it was really fun to play with camera language and just the personalities based on how

we were cutting because Mira is very strong and guarded.

And so having this doctor just go right up in her face and then she ends up scaring him,

a lot of really fun things.

And the space itself kind of, you know, they're just in this little box and they're all kind

of sitting two or one side, roomies on another and then the doctor is kind of in the middle

and we kind of have this little triangle dichotomy that we're trying to get around.

And so it was just a lot of fun being able to cut in on funny gags or hide Mira behind

magazines or have the doctor just come right in the camera and then pop out.

Because the other thing, we wanted it to be silly, you know, we wanted it to be fun

as well, you know, like we always wanted to make sure that the girls were fun and the

dialogue was fun and that the movie was also just fun at a lot of times.

And so that sequence, I was really glad that that was one of the first ones to go into animation

because that was the first time we really got to see the mannerisms of the girls, which

really, really helped.

It kind of goes back and forth in that sequence to where it's like one of the characters

might motivate a cut or a camera move or something like that, but then the other times

it doesn't happen.

The camera leg, which is very symbolic of the characters himself a little bit, which

is a lot of fun to do.

So it's very hard to do, but I think that sequence overall came out really great just because,

again, it's quick cutting and it's in a small space.

And we also really wanted to kind of make it feel like when you're at a doctor's office,

you know, you're kind of on your guard when you're at a doctor's office.

And so when you're not the one that the doctor's supposed to be examining and then he starts

examining you, it was kind of like, oh god, it made a lot of their kind of insecurities

kind of come out and it was a really fun little sequence to make.

When you've done something in storyboard and edited in a certain way for a pace and then

you get it back and layout, what can change at that point?

Can you go, oh my gosh, I was hoping that this big push into the guys, you know, when

the doctor dives into the camera or at roomy or one of the other characters, the pace

is wrong because the action is wrong.

Exactly.

Everything can still change.

So I will do the same thing to layout that I do to storyboards.

I will put a camera move on top of a camera move that they have built in or all cut out

a character and paste it onto a frame with another character and be like, this needs

to be a two shot or I will, you know, speed ramp the shot to make the camera as fast as

I feel like it needs to feel.

And so that's all still very about being edited because they'll show it to the directors

and then they'll send it to edit and then all massage it.

And we just don't get one shot, especially in the previous sandbox, they can send us

just dozens and dozens and dozens, you know, because it's a lot easier to render through

their tools and that and they're a lot quicker to do.

And so a lot of times the way we boarded it isn't at all the way it looks after it goes

through layout because once we're in the 3D space, we're like, well, now that we're

in here, what if we came through here and went around the corner or, you know, we were

shooting from top down or it gives us all these new options we never had before because

if the storyboards are working and everything is cutting and it's feeling good, we always

know that like, hey, this is great for now, it's doing what it needs to do in story, but

once we get to layout, because a lot of times when these sequences are boarded, the models

aren't done yet, you know?

So, you know, they have a rough idea of what they're going to look like so they can kind

of board in that rough space, but, you know, everything's being made at the same time

at all the times.

And so one of the things that I love about when we get to that phase is all the new options

I get.

How do we get to make it better now?

You know, now that we can move the camera wherever we want, we can do all these things.

This is what the shots are going to look like, you know, once we can run.

I kind of treat the first round just like storyboards, I will cut and I will manipulate

and I will do everything I can that I can do, you know, there's only so many tools like

I'm, it's not like, avid is like Maya and I can go in there and actually change the camera

or anything, but we get it as close as we can and then of course, you know, we'll call

on all those people from all those departments and we'll be like, hey, here's what we're

thinking, here's what we kind of want.

And then we'll walk them through everything they're like, yeah, we combine this, we combine

this.

And then the shots are combined or we make more shots, like nothing is sacred.

It's all wet cement.

As long as it's making it better, we're always going to say like, hey, is this making it

better?

And a lot of things I say a lot of the time is, hey, is this just a lateral change?

Are we just changing it to change it because we can or is what we had better still, you

know, and in animation, a lot of times, we'll have a sequence that's playing great, but

then we'll come up with an idea and then that idea will bloom and do another idea and

because we have that idea, now we're going to do another idea and then we do all this

and then we watch the sequence back when we're like, what did we just watch?

This sequence isn't doing anything that we needed it to do anymore.

Part of my job or whoever remembers is like, well, we did this, but then we had the idea

to add this.

And then since we added that, we kind of like just started adding more and more things

for this one little idea.

If we don't care about this idea anymore, we can just go back to what we had in the sequence

was great, you know, so it's a lot of try and error, try and error, but I always think

of the dominoes, you know, every sequence is a domino.

You need this one to hit this one so they're all going to go down at the end and sometimes

when you take too many things out of a sequence, the domino doesn't hit the next one anymore.

And so then you're at a junction where you have to go like, or we're just going to keep

adding to this to make it work again or should we just go back to what we had and realize

that that was actually working really well, maybe we just need a better line written or

maybe we should just try to find a joking animation or the thing that we're all missing,

I think we'll be able to get, but maybe just not in the storyboard phase, you know, and

so it's just having a lot of conversations about what we actually need, what we don't

need.

Is this better?

Is it lateral?

It's always going to be changing.

So you can't say like, hey, this sequence is done in storyboards.

It's got all the production dialogue.

It's playing great.

This is the movie.

I'm like, no, that's not the movie at all.

It's going to change so many more times before that sequence is done.

So usually once it's approved in animation, the shot will be locked for time at that point.

Because after that, the story, the animation, the camera, and all that is done.

And then what happens after that, it goes simulation effects, lighting, DI, stuff like that.

And you know, a lot of those things are more technical, but there has been many times

where we've got a shot, you know, in lighting, and they're like, oh my god, that looks so

gorgeous on the sunset or whatever we're looking at.

They're like, well, why don't we extend the shot a little bit more, you know, now that

we see it fully rendered, it would be nice to hang for another beat or second.

So it's never off the plate to when I can change the length of a shot until they basically

says, you can't change anything at this point.

I was looking at the soda pop song and that has some editing in it that in a live action

shot, the song would involve dropping frames.

You've probably heard live action editors say like in a fight scene on a punch, they'll

cut out a frame or two or three to make a pop.

And I felt like that was happening in that soda pop song.

Did you do that?

Did you cut frames?

And at what point in the process did you cut them or speed ramps?

Is another one right on a snappy move of a dance choreography?

Oh, let's speed ramp this so that that pops more.

So that was the first sequence I ever cut on a movie.

I think that's why I got the job actually.

I know it was a different song back then.

Again, it was a demo of what became soda pop.

So it was same vibes, pretty much the same tempo, stuff like that.

The biggest difference between what you're saying in live action animation is that if

we decide to speed ramp a shot and layout, someone then has to go do that, you know, actually

make the actual time of the camera that laying.

So everything that's done, like that is actually how it is, there's two different types

of animation throughout the entire movie, you know, sometimes we're animating on ones

where every frame is animated and other times we're animating on twos to where every other

frame is animated to give it more of that kind of pop film stuff like that.

And so with soda pop, it's such a pop song and a lot of K-pop is made at these huge

amazing studios, you know, that produce all this stuff.

And so it's very precise and it's very clean, you know, and everything's perfect.

And so I wanted those cut points just to be as poppy as can be.

And so a lot of the times I was cutting directly on the beat sometimes to make it really pop,

the cut might actually happen a frame before the beat hits.

Just so you actually hear it and see it almost at the same time because you kind of hear

faster than you see a lot of the time being able to do that.

It was almost kind of like the audience was just wanting more and more because every time

they'd get a pop and then the choreography was a whole other thing.

That was a whole another layer we had on top of the animation.

We weren't just animating and doing all these songs.

We had people helping us out with choreography.

We'd have to obviously get that into animation and they'd have to do that as well.

But also when you're animating a choreographed dance and animated movie, you can't just

have them dancing.

You still need to have the emotions and everything they're doing on their face and the subtle

things.

And so cutting in that sequence, it was, it's very different when you're on the boys.

It's very precise.

It's very on the beat for the most of the time and it's very, you see them and you see

that how the audience is reacting to them and then you see the girls and how they're just

like what the hell, who are these people.

We actually stay on that three shot of them for a decent amount of time compared to how

we're cutting throughout the rest of the song.

Again, just to show that hey, they're not having any fun.

Every sequence was very unique in how I would cut it because every sequence had a different

prerogative.

You know, it's like, here's what we need out of this sequence and that one just had to

be ultra precise and everything's happening on the beat and so, but those movements as

well with the choreography, a lot of there when they pop their arms up and stuff, those

are also to the beat.

I had to cut the same way that they were dancing a whole lot of the time and so again, it

was just back and forth.

I was like, we get all types of different cameras and all types of different stuff from animation

to layout and just try a hundred things to see what felt like it should be cutting at

the right post and who we should be cutting to because in that song, pretty much everybody

sings and there's a rap and stuff like this, every sequence was a challenge, especially

the music ones.

Knowing when to really go faster or not, with that one, it kind of ramps up as the song

ramps up at the end because it builds up to the little crescendo at the end.

It was just a lot of departments all working in tandem to make sure that everything felt

right.

Even in animation, the cameras would still change.

Sometimes we would get six to ten camera choices for one shot and so then I'd be like,

well, maybe these need to be six shots and maybe we just cut to six different angles

where this one shot used to be.

Again, it just all goes back to the movie rejecting it.

We would all watch something and we'd all, Chris and Maggie and I would always just be

like, it's not really working or I turn around and we'd be like, shit, that was good.

That was good, always wins.

I was going to ask this question later but you brought up the fact that there was choreography.

If there's choreography and you've got storyboards, how does that work?

The storyboards aren't that animated, you know?

There's only a couple poses per shot and so the choreography for that is kind of close

to the idea of what it is.

So storyboards are always like, hey, is the idea getting through?

Are you feeling what they're supposed to do?

For that, it doesn't have to be an exact science.

Like a lot of the action changes and after storyboards as well, like, well, no, they get

from A to B to C to D and they have to kill this many things or they have to do whatever

but it's really not until layout and animation where we really start blocking out the actual

things that they're going to do.

But for the choreography, we had people in Korea doing the choreography and they would send

back a bunch of stuff they've done and like three different versions of the soda pop

choreography and sometimes what I would even have to do is we'd watch all three and we'd

be like, well, we like the first part of this one and then we like the second part of

that one or maybe we like the third part of that one, you know, these different options

that they would give us and then we'd be like, can you make all those one?

You know?

And so we were just editing everything to try everything all the time.

It wasn't like, hey, here's your choreography, here's three examples of your choreography

and then, you know, we'd give it back and I'd do it again and we'd be like, we really

like that.

We really like this.

And then we'd give that to animation and then that's when they'd have to actually animate

to that.

And so the characters in rough layout are still just kind of roughly blocked to where

they need to be.

They're not doing the full dance and everything.

So we weren't even able to animate those dances until we absolutely loved the choreography.

But I was cutting the choreography into the sequence to make sure that the cutting and the

dancing and everything would still work to give them an idea of where everything was

happening.

It was just a massive collaboration between so many countries and continents to try to

get all this right and it was just constantly changing.

And so no one even knows what the choreography will be.

Plus we have to have the song first, you know, and if the songs are always changing, then

we have to change the choreography so you can see this kind of like this infinity sign

of changes.

When you were getting choreography from Korea, what were you getting video?

It should be filmed on an iPhone or whatever they use.

My assistants would import the footage into the avid.

We would watch it.

It would be literally on, you know, like in a dance studio.

If it was the huntrix, it'd be three people dancing.

We'd have like take one.

Here's what they did.

Take two.

Here's the different thing they did.

Take three.

And we would watch them all in my edit bay and I'd kind of chop them together to the best

parts we liked.

And then when it was the Sasha boys, it was the same thing.

There would be five people on screen and they'd be like, hey, here's one version we came

up with.

Here's another version we came up with.

Here's another version we came up with.

We'd all just kind of watch it and Chris and Maggie would be like, oh, I really like this.

I really like this.

You know, I'm not a dancer, so I didn't have a whole lot of input to do it.

But I would be like, hey, well, if they do this, that would make a really good cut to

this.

If they're doing this, it's really going to make it help cut on this and this.

So I would give my important from how I think certain dance moves might help the cutting

or the pace of the sequence.

You know, it was always just back and forth like we really like this.

We really like this.

Try this.

And then we would send them back those notes and be like, here are the parts we liked.

Can you do this?

Can you do that?

Or, hey, that was great.

You know, this movie had more media in an avid than I've probably ever had in my life,

you know.

So Kira, who's not my associate editor, who was my first assistant editor on this film,

she told me before the eddies that we had just under 62,000 storyboards in the avid.

Wow.

And can you give a shout out to Kira with her last name?

Yeah, Kira, time to go.

Right after Soda Pop is the getting battle ready speed montage.

Can you talk about cutting a montage and how that might have evolved or it's a fast little

flurry of fun edits?

So that's actually one of my favorite things to talk about because it used to be a very,

very, very long sequence.

And it was very James Bondy, very batmany, like they're in their apartment, they go to

their layer, but it was too, it was too a K-pop song, you know.

So they, you know, we're doing a whole lot of fun stuff with nails and makeups and, you

know, outfits and it was very, very fun.

And it was a super fun sequence, but it was long and all it did was get them ready to

go.

I was like, look, we need to cut this.

People will know that they left.

They went home.

They got ready because they say at the end of Soda Pop, let's go get battle ready.

And then we see them ready in the next sequence, and at the time we're like, I'm sure it'll

be fun.

And then we'd be watching it back and we're like, we really want to see them getting ready.

And so we tried however many versions we tried of that sequence.

And then after we cut it there, like we really need something and I was like, all right,

I have an idea.

Come back tomorrow.

I had found the stuff on YouTube of these Korean women practicing like death metal screams.

I went down this whole wormhole of like Korean like metal music at some point.

It was, it was really fun actually.

People must have thought I was crazy on the 405.

And so I kind of mashed together this just really loud Korean death metal song that

was extremely high tempo.

And then I cut over these Korean women doing death metal screams over it.

One of the best things about having orange my music editor there.

I was like, hey, I have this song.

And then at the end, I really want these three huge like snare kicks.

And then just it's really crunchy like fuzzed out distorted power cord over guitar.

And then he opened up this amazing program.

I think it was called splice.

He was like, what note do you want?

What kind of guitar do you want?

What pedals do you want it?

And he could just make that happen.

We kind of created this little 12 second sequence of what it is now.

And I showed it to him and they're like, yep, that's perfect.

That's all we needed.

And that was it.

And so that was one of my, it was one of those fun things because it was just this thing

that I just kind of imagined got it together really quickly just by using what I could.

Having an orange make sure it was musically correct.

And every person got a fun little comedic beat.

And you know, we go out to this crazy kill sages on their nails and the fluorescence and

like, you know, and so it turned out to be this really great little fun sequence.

And again, that's all we needed.

We didn't need this whole long thing of them going into their apartment, getting ready,

done by one, doing all these other gags when you can just kind of get this like rock,

rock metal like badass warrior moment from these girls, which is great because again,

it's a whole different side of the girls you've had it seen before.

So doing the other sequence was more like, oh yeah, this is very in tune to their personalities.

This is what I imagine how they'd be getting ready.

This is what I see in my head.

Oh, it would be so nice.

But no, you just get you know, for 10 seconds and people like, oh my God, that was, that

was awesome.

That was the other really fun thing about this movie is that we could do things like

that.

And it wouldn't upset anything about the world, which was great as well, because again,

you know, Maggie always wanted to keep it silly and fun when we could.

And this just, I think when they saw that, it was just kind of like, oh yeah, we can do

it whatever we want.

This is great.

That's one of my kind of like proudest moments on the movie, so you won an ACE, Eddie,

for this and an Annie.

What do you think people saw in the editing that they felt was worthy of those awards?

Or when you are looking at somebody else's work, what makes you say that's great editing?

I think one thing that I think people probably saw in this movie from an editing standpoint

was the variation of styles, knowing how fast it goes at some point, and then also knowing

how slow it goes at the others.

So I think the variation and really editing to what the movie needed, because I mean,

I edit a hundred different ways in this movie, and the movie needs it.

It's super fast and like those little flashbacks.

You only need them for as long as you need them or the sequence we were just talking about

the Get Ready sequence.

It only needed to be 10 seconds, you know, and at one point it was three minutes.

But then when all things break down like after the concert and we're just sitting with

the girl's backstage, just longer shots, knowing when not to cut is a big thing for me,

especially in animation, because a lot of people think like, it's hard in storyboards

when you're just sitting on a frame that's not nothing's happening, which is why I might

put a little camera move or something like I talked about earlier.

But I hope when people watched it, that they felt the editing when they needed to feel

it, and that they didn't feel it when they weren't supposed to feel it, you know, the

kind of the invisible art of editing.

So I like to think people watched it and be like, oh wow, he has quite a range of editing

and really edited to what the movie needed.

We also just had so much varying degree of situations in our movie.

Given them all feel like one thing with being in a lot of different situations, I think

is a big part of the editor's job to make sure it all feels like the same thing.

And there's kind of two things.

If I noticed the editing, my brand immediately calls out like, oh, I would have held on

that longer or I would have cut there.

And so if I watch a movie and I didn't say any of those things, I'm kind of like, oh,

that was edited really well because I didn't notice it or I did notice it when I needed

to notice it.

That's kind of the ying and yang of editing.

To me, I'm not always like, this is my editing style.

I edit to the story.

You know, one movie I always give an example to of amazing editing and it's a very simple

movie.

It's a live action movie.

It's a John Hughes movie, Uncle Buck.

It's a great movie.

We watch it every year around the holidays and every year I appreciate it more and more

and more.

There's not really any action.

There's not a lot of big camera moves.

There's not a lot of big set pieces.

It's just a movie you sit in.

But the editing of that movie is so precise and so great when you watch it.

I'm just like, see, you don't have to edit like crazy to get your point across.

You can sometimes the simplest thing to do is not to cut or break up simple cuts in

a way that goes along with the dialogue or the story.

And so I never go into a project saying, hey, this is what I do when I edit a film.

I let the film kind of tell me how it needs to be edited.

So.

Let's talk about the bathhouse fight.

It's got great action and inside every single shot.

There's a ton of rhythm to it.

So talk to me about the construction of that originally and then the evolution of that

scene as it went through the phases.

So that was one of the ones sequences where we weren't making a song for ourselves.

We had a needle drop in there that was kind of more rock and rolly just to kind of get

the pace of the music.

And so we knew that one was going to be a huge challenge, action wise and all that kind

of stuff.

We needed roomie and genu fighting or the rest of them were fighting and we come back

and we do all this stuff.

That sequence structurally, we always knew what needed to happen.

We're like, look, they go into the bathhouse, they fight the boys, roomie and genu have

a moment.

Roomie's secret has to be revealed to somebody, to the last person that needs to know.

But we also need to show all these other things that the audience needs to know and story

points.

So the idea of the sequence was always there.

We always kind of knew what it was going to be, but the benefit to not making a song

for that was that we had the option to do as much action, extend shots or cut shots

or do whatever we needed.

And that sequence was one of the biggest collaborations between animation and camera and

choreography.

Some of the animators we have are absolutely amazing.

They will take rough shapes into After Effects or Maya and they'll do camera movements and

they'll pitch to the directors and be like, what if we did this, you know, or a layout

artist would be like, instead of having all these shots, what if we had a big orbiting

camera throughout the entire thing where we saw them all fighting at once instead of

all these quick cuts.

And so that one took a very long, long time to finish because all the action and ideas

people kept coming up with, like kind of one up in the one before it.

And so luckily I had all the freedom in the world to take in all that stuff and we had

all the freedom in the world to trial that stuff because we just knew it was going to be

a needle drops song.

They weren't singing, you know, they were just fighting for once.

So we could really let the fighting just be the fighting and the emotionally between

Rumi and Genu when they're off alone.

And then when Marin Zoey, like, Rumi, we need you, but her arm is showing.

And so we had the opportunity to really just swing for the fences on that one.

If I missed animation days or something, an assistant would bring in a shot that's like

three seconds longer than the shot I had and I'd be like, whoa, whoa, what is going on

with this?

Like, this is crazy extending this.

And then, you know, the directors come in and be like, Oh, no, we're going to do this.

And that's just a send to you because we want parts of that shot, maybe used over here

and over here, see what you can do.

And I'm like, Oh, okay.

If you ever missed a meeting, you'd be out of the loop on that sequence because so much

would happen in one round of animation dailies that then when I would get the shots,

you'd be like, wait, what is happening?

The sequence is broken.

It's not working.

They're like, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to do this.

We're going to do this.

We're going to do this.

And, you know, see if you can make it work and great, you know, and so, and every time

I'd get anything on that sequence, I'd be like, Oh, wow, this is, this is insanely cool

camera work.

At one point, it was getting a little long.

We were like, all right, we've been fighting for a while.

And so, I don't think we ever dialed it back, but we were very conscious of like, let's

not over stare welcome with this.

And but then the best thing was, is that we landed on a joke, you know, like the guy was

like, Hey, this is the men's bathroom.

And then they immediately go to like, Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, they're back out.

And then that joke gave us this great opportunity, then then look through the door and see that

old man.

And then he starts singing soda pop, which is great.

And then he gets eaten by the demon.

And so, you know, we found all these amazing ways just to kind of like remind the audience

of the stakes as we were going.

And you know, and that was the first big showdown between the Sajja boys and the Huntrix,

you know, and we know neither one of them could win, you know, we know it kind of had to

end in a standstill for the rest of the movie because they're about to go into the big

how it take down montage of them winning back and forth.

A lot of people think like, Oh, that's a cool action sequence, but just like all the sequences,

I had so many purposes underneath the hood of what we needed to do storytelling underneath

all the action.

And so every time the action would ramped up, we'd just have to make sure that all those

other pieces and dominoes were still falling into place, but that one was a really fun sequence.

And musically it changes a lot, you know, we go from the needle drop and then we go to more

serious music, you know, score when they're fighting in the sauna, then we go back out

to score, then it ends on the big thing and then it's kind of silent.

One of the things I always wanted to make sure too is that sometimes we had quietness

in the movie, you know, that we always just didn't have music or songs after that.

And so when that song ends, it's pretty quiet because then after that, Genu gets, you

know, sucked back down to the demon world and stuff like that.

And it's a little more somber, you know, and then they go into, they're trying to write

a song and now it's a bad song and they can't figure it out, but then it fix out.

So the music also kind of like represents where they are as a group as well, like,

oh, the sucks, we can't do anything and they're kind of like down on the dumps, you

know.

So congratulations on the acetic congratulations on your Annie and it was wonderful talking

to you.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me.

This was a good time.

I've had talked in this step about a little while, so it's fun to kind of relive some

of these moments.

That's it for out of the cup this week.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd also like to read this interview and see clips, the trailer, timeline screenshots

and other images from the film and the making of the film, check out borrisfx.com slash blog

slash a otc where there's a ton of great expert content for filmmakers of all types.

Also my latest art of the cut book conversations with documentary editors volume three is now

available for preorder on Amazon and will be available next week.

Thanks to Ace Eddie winner Nathan Shaw for talking to us about the Oscar winning best animated

film, K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Thanks also to our partner in borrisfx, see how they can help you on your latest project

head on over to borrisfx.com and check out the entire borrisfx suite, including their audio

tool, CrumplePop.

I'm Steve Hallfish, ACE thanks for listening and please tell all the editors and filmmakers

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