(dramatic music)
(ringing chimes)
- I'm sorry, dad.
It won't happen again.
- Okay.
Where are you, by the way?
- Study group.
- Ah.
Whose house are you at?
- One of my friends in bio.
You haven't met her yet.
It won't happen again.
- Where are you then?
- [Will] That's a different shot, than that.
See, that's a different shot.
- [Sven] Oh, okay.
- [Will] There was a cut on her.
- [Sven] So there was a (mumbles) cut to her, yeah?
- Yeah, there's another cut.
The lighting even changed on her, but you never catch it.
- [Sven] No.
- I'm giving away everything right now.
(dramatic music)
- I'm Margot.
- I haven't been able to reach Margo.
When was the last time you saw her?
- [Female] The study group only went till nine.
- [Sven] How do you cut a thriller?
(intense music)
- I think we're gonna go late.
- [Student] No, she definitely left that night.
- [Sven] How do you keep a firm grip on the narrative?
- Did she mention anything unusual?
Was she acting strange?
(intense music)
- [Actor John] Where are you?
- [Female] She's been transferring funds
for the last six months.
- [Sven] How do you trick the audience,
but give them everything they need
to figure it out for themselves?
- [Female] She had cash in her car.
- We felt bad about everything.
- She was my best friend.
- [Male] Oh, my God.
- [Actor John] You told me she ran away!
(intense music)
- [Male] I didn't know her.
- [Sven] How are you?
- I'm Nick.
- [Sven] In this video, I'm meeting Nick and Will,
editors of the new hit thriller Searching,
that won Sundance, is making $70 million at the box office.
And is now coming to video on demand and streaming.
- [Actor John] I'm calling to report a missing person.
- [Sven] I wanted to find out what it takes
to edit a thriller.
(intense music)
This video is brought to you by Music Vine.
Get six high end music tracks free
by clicking the link in the video description.
(intense music)
- John Cho plays a father who,
when his 16-year-old daughter, Margot, goes missing,
has to try and help find her
with the only he can help with the investigation,
which is looking through her laptop
and her digital and social media life,
and while he's doing that,
he realizes he maybe didn't know her
as well as he thought he did.
- What's up with the FaceTime?
- Oh, I'm glad you asked.
What is wrong with this picture?
- [Margot] I'm about to be in trouble, aren't I?
- [Actor John] Maybe we should keep the trash in your room?
- Yep.
- It's a somewhat conventional detective thriller,
just told in a totally new, bold way.
- [Sven] Yeah.
- You usually don't wanna play with the form
and the genre at the same time.
- Right.
- [Sven] And you're playing with the form, quite a bit.
- A lot. - Yes, yeah, yeah.
- [Sven] What is that form?
- The entire thing takes place on screens,
mostly on computer screens on Margot's laptop.
Which is not necessarily a new concept.
We've seen Open Windows and Unfriended
is the most successful.
- But all of these films, this a little-bit nit-picky,
but they do this thing, where they're kind of afraid
to just cut and to treat the screen, cinematically.
And we would have been too if they hadn't done that first.
(dramatic music)
- [Sven] Let's talk a little bit about the moving
across the screen.
Like you're taking control of the audience eyes.
What's the thinking behind that?
- That's what movies do.
- [Peter] She's good though?
- [Actor John] Yeah, why do you ask?
- [Peter] Making sure you guys
are both talking to each other, both--
- [Will] So do, "don't forget the trash!"
And then we'll go over and grab his line.
- Everything is fine Peter, thanks for asking.
- And that sort of coverage is more, the filmmaker
showing you what you want to see
and presenting it a more cinematic way.
Rather than just following the mouse and just seeing
what David is doing.
- But deep down it's actually the same thinking.
It's like a doorknob and then it turns
and a shadow comes into the room,
and you see a gun in their hand.
It's just trying to cover the scene in the most interesting
way we can.
(dramatic music)
The live action shoot was 16 days, something like that,
but the edit as we said, was pretty well over a year.
So, a lot on the editing side of things.
- This is pretty much what our project looked like.
You can see this is all just one big long nest.
With cut points and then.
- [Sven] Can you explain nest for me?
- So what a nest is, it's basically a compound clip
that you can step into
and then inside this is what it looks like in our nest.
You can isolate each one of these.
For instance, if I turn all these off, you have
the desktop background.
I can turn off, for instance, the weather page there
or the YouTube video.
So basically, the way we constructed this was we would
create everything in a wide, kinda like this:
we highlighted all of our live action footage
in this teal color.
This video is David, right there.
And this video is Peter.
- One thing you'll notice about that actually,
you would think we were doing this in a computer screen.
So we're just dropping the best takes in there.
But if you look at it, it's full of cuts.
- Right, you can see this is where we created
all these glitches.
So we would add freeze frame to parts of it.
And just create that stuttering effect that you get.
- [Sven] Would you use the distortion as a cut point?
- Yeah, occasionally we would, if we needed
to combine takes, or we'd really more use it
as a timing thing.
If we wanted to create more of a pause or if they were
taking too long and we needed to cut some air out.
(bell chimes)
- Aye, I gotta go, but send me that recipe, please.
Thank you.
- Both feeds were actually the actors talking to each other
in real life.
You still wanna do some takes selection, and playing
around with it.
- A lot of times you wouldn't wanna
use the same take anyways.
Maybe Peter's performance is more what we're going for,
but David's performance isn't.
So then, we would have to combine those takes
and then timing would be an issue.
- It won't happen again.
- [Actor John] Where are you then?
- That's a different shot, see that's a different shot.
- [Sven] Oh, okay.
- He's going in slow motion for a while there.
And then he plays back.
Very obvious cut on her right there.
- [Sven] Interesting, so you had to pace it out more.
- Oh yeah, oh yeah.
- [Sven] Now these camera angles, that's not shot
with a webcam right?
- You-- - No.
- [Sven] It's basically a Red or whatever.
- Wait, the live action footage of them?
That's GoPros.
- [Sven] That's GoPros?
- Our DP, Sebastian, really wanted everything
to look super real.
And then we'll add the layer of cinematic on,
in this part of it.
But yeah, that was just GoPros.
(ringtone chimes)
In terms of how we actually broke up the work,
we just divided the movie into 26 sections.
(rings)
Which we later found out is what Pixar does.
- [Sven] Interesting.
- And then we each just took one at time, and by the end
of the movie, we both worked on every section.
So, we kind of filled in for whatever each other's
shortcomings or strengths are, whatever.
- [Sven] What was the dynamic with the director
having two editors?
Were there alliances sometimes?
Or--
- It was always us against them (laughs).
- Originally, we were in a room where there was
a dividing door.
We were constantly maximizing
Aneesh, Sev and Natalie's time, because, while they
were working with somebody else, one of the other editors
was implementing their notes.
- [Sven] Before we move on to the next stage,
I wanna take a brief moment to thank Music Vine
for their support.
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Music Vine in general, has instituted a new and flexible
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And the license starts at eight bucks per track.
Now back to Nick and Will.
- All the graphics were rough.
We came in we cut on Premiere and we picture locked.
We brought everything using Dynamic Link
over to After Effects.
You know, half of this process was actually in After Effects
it wasn't just in Premiere.
So editing took six months.
Then the After Effects portion took about six months.
You can see now, we've replaced all of these
with Illustrator files.
So the graphics are much crisper.
If we go to, for instance, this shot, which we saw earlier,
where it was all messy, now it's nice and clean.
- [Sven] Okay, so let's make a point of that.
You did not screen-record on Mac at all.
You decided--
- We started that way when we were first roughing out
what the movie would be.
But, the final movie is completely built from scratch.
- [Sven] Okay.
- Yeah, that's why it took so long.
- [Sven] And it was because of quality
or because of control?
- Because you can see, yeah, because of control
we had to replace all of the copy, all of the text,
all of the thumbnail images.
All that stuff.
So we would have been doing a lot of manual work anyways.
- I have a good control thing actually.
What David's about to do here..
Sorry, Nick, he's about to right-click this.
He's gonna go to the thing that says,
Hide From Search Results.
We made that up.
That's not real.
- [Sven] For a split second I was like what?
You can do that (laughs).
- [Nick] I'm not sure why you would ever want
to do that actually.
- But it works in the movie.
Most people don't really question it.
- [Sven] That's awesome.
- So this is what a typical After Effects project
would look like for 'Search'.
And it's broken down by all the 26 sections.
So if I were to go into this, pre-comp.
This is--
(laughs)
This is what a pre-comp would look like.
- [Will] And they go deep.
They go many levels deep.
- [Nick] And you can see we've replaced all of these
with Illustrator files.
- [Sven] What's the reason of doing these layers
in Illustrator as opposed to Photoshop?
- So Illustrator is vector based, so what that affords
you is the ability to punch in as much as possible.
In Photoshop, when you blew that up, it would be really
distorted, but in Illustrator, you can zoom in
and the lines and everything stay nice and crisp.
- [Sven] I love that we get to see
like he wants to type something
and then he changes his mind?
- A lot of that nice little first person stuff you get
to see, with these computer screen movies.
- I should get back.
- Oh one more thing I--
- Bye dad! - wanted to find out about the final you
took today.
- What's great with computer screen movies is that
you can kinda see these really quiet, intimate moments
of a character alone on a computer.
See this little deeper, emotional part of David's life.
- [Child] Yeah.
- Yeah.
(soft music)
- [Sven] So, how do you edit a thriller?
What does it take to edit a thriller?
- You gotta like thrillers.
- For me what a thriller's about is making sure
that it's never dragging, that the story is streamlined.
And that one thing leads to another.
And that you're keeping the tension, high.
I think the script was already incredible.
And then, what we did in editing was we
just made sure that the plot was always, always
moving forward.
- Did she say where she was going?
- Not really.
- How did she look?
Was she worried?
Did she look scared?
Was she talking--
- Honestly I don't know.
We're not really that close.
- Why did you invite her study group?
- However I think not being afraid of pauses,
I mean this is like, every editor says this,
but not being afraid to let things breathe
when they need to breathe, is very crucial.
Especially when tension is a big part of the story.
I think our first cut was way, way too fast.
And even though our runtime came down, because we cut
unnecessary scenes, every scene individually
probably got a lot longer in the final movie.
- Okay, you were...
You were in her class though.
Did she mention anything unusual going on lately?
Was she acting strange?
- Ah.
- [Sven] Any advice for aspiring editors?
- From a purely functional level, it's probably good
to learn After Effects and stuff like that.
I know editors far along in their career, hate me
for saying that, but that helped us.
- [Sven] Specifically for a thriller, editing,
any advice?
- Be emotional about it.
Think about the actors, not just the software.
And look into their eyes and really feel the takes.
Watch them full screen, don't watch them
in some tiny little window.
And watch movies in theaters.
And get deep into it.
Really focus all your attention onto the performance
their giving, I think.
(soft music)
- [Sven] So what does it feel like to look
at this movie now after the fact?
- Ah--
- [Will] Nothing.
- Yeah.
(laughs)
We've just seen it so many times.
- [Sven] How do you deal with it as an editor,
after cutting it and re-cutting it and re-cutting it.
You're like emotionally dead.
And you still have to make it better.
- Watching it with audiences really helps.
So when we would test it on an audience
and you see their reaction,
you remember your initial feeling.
You really gotta try and hold onto that and trust each
other as a team as well.
Because say there'll be moments that Nick will remember
the emotional core of it, I wouldn't remember
and vice versa.
But I really think watching it with a friend
or an audience is a great way to refresh your mind
about what the scene is trying to do
and what the movie is trying to do.
- [Sven] Getting those mirror neurons fired up again.
- Yeah.
(upbeat music)
- [Sven] I wanna thank Nick and Will
for letting me shadow them, give us a deep dive
into their process.
They also answered a bunch of questions
directly asked by the Patreons of This Guy Edits.
The next question comes from Bryce.
What do you do if you've edited something
a particular way and it's just not working?
- First, you don't try to convince yourself
or anyone else that it's working.
- [Sven] Clara would like to know, what excited you
about editing a screen movie?
You guys were credited as editors and director
of virtual photography.
What is virtual photography exactly?
What is it like to go to Sundance?
And what can you do as an editor when you're
at the festival to get the next gig?
- I feel like we failed at that man.
- Yeah (laughs).
- But it worked out for us anyway.
(laughter)
- So this was our first Sundance.
- [Sven] Check out the answers on patreon.com/thisguyedits.
A big thank you also to Sony, Bazelevs Productions
and especially Alex Anderson who made this happen.
Searching is available now on video on demand and streaming.
And now, also on Blu-ray.
If you've seen the film already, do let me know
in the comments, what you think about the storytelling.
But no spoilers please.
Don't forget to check out Music Vine for your free tracks.
And if you like this video, there's another one
I made with Josh Beall, who cut on House of Cards,
Bloodline and Counterpart.
- [Male] Permission to fire?
- [Actor] Take the shot.
- [J.K.] No, no stop!
(shots)
- There's a lot of stuff going on.
There're different locations of action.
You have up in the balcony, you have down.