Editor Sloane Klevin, a commercials/branded content mainstay and partner at Union Editorial, has had eventful excursions into long-form fare as most recently evidenced on the awards show circuit with her first career primetime Emmy Award for editing (SHOOTonline, 9/20/13) coming for the Alex Gibney-directed documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God (HBO), which went on this month to also earn a Peabody Award.
Indeed Klevin’s collaborative bond with Gibney on documentaries has been fruitful, most notably with the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. While most of Klevin’s feature-length work in recent years has been in the documentary discipline, she now marks her return to the narrative movie arena, having teamed with Union Editorial colleague Marco Perez to edit X/Y, which makes its world premiere at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival as part of the World Narrative Feature Competition.
Written and directed by Ryan Piers Williams, X/Y is a character-driven drama centered on four restless New Yorkers and their shifting sexual and romantic relationships as they search for a sense of intimacy and self-identity. The cast includes Williams, America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn and Melonie Diaz. Ferrera brought Klevin into the project. Klevin had cut the Patricia Cardoso-directed Real Women Have Curves (2002) which starred Ferrera.
“Back then, when I first worked with America, she was 17,” recalled Klevin. “Now she’s turning 30 and married—to this awesome independent writer/director Ryan Piers Williams. America and I have kept in touch. We were together on a Sundance jury in 2011. She has worked with her husband on several projects and starred in and produced X/Y. She got their actor friends together and made this on a budget so tight that a string of independent editors worked on it for a little bit but left to take more of a paying gig. Ryan got the film to a first assembly and America contacted me, saying that they needed someone to get the film into shape. I hadn’t done a narrative film in a long time and I liked this story. The film has an amazing style and energy, capturing something about New York life that I haven’t seen captured before.”
Still, while she liked the project, Klevin with her schedule commitments could only spare a three-week window to work on X/Y. Her solution was to bring Union Editorial partner/editor Marco Perez into the mix. “He saw in it what I saw in it so we decided to do this ‘Exquisite Corpse’ experiment,” said Klevin, referring to the method whereby one collaborator adds to the work of another, building on the contributions of the preceding person. In word game parlance, it’s akin to one person finishing someone else’s sentence.
The “Corpse” approach breathed life into X/Y editorially. “My strength is writing and structure,” assessed Klevin. “I cut 30 minutes out of the film, kind of laying out the big picture structure. Then Marco came in. He’s super visual and a real meticulous artist. He did all the fine cutting over the next four weeks and locked picture with Ryan. It was a great process. It was healthy for me to hand it off to a fresh set of eyes in Marco…Marco and I have so much respect for each other as editors, and have so much love for cinema, that we could edit X/Y without being territorial. I couldn’t wait to hand it off to see what he would do. And he couldn’t wait to show me what he did.”
Klevin meanwhile has been active in the ad arena with a Pandora campaign directed by Jaci Judelson of HSI, Weight Watchers spots directed by Jim Sheridan via Moxie Pictures, and a short for GQ directed by Lauren Greenfield of Chelsea.
At press time, Klevin was in the midst of her first documentary not directed by Gibney. She wasn’t at liberty to discuss details of the project which is being directed by Jamey Phillips and produced by Anonymous Content.
Klevin’s editing compatriot on X/Y, Perez, was in Italy at press time and unavailable for comment. “Marco is a rare breed,” said Klevin. “He cuts commercials but also understands how to edit a feature. Often you get commercial editors who don’t translate well into feature-length films. He naturally can edit, and works tirelessly. He’s a true artist.”
Every Secret Thing
Andrew Geary of Company 3 has served as DI colorist on three films in this year’s Tribeca lineup: Gabriel, directed and written by Lou Howe; This Time Next Year, a documentary directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman; and Every Secret Thing directed by Amy Berg.
Gabriel stars Roru Culkin in the title role as a vulnerable and confused teenager longing for stability and happiness, His pursuit of an ex-girlfriend is desperate and obsessive, forcing him to battle his inner demons. This Time Next Year chronicles one community’s story of what it takes to rebuild in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. And Every Secret Thing is very dark in subject—young girls kill a baby, spend years in jail, get out and soon after, another baby disappears. Two detectives are called in to investigate the case in a community where seemingly everyone has a secret. The ensemble cast includes Elizabeth Banks, Diane Lane, Dakota Fanning and Nate Parker.
“The best color is the color you never see,” said Geary who finds color grading gratifying, particularly work that is subtle, almost subliminal at times, yielding treatments of the image that the viewer feels without necessarily knowing what role grading had on the piece. That approach dovetails well with Every Secret Thing for which Geary was DI colorist and Scot Starbuck the dailies colorist.
Geary credited cinematographer Rob Hardy for his work on Every Secret Thing. “Any time you get a film that’s well shot, that’s ideal for a colorist. You’re not fighting the footage. You’re able to go with what’s there, to enhance it.”
Geary worked primarily with Hardy—as well as director Berg—to set an overall tone that helps convey the seriousness of what’s unfolding in Every Secret Thing even during very early, seemingly upbeat scenes.
They worked out different looks to help orient the audience to several different locations with an overall look that at the same time helps to unify the film as a whole. “We had a lot of contrast but nothing was overly contrasted. That allowed the contrast to flow from being sunny outside to low light scenes inside.”
Geary broke into the post community eight years ago at Company 3. “My first job out of college was here. I started running wires with the engineering department. As I came up, the transition from the old telecine workflow was taking shape. Having film scanned, DI workflows emerging, working on scanners, conforming commercials. I learned a lot as an assistant and then moved into being a colorist—I’ve been officially a DI colorist for a year and a half but was doing this work before that. I helped fill in on projects prior to formally becoming a colorist.”
Geary came up the ranks assisting on spots for colorist Tim Masick, and then features as an assistant to colorist Tom Poole. Now as a full-fledged DI colorist, Geary has arrived on the festival scene. Besides three films at Tribeca, he worked on a trio of pictures at this year’s Sundance Fest, serving as DI colorist on War Story directed by Mark Jackson, and The Skeleton Twins directed by Craig Johnson; and dailies and DI colorist on The Better Angels directed by A.J. Edwards.
