Waist Deep, an urban action thriller released by Rogue Pictures, tackles the question of how far a father would go to save his child. Director and co-screenwriter Vondie Curtis-Hall (Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story, Gridlock'd) says, "To save your child, you would find the adrenaline that allows you to run much faster than you have ever run. That's a universal story, and it's the starting point for our movie. You don't get to see love between a father and son often enough in urban movies."

Editor Teri Shropshire, ACE, and 1st Assistant Editor Kenny Marsten formed the nucleus of the editing team. Waist Deep is Shropshire's second collaboration with Director Vondie Curtis-Hall, following Redemption, which played at the Sundance Film Festival and earned Shropshire an American Cinema Editors (ACE) Eddie Award for Best Edited Motion Picture for Commercial Television. Some of her other feature editing credits include Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Biker Boyz and Eve's Bayou.

Multiple Film Formats
Shropshire notes, "We mixed a lot of formats: 3-perf and 4-perf 35mm film, 16mm and HD video. This was my first film for a digital intermediate finish, so I wanted to make sure that everything went smoothly when it came time to do the DI."

The bulk of the film was shot in the 3-perf Super 35mm format, which gave the filmmakers the most bang for the buck in producing a widescreen finished product after conversion during the digital intermediate process. Many of the nighttime helicopter scenes were shot in high definition. Shropshire continues, "Vondie wanted an interesting way to create transitions, so he came up with the idea of shooting car drive-by scenes from underneath. It turned out that only a 16mm camera was small enough to safely go under the vehicle, which is why we ended up with 16mm as one of our production formats."

Longtime Avid editor Shropshire cut on a Meridien hardware-based Avid Media Composer connected to 1TB of shared storage in an Avid Unity system. Shropshire's assistant editor, Kenny Marsten, used an Avid as well. In total, about 500,000 feet of film was available as raw footage using the Avid 14:1 SD resolution for 24fps film projects. As the first assistant, it was up to Marsten to determine the best way to deal with this mixture of formats.

Marsten explains, "The Meridien Avids won't let you mix film formats and gauges within the same project like Avid Adrenaline systems do, so my solution was to create a separate project for each format type. Within the Avid project, you can open any bin from another project, which allows you to use that 'borrowed' material in your sequences. We would work from our 3-perf project and import 4-perf, 16mm and video elements from there."

Tips for the Cutting Room
Technicolor provided lab services as well as telecine, HD online editing (for preview screenings) and DI finishing for Waist Deep. LaserPacific transferred all dailies-not just "circle takes"-to HDCAM, DVCAM and Avid hard drives for viewing and screening. This workflow posed some challenges for Shropshire. "I'm a firm believer in viewing all the dailies in a screening room. I usually like to watch them twice-once to enjoy and a second pass to take notes. With this film, the sheer volume of footage was a real challenge because I started cutting from the beginning of the production. I'd cut during the day and screen dailies at LaserPacific in the evening. Since this was a 'print all takes' situation, that meant some days had four hours worth of dailies. This made for some really long days."

Many scenes in Waist Deep were shot with multiple cameras. Shropshire points out that Avid's method of grouping clips was a big help in the cutting room. "I'd have Kenny prep a scene by grouping clips or placing multiple angles or different takes onto higher tracks of the timeline, which was a great way to see all the alternatives in sync and compare them."

The team also devised a creative approach to audio. Marsten explains, "Production audio was recorded as Broadcast Wave (BWF) files using a [Zaxcom] Deva recorder. We synched these files in the Avid but used separate partitions for our project audio. When it came time to send the material to sound, it was simply a matter of exporting an OMF file from Avid for the sequences and cloning the audio media to another set of drives, which were delivered with the OMF file." This process ensured the sound editors wouldn't have to recapture any audio files.

"We opted to send the sound department QuickTime movies as a picture reference instead of videotape. In fact, the film was mixed to a QuickTime movie. Rather than take the hours to encode a file from our Avid timeline, we simply ran our Avid video output through a Canopus video-to-FireWire converter. This was connected to my PowerBook, and I used Final Cut Pro to capture the incoming stream for each reel of the film. This was a real-time process, which made it easy to quickly deliver the necessary files.

Shropshire and Marsten confirm that the DI process for Waist Deep -- the first DI for both of them --went better than expected. Rogue Pictures used the HDCAM tapes only to assemble official preview tapes for screenings, not for theatrical release. "As long as I brought each format into its appropriate project on the Meridien, I was able to export my EDLs from my primary project [3-perf] and link it to the 24-frame timecode on the HD master tapes for all formats." From this timecode, LaserPacific was able to cross-reference to the telecine files and matching Keykode to create the release print.

Shropshire adds, "We were fortunate that all our efforts to be meticulous worked. There were no mistakes in the Avid output that was used for DI. The worst case was that a few clips had slipped sync by one frame, which is very minor and totally correctable in the DI stage. Not only was it a big benefit to have the same post facility for all the tasks, but we ended up having the same colorist, Tim Vincent, for both the dailies and the DI timing. Since Tim had done the dailies, he already knew the visual language we were going for, so we didn't have to start from scratch with someone new to the film."

Post on the Fast Track
Waist Deep had a very tight post schedule. Shooting started in August 2005 and production wrapped at the end of September. Shropshire points out that her first full assembly of the film was completed four weeks after the production had wrapped. She then had just three weeks with the director before the film was screened for producers.

Shropshire explains, "I like to make a cut as tight as possible before showing it to someone. I'd have to call this first version a 'director's cut in progress.' Vondie and I had taken at least a pass through all the scenes by this time, but because we were on an accelerated post schedule, he was okay in showing this without pushing for any sort of official 'director's cut' first. We locked the film by Christmas 2005 and had the first official preview screenings on Jan. 10. The final lock was Feb. 3, after both previews."

Shropshire has a good rapport with Marsten, even to the point of letting Marsten do the preliminary cut on a few of the simpler scenes. "People lament that the loss of hands-on film cutting means the loss of that journeyman sense of training for new editors," says Shropshire. "I think that with the new nonlinear systems like Avid, you have to work harder to find ways to include and train the next generation of editors. In this case, the volume of work, the mixture of formats and the concern about an accurate output for DI made me glad that Kenny was instrumental in finding ways to make all of this work."

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