Beach, Bingo, Blackmagic
What do Cartoon Network, Monster Trilogy, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force have in common? Answer: Jay Edwards. He’s a filmmaker in Atlanta with a taste for ’60s style horror movies and a day job as an editor and producer with Turner Broadcasting. Both artistically and financially, Edwards excels by understanding the advantages of desktop video. Just this year it helped him make the jump to directing and producing his own movie.
As an undergrad at Auburn University, Edwards wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do after graduation. He was a public relations major, but when he landed in an old linear edit bay his junior year, he ended up pulling a few all-nighters to finish a class project. The long hours were his own idea, and after getting a full night’s sleep he realized he had found what he loved to do. So he changed his major to mass communications, a catchall title that could lead in many directions. After graduating in 1991, he moved to Atlanta, a burgeoning production center where he climbed the ranks in post production to become a respected editor and producer.
After several years at Turner Broadcasting managing their Avid suites, Edwards went freelance to edit and produce Aqua Teen Hunger Force for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Aqua Teen is a snacker’s answer to Super Size Me, the recent hit documentary that takes aim at McDonald’s and fast food in general. The Hunger Force consists of three animated fast food characters—a shake, a meatball, and a side of fries—who solve crimes and fight arch villain Dr. Weird.
Like many cable stations, Cartoon Network is open to novel approaches to animation. While the upside is originality, the downside is that production frequently begins with a few missteps. “ After about six painful months of editing the Aqua Teen pilot, I helped move the production to a Final Cut Pro™ offline and After Effects online production flow,” says Edwards. “At the time, Avid was very tied to all elements being in TV resolution [720x486] for import, but all the Aqua Teen production elements were oversized Photoshop backgrounds and oversized character QuickTime™ movies. Final Cut enabled us to import our backgrounds at their native resolution [sometimes 3000 pixels wide] with multiple layers intact. We cut our production time in half by switching to Final Cut Pro™.”
The suites that Edwards eventually set up are owned by him and leased to Cartoon Network for the production of Aqua Teen. There are two identical suites comprising Power Mac G5s with 2GBs of RAM, Final Cut Pro 4.5™, Photoshop™, and After Effects™. Storage for both edit bays is a shared 1.3TB Xserve via Fibre Channel. I/O is handled by Blackmagic’s DeckLink card with Techtronix scopes and a Sony broadcast monitor. The gear is put to the test nearly around the clock: the two FCP suites work 16 to 20 hours a day, five days a week.
“We do the rough cut part of the process, which takes about six weeks per 12-minute show,” Edwards says, explaining the workflow. “The first week is dialogue, sound effects, and music editing. Then we layer in the video: Photoshop backgrounds and props and QuickTime™ reference movies of the character animations. Once the rough cut is picture locked, we break the show up into one-minute reference QT movies and pass them to the After Effects™ artists, who rebuild the whole show from scratch. That takes another four to six weeks. When the AE compositing is done, they render out a final movie in the Blackmagic codec, which is sent back to us for conform and mastering to Digi Beta tape. When we're in full-scale episode production, we have six to eight shows in various stages of production at once. ”
The DeckLink card is a real workhorse on Aqua Teen for both animation and live action. The rough cut is first viewed on a Sony monitor using the SDI output of the DeckLink card. Any live-action elements are digitized from Digi Beta to 10-bit uncompressed video and added in. The show is then broken up into 12 to 15 one-minute QuickTime™ reference movies. These segments are moved to After Effects™ stations where artists rebuild the show at full resolution. When they’re finished, the resulting movies are rendered in the Blackmagic codec and then conformed in Final Cut Pro™. The FCP movie of the completed show is then output to Digi Beta using the DeckLink card.
You might think at the end of such long days Edwards is ready to come home and kick back. You’d be wrong. Instead, he jumps onto his home editing system (also Mac-based) to work on his first feature film, Stomp! Shout! Scream! Shot in 35mm (using short ends) Stomp! Shout! Scream! is inspired by the American International beach party movies of the mid ’60s or, as described by Edwards, Creature from the Black Lagoon meets Beach Blanket Bingo. This is the fourth horror movie he has produced and directed. His previous three horror shorts, known as Monster Trilogy (monstertrilogy.com), are a favorite at film festivals, and the trilogy is winner of two Best-of-Show awards.
The genesis of any indie movie is a unique story, but how a project finally gets made usually has the same plot: a writer/director with unfailing perseverance fights to get his or her movie to the screen. Evidence of Edwards’ dedication is three short horror films in as many years. In 2003, when he was finally ready to tackle a feature, Edwards was fortunate to have credibility as a filmmaker and as a working industry professional. He also had a script. “ I started writing the story inspired by watching every Annette and Frankie beach party movie and listening to every ’60s garage rock album I could find,” he says. “After nine months, I started showing the script to friends, including a producer friend, Arma Benoit. She loved it and introduced me to Evan Lieberman, a film studies PhD, Emory University lecturer, and cinematographer. He loved the story and became an integral partner in the project. I spent most of 2004 working lots of overtime and looking for investors.”
Given his expertise in video, it would have been far easier to shoot Stomp! Shout! Scream! in HD, but Edwards wanted the bright color palette typical of the ’60s beach movies even though it added to the budget in several ways. 35mm would give his retro movie an authentic period feel, and using short ends made it affordable. Stomp! Shout! Scream! was filmed in October 2004 in Georgia and Florida (Edwards’ home state). April 1, 2005, is the proposed completion date—no fooling.
Currently deep into post production of Stomp! Shout! Scream!, DeckLink is at the heart of the workflow. “ I will be digitizing my Digi Beta 35mm film transfer tapes into Final Cut with the DeckLink card and converting that media to DV for editing on my home editing system,” he explains. “Once picture is locked on that, I will either pull a negative cut list [for negative cutting or possibly for digitizing into a 2K digital intermediate] or an EDL for a video conform, depending on my budget at the time. I will use the DeckLink card to batch digitize my video conform.” What is incredible in this last statement is the sheer flexibility afforded by this amazing card.
The fact that Edwards is doing high-level post production at home is the quintessential desktop indie story. What was once the exclusive domain of $500/hour post is now possible with a few hardware add-ons to a reasonably robust generic workstation. The old days of dedicated engineers managing a machine room are also gone. “The last thing you want to be thinking about during production is your video card. I love that I've been able to plug it in and forget about it. It just always worked,” he says.
He hopes to launch Stomp! Shout! Scream! in summer 2005. Characteristically, he is not worried about a distribution deal; a release in regular movie theaters would be great, but his business plan calls for a self-release on DVD, if necessary. In the end, Jay Edwards is not leaving his future in the hands of others. From script to screen, he’s doing things his own way.
