Take a group of dancers, three years and the ambition to push the boundaries of pole dancing and you have the ingredients for a good feature length documentary. It turned out that FCPX was the ideal tool for the edit.
Matthew Celia wrote to us about his film that recently screened at the Manhattan Film Festival. His production of the film ran in parallel with the maturing of FCPX. We will let him take up the story after the trailer for Off the Floor.
About the Film
In the fall of 2010, my wife and I attended a dance performance in Venice, CA where a group of young women had fused modern dance with aerial fitness (pole dancing). Having arrived at the performance expecting one thing, we left with a completely different thought about the artistic merits of pole dance. We knew it was immediately interesting.
What began as a documentary about the underground world of pole fitness transformed into a personal human interest story about one dancer, Jessica Anderson-Gwin and her group of dancers struggling to invent a new art form with this fusion of modern world narrative dance and pole tricks.
The first company ever to stage a performance with 5 simultaneous poles, they appeared on MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew, created a second company in Nashville, TN, and continued to struggle for acknowledgement and acceptance. For the past 3 years we followed them through success and failure, capturing their art and their lives with our cameras.
Their struggle became our struggle. The journey of these women became the crux of the story. The editing process made heavy use of key features in FCPX: keyword collections, proxy workflow, mixed format timelines, native RED support, multi-cam and synchronization, and the amazingly fluid magnetic timeline. As the program matured from 2011 until the end of 2013, we took advantage of each new feature to help us tell our story.
Keywords and Organization
We grouped footage by type (interview or b-roll), by location, and by featured person. In each keyword collection, we further narrowed it down by marking our favorite moments to give us a place to start. Once multi cam clips were introduced, we used smart collections to organize the multi cam clips, which were used to piece together 4 camera recordings of their dance performances and dual camera interviews with second source audio. Utilizing keywords allowed the same footage to exist in a few different folders, which helped us find what we needed quickly.
Proxy workflow
Being a self-funded independent documentary, access to the latest technology isn’t feasible. In our case, we chose to shoot on low-budget DSLR cameras which record to H.264. FCPX works with H.264 natively, but I’ve always found it less taxing on my computer to transcode into a more edit friendly format for long format work. In the past, I would transcode everything to ProRes 422 and cut from that. But with hundreds of hours of footage and not knowing how much more we still had to shoot, I needed a solution that would provide me the speed optimization of ProRes, but with the file size of the original H.264 media.
Simply choosing “Create Proxy Media” on import allowed me to have FCPX automatically generate proxy files so I could edit and work. When it came time to output, all I had to do was change a preference setting and FCPX was back referencing the original H.264 media. No reconnecting. No scary media offline. For someone who had managed proxy workflows for other documentary films, it was a dream.
Working with Others
The Magnetic Timeline
I am an editor, but primarily I am a storyteller. The way I describe working in FCPX is like playing improvised jazz. Because the mechanics of the software fade away, editing becomes fluid and creative. The focus moves away from “how do I do this” and becomes “why should I do this.” For me, this is very freeing.
Often while cutting the documentary, I’d start by skimming through the hours of footage we shot and marking interesting moments as favorites. I would then drop all of these into the timeline in random order and begin to craft. Reordering, trimming, slipping, all incredibly fluid and intuitive thanks to the magnetic timeline. We could feel the pulse of the piece come to life as each shot moved into its correct place to tell the story.
It’s The Little Things
I am the Editor-in-Chief of FCP.co and have run the website since its inception ten years ago.
I have also worked as a broadcast and corporate editor for over 30 years, starting on one inch tape, working through many formats, right up to today's NLEs.
Under the name Idustrial Revolution, I have written and sold plugins for Final Cut Pro for 13 years.
I was made a Freeman of Lichfield through The Worshipful Company of Smiths (established 1601). Though I haven't yet tried to herd a flock of sheep through the city centre!
Current Editing
2020 has been busy, the beginning of the year was finishing off a new property series (cut on FCP) for Channel 4 called The Great House Giveaway. I also designed and built the majority of the graphics as Motion templates. It has been a great success and the shows grabbed more viewers in the 4pm weekday slot than any previous strand. It has been recommissioned by C4 for 60 episodes, including prime-time versions and five themed programmes. The shows have also been nominated for a 2021 BAFTA.
Although both were postponed to later in the year, I worked again on ITV's coverage of the Tour de France and La Vuelta. 2020 was my 25th year of editing the TdF and my 20th year as lead editor. The Tour was the first broadcast show to adopt FCPX working for multiple editors on shared storage.
BBC's Snooker has played a big part in my life, I've been editing tournament coverage since 1997. I'm proud to be part of a very creative team that has pioneered many new ideas and workflows that are now industry standard in sports' production. This is currently an Adobe Premiere edit.
Covid cancelled some of the regular corporate events that I edit such as trade shows & events. I was lucky however to edit, from home, on projects for Amazon Kindle, Amazon Black Friday, Mastercard and very proud to have helped local charitable trust Kendall & Wall secure lottery funding.
As for software, my weapon of choice is Final Cut Pro and Motion, but I also have a good knowledge and broadcast credits with Adobe Premiere Pro, MOGRT design and Photoshop.
Plugin Design & Development
I'm the creative force behind Idustrial Revolution, one of the oldest Final Cut Pro plugin developers. It hosts a range of commercial and free plugins on the site. One free plugin was downloaded over a thousand times within 24 hours of release.
I also take on custom work, whether it is adapting an existing plugin for a special use or designing new plugins for clients from scratch. Having a good knowledge of editing allows me to build-in flexibility and more importantly, usability.
FCP.co
Now in its 10th year and 4th redesign, running FCP.co has given me knowledge on how to run a large CMS- you are currently reading my bio from the database! Although it sounds corny, I am pretty well up on social media trends & techniques, especially in the video sector. The recent Covid restrictions has enabled live FCP.co shows online. This involves managing a Zoom Webinar through Restream.io to YouTube and Facebook.
The Future
I'm always open to new ideas and opportunities, so please get in touch at editor (at) fcp.co. I've judged film competitions, presented workflow techniques to international audiences and come up with ideas for TV shows and software programs!
