Oliver Peters talks to director Brantley Gutierrez and editor Ryan P. Adams on why Final Cut Pro X was the perfect tool to edit Paul McCartney's 'Who Cares' music video.
Paul McCartney hasn't been the type of rock star to rest on his past. Many McCartney-related projects have embraced new technologies, such as the 360VR production featured here on this site. The music video for Who Cares - McCartney's musical answer to bullying - was filmed in both 16mm and 65mm film. And it was edited using Final Cut Pro X.
Who Cares features Paul McCartney and actress Emma Stone in a stylized, surreal song and dance number filmed in 65mm, which is bookended by a reality-based 16mm segment. The video was directed by Brantley Gutierrez, choreographed by Ryan Heffington, and produced through LA production company Subtractive.
Gutierrez has collaborated for over 14 years with Santa Monica-based editor Ryan P. Adams on a range of projects, including commercials, concerts, and music videos. Adams also did a stint with Nitro Circus, cutting action sports documentaries for NBC and NBCSN.
In that time he's used the various NLEs, including Premiere Pro, Media Composer, and Final Cut Pro 7. But it was the demands of concert videos that really brought about his shift to Final Cut Pro X.
[OP] Please tell me a bit about what style you were aiming for in Who Cares. Why the choice to shoot in both 16mm and 65mm film?
Brantley Gutierrez[Brantley Gutierrez] In this video, I was going for an homage to vaudevillian theater acts and old Beatles-style psychedelia.
My background is working with a lot of photography. I was working in film labs when I was pretty young. So my DP and friend, Linus Sandgren, suggested film and had the idea, "What if we shot 65mm?"
I was open to it, but it came down to asking the folks at Kodak. They're the ones that made that happen for us, because they saw it as an opportunity to try out their new Ektachrome 16mm motion film stock.
They facilitated us getting the 65mm at a very reasonable price and getting the unreleased Ektachrome 16mm film. The reason for the two stocks was the separation of the reality of the opening scene - kind of grainy and hand-held - with the song portion. It was almost dreamlike in its own way.
This was in contrast to the 65mm psychedelic part, which was all on crane, starkly lit, and with very controlled choreography. The Ektachrome had this hazy effect with its grain. We wanted something that would jump as you went between these worlds and 16 to 65 was about as big of a jump as we could get in film formats.
[OP] What challenges did you face with this combination of film stocks? Was it just a digital transfer and then you were only dealing with video files? Or was the process different than that?
Linus Sandgren[BG] The film went to London where they could process and scan the 65mm film. It actually went in with Star Wars. Lucafilm had all of the services tied up, but they were kind enough put our film in with The Rise of Skywalker and help us get it processed and scanned. But we had to wait a couple of extra days, so it was a bit of a nervous time. I have full faith in Linus, so I knew we had it. However, it's a little strange these days to wait eight or nine days to see what you had shot.
We were a guinea pig for Kodak for the 16mm stock. When we got it back, it looked crazy! We were like, "Oh crap." It looked like it had been cross-processed - super grainy and super contrasty. It did have a cool look, but more like a Tony Scott style of craziness.
When we showed it to Kodak they agreed that it didn't look right. Then we had Tom Poole, our colorist at Company 3 in New York, rescan the 16mm and it looked beautiful.
[Ryan P. Adams] Ektachrome is a positive stock, which hasn't been used in a while. So the person in London scanning it just wasn't familiar with it.
[BG] They just didn't have the right color profile built for that stock yet, since it hadn't been released yet. Of course, someone with a more experienced eye would know that wasn't correct.
[OP] How did this delay impact your editing?
[BG] It was originally scanned and we started cutting with the incorrect version. In the meantime, the film was being rescanned by Poole. He didn't really have to do any additional color correction to it once he had rescanned it. This was probably our quickest color correction session for any music video - probably 15 minutes total.
[RPA] One of the amazing things I learned, is that all you have to do is give it some minor contrast and then it is done. What it does give you is perfect skin tones. Once we got the proper scan and sat in the color session, that's what really jumped out.
[OP] So then, what was the workflow like with Final Cut Pro X?
Ryan P. Adams[RPA] The scans came in as DPX files. Here at Subtractive, we took those into DaVinci Resolve and spit out ProRes 422 HQ QuickTime files to edit with.
To make things easy for Company 3, we did the final conform in-house using Resolve.
An FCPXML file was imported into Resolve, we linked back to the DPX files, and then sent a Resolve project file to Company 3 for the final grade. This way we could make sure everything was working. There were a few effects shots that came in and we set all of that up so Tom could just jump on it and grade.
Since he's in New York, the LA and New York locations for Company 3 worked through a remote, supervised grading session.
[OP] The video features a number of effects, especially speed effects. Were those shot in-camera or added in post?
[RPA] The speed effects were done in post. The surreal world was very well choreographed, which just plays out. We had a lot of fun with the opening sequence in figuring out the timing. Especially in the transitional moment where Emma is staring into the hypnotic wheel. We were able to mock up a lot of the effects that we wanted to do in Final Cut. We would freeze-frame these little characters called "the idiots" that would jump into Emma's head. I would do a loose rotoscope in Final Cut and then get the motion down to figure out the timing. Our effects people then remade that in After Effects.
[OP] How involved was Paul McCartney in the edit and in review-and-approval?
[BG] I've know Paul for about 13 years and we have a good relationship. I feel lucky that he's very trusting of me and goes along with ideas like this. The record label didn't even know this video was happening until the day of production. It was clandestine in a lot of ways, but you can get away with that when it's Paul McCartney. If I had tried that with some other artist, I would have been in trouble. But Paul just said, "We're going to do it ourselves."
We showed him the cut once we had picture lock, before final color. He called on the phone, "Great. I don't have any notes. It's cool. I love it and will sign off." That was literally it for Paul. It's one of the few music videos where there was no going back and forth between the management, the artist, and the record label. Once Paul signed off on it, the record label was fine with it.
[OP] How did you manage to get Emma Stone to be a part of this video?
[BG] Emma is a really close friend of mine. Independently of each other, we both know Paul. Their paths have crossed over the years. We've all hung out together and talked about wanting to do something. When Paul's album came out, I hit them both up with the idea for the music video and they both said yes.
The hardest part of the whole process was getting schedules to align. We finally had an open date in October with only a week and a half to get ready. That's not a lot of time when you have to build sets and arrange the choreography. It was a bit of a mad dash. The total time was about six weeks from prep through to color.
Because of the nature of this music video, we only filmed two takes for Paul's performance to the song. I had timed out each set-up so that we knew how long each scene would be. The car sequence was going to be "x" amount of seconds, the camera sequence would be "x" amount, and so on. As a result, we were able to tackle the edit pretty quickly.
Since we were shooting 65mm film, we only had two or three takes max of everything. We didn't have to spend a lot of time looking through hours of footage - just pick the best take for each. It was very old school in that way, which was fun.
[OP] Ryan, what's your approach to organizing a project like this in Final Cut Pro X?
[RPA] I labelled every set-up and then just picked the best take. The first pass was just a rough to see what was the best version of this video. Then there were a few moments that we could just put in later, like when the group of idiots sings, "Who cares."
My usual approach is to lay in the sections of synced song segments to the timeline first. We'll go through that first to find the best performance moments and cut those into the video, which is our baseline. Then I'll build on top of that. I like to organize that in the timeline rather than the browser so that I can watch it play against the music. But I will keyword each individual set-up or scene.
I also work that way when I cut commercials. I can manage this for a :30 commercial. When it's a much bigger project, that's where the organization needs to be a little more detailed. I will always break things down to the individual set-ups so I can reference them quickly. If we are doing something like a concert film, that organization may be broken up by the multiple days of the event. A great feature of Final Cut Pro X is the skim tool and that you can look at clips like a filmstrip. It's very easy to keyword the angles for a scene and quickly go through it.
[OP] Brantley, I'm sure you've sat over the shoulder of the editor in many sessions. From a director's point of view, what do you think about working with Final Cut Pro X?
[BG] This particular project was pretty well laid out in my head and it didn't have a lot of footage, so it was already streamlined. On more complex projects, like a multi-cam edit, FCPX is great for me, because I get to look at it like a moving contact sheet from photography. I get to see my choices and I really respond to that. That feels very intuitive and it blows me away that every system isn't like that.
[OP] Ryan, what attracted you about Final Cut Pro X in order to use it whenever possible?
[RPA] I started with Final Cut Pro X when they added multi-cam. At that time we were doing more concert productions. We had a lot of photographers who would fill in on camera and Canon 5Ds were prevalent. I like to call them "trigger-happy filmers," because they wouldn't let it roll all the way through.
FCPX came up with the solution to sync cameras with the audio on the back end. So I could label each photographer's clips. Each clip might only be a few seconds long. I could then build the concert by letting FCPX sync the clips to audio even without proper timecode. That's when I jumped on, because FCPX solved a problem that was very painful in Final Cut Pro 7 and a lot of other editing systems. That was an interesting moment in time when photographic cameras could shoot video and we hired a lot of those shooters. Final Cut Pro X solved the problem in a very cool way and it helped me tremendously.
We did this Tom Petty music video, which really illustrates why Final Cut Pro X is a go-to tool. After Tom had passed, we had to take a lot of archival footage as part of a music video, called Gainesville, that we did for his boxed set. Brantley shot a lot of video around Tom's hometown of Gainesville [Florida], but they also brought us a box with a massive amount of footage that we put into the system. A mix of old films and tapes, some of Tom's personal footage, all this archival stuff. It gave the video a wonderful feeling.
[BG] It's very nostalgic from the point of view of Tom and the band. A lot of it was stuff they had shot in their 20s and had a real home movie feel. I shot Super 8mm footage around Tom's original home and places where they grew up to match that tone. I was trying to capture the love his hometown has for him.
[RPA] That's a situation where FCPX blows the competition out of the water. It's easy to use the strip view to hunt for those emotional moments. So the skimmer and the strip view were ways for us to cull all of this hodge-podge of footage for those moments and to hit beats and moments in the music for a song that had been unreleased at that time.
We had one week to turn that around. It's a complicated situation to look through box of footage on a very tight deadline and put a story to it and make it feel correct for the song. That's where all of those tools in Final Cut shine. When I have to build a montage, that's when I love Final Cut Pro X the most.
[OP] You've worked with the various NLEs. You know DaVinci Resolve and Blackmagic is working hard to make it the best all-in-one tool on the market. When you look at this type of application, what features would you love to see added to Final Cut Pro X?
[RPA] If I had a wishlist, I would love to see if FCPX could be scaled up for multiple seats and multiple editors. I wish some focus was being put on that. I still go to Resolve for color. I look at compositing as just mocking something up so we can figure out timing and what it is generally going to look like. However, I don't see a situation currently where I do everything in the editor. To me, DaVinci Resolve is kind of like a Smoke system and I tip my hat to them.
I find that Final Cut still edits faster than a lot of other systems, but speed is not the most important thing. If you can do things quickly, then you can try more things out. That helps creatively. But I think that typically things take about as long from one system to the next. If an edit takes me a week in Adobe it still takes me a week in FCPX. But if I can try more things out creatively, then that's beneficial to any project.
Images courtesy of R. P. Adams
