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The Editing of “Courageous” Part One

I arrived in August of 2010, settling in to one of the side-by-side Final Cut Pro systems that were set up in a spare room in the basement of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. Alex and I cut with headphones on, each of us using identical Macs with the same footage on two separate RAIDS.

When I arrived, Alex had already cut about the first 20 or 30 minutes of the movie. The first day, we watched it and discussed my impressions on the cut at that point, before I dove into my first task, which was to make sure all of the “assistant editor” work was really completed for all of the scenes and to cut together “selects” reels for every scene in the rest of the movie. Alex and I used these reels to get a quick feel for all of the footage that we had to work with and refresh ourselves on specific shots, takes and performances. I also annotated all of the takes with my own notes on performances and problems.

With that done, I started cutting the second half of the movie. Not to give away any “spoiler” information, but my work started at the big turning point in the movie.

The way Alex and I worked was that we would each spend however long we needed to cut a scene. When one of us was done, we’d announce a screening and we’d take off the headsets, and switch our editing system over to play back through the main speakers and on the big-screen monitor that sat at Alex’s end of the edit suite. If I showed a cut, Alex would comment on it, we’d discuss the relative merits and problems and then I’d go back and make the revisions we’d decided on. We did the same thing with Alex’s edits. I’d comment. We’d discuss and then he’d make revisions and have another screening a few minutes, hours or sometimes days later. Each scene was edited on its own short timeline sequence. Each scene’s sequence would reside in the bin with the other raw footage for that scene. At the end of the day, one of my tasks was to take the scene or scenes that I’d cut that day and transfer them via Ethernet to Alex’s system, then I would have to relink the sequence to the media on Alex’s RAID. With that done, I would edit my footage to the end of a master sequence that included every scene in the movie. While we were editing individual scenes, we always just worked on a sequence with JUST that scene, but Alex was also working on a sequence of the entire movie that ended up being two and a half hours long! We never really broke it into reels until the on-line process at PostWorks.

About a month before we needed to deliver the first draft to the executives at Sony/Provident/TriStar we had a pretty good idea that we were running quite long. If you’ve ever heard or read the “inside scoop” on editing a feature, this is nothing unusual. Most movies have a very long first cut, compared to the length that they’re eventually released. Some movies, famously, need to almost be cut in half from their original edit. Our case wasn’t that bad. The folks at Provident had laid down a pretty firm rule that the movie could not be longer than 2 hours. The Kendrick brothers and Sherwood Pictures have tremendous creative control, but the length of the movie was something that they knew they really needed to hit in order to have a chance for the movie to succeed financially.

The first cut that we delivered didn’t have to conform to any time limit, but Alex and I were having pretty constant discussions while watching every scene that often centered around how much of a scene was really necessary. Could we cut out the first 15 seconds? Could we cut out the last 15 seconds? Did we really need this bit of character development or was that joke really necessary? We knew we were going to have to make some pretty difficult cuts later in the process, so the more we trimmed as we went, the easier it would be to fix later on.

My job on the production was to help get Alex to the first cut that needed to be shown to the distribution executives at Sony and Provident on October 1st of 2010. Once we made that deadline – in the nick of time – my work was over.

When I left Albany, we had a really nice movie. We knew it was too long at two and a half hours, but we also knew that it was really impactful and that cutting it down to two hours would simply serve to distill the essence of the movie and make it more powerful by tightening it up throughout. All of those decisions – cutting 20% of the movie that Alex had lovingly co-written and directed – were hard decisions. Some were deeper than he wanted, I know. I know that one of the scenes I worked hard on – a lengthy weapons training scene that provided some good diversion and an energy boost at a certain spot in the movie - was cut out entirely.

In the next installment of this article, I’ll discuss the on-line process that took place at PostWorks NY. That article will explain how the Final Cut Pro sequence was conformed back to the R3D files from the RED camera and how it all got color corrected and delivered to the big screen.

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