KENNY: I got to see Devotion at the Sony lot. So I got to see it, you know, properly in all its glory and it’s a fantastic film. I went in thinking it was more of an action film, but it’s actually kind of, it’s far more of a drama piece.

BILLY: It definitely is.

KENNY: I wanna get into the technical a little bit later, but talk to me about kind of the “emotional” differences between editing something like this versus for perhaps like Band of Brothers, which was… well I guess that was still a drama, but perhaps more actiony.

BILLY: It actually is very similar and I look at this one and I look at Only the Brave as similar, that the action percent just is just a little bit lower. It certainly, in fact, my assistant Russell figured out that our action to drama ratio is about 35%. And I like that ratio. I like it when the ratio is, or at least below 50%.  It just seems like you have more time to develop the characters, feel the emotion. And in particular when you have a story where bad things happen to certain individuals, you have to lay down the foundation to be invested in that character. So if you don’t have enough drama time, you know, someone dies and you don’t feel the impact that you’d like to feel. Cause you don’t have enough time to get to know them.

KENNY: I talk to a lot of cinematographers as a DP myself, and this film felt incredibly composed visually and the pacing seemed to reflect that; it was all very measured. With the footage that you were receiving in, especially in the aerial shots, was that all kind of “pre-set” for you? Or did you actually have a lot of creative control? I imagine the aerial shots especially are kind of expensive and perhaps few and far between and therefore not just “firehose covered” as it were.

BILLY: Right. We had, in terms of the aerial photography, an entire separate aerial unit which I don’t think my number is right, but it was like 50 people and multiple plane and helicopters and jets and all of this stuff. In terms of the sequences within Devotion, and again, I’m not sure my number is right, but there were like eight big aerial scenes and for the most part really each scene was very much storyboarded.  And so virtually every shot that this plane turned over, and this plane did this, and then two of them came together and did this… we would’ve done multiple takes of each one. And then we had what we would call “non-board” shots. They were great shots, but we didn’t really have a home for them per se and we would look for opportunities to put those in. But in terms of when they were shooting all of the aerial photography, you know, they had their own storyboard for just the aerials. So when they’re going up on today’s sortie, or they’ll say the afternoon sortie, they would go, “okay, these are the 11 shots we need to get” or the “seven shots we need to get.” They would discuss it and they would talk safety and discuss how the jet’s gonna fly below and they’re gonna come down, whatever it was. And so slowly but surely, they filled in their storyboards so that when it came to editorial it was still difficult to find things because there was just such a massive amount of material. I mean, I would get anywhere from 15 to 18 hours of footage a day of the aerials, not the principal photography. JD was in Savannah, you know, shooting the A unit. And then we were in Washington state shooting all of the snow material and then the aerial unit went to Savannah and they were shooting the non snow. But yeah, it was an entire separate unit that went on for a very long time.

KENNY: So how, this could be a dumb question, but I haven’t really seen any behind the scenes stuff for Devotion, but just thinking about like Top Gun for instance… it just looked like they jammed three Sony Venices in the cockpit and hit “record” on that film, was that the case here and you were just dealing with massive lengths of footage? 

BILLY: Yeah, for the most part. So the aerial photography, when they would go out and shoot their sortie, let’s say with a helicopter, a jet, whatever… The Cinejet… it had multiple cameras. I’m not sure if it has four cameras, maybe five cameras. And I think it would be about 45 minutes per camera every time it went up cause they didn’t stop and start the camera, It was rolled before they took off. So we did that and then there was some material that they mounted the actors in planes and shot some of that. And then we, we went to Atlanta and they shot… why am I blanking on the name? The thing they use on Mandalorian…

KENNY: The Volume. 

BILLY: Yeah we used The Volume. And we had the array behind them of all of the exact material of going down this canyon and then it’s gonna turn left. And the buck that the guy is in would be turning left, you know, would be, but the backgrounds would be turning. It was astounding.

KENNY: Yeah, that’s, that’s gotta be a joy to be able to get exactly the footage that you want without much compromise.

BILLY: Right. And they would have on the, on the volume, I would be watching it and I’m looking at Jesse and all of a sudden a real film light would come flying behind his head and then it would move over here, move over here, so I called the producer and I go, “what’s going on there?” And he goes, “oh, that’s the sun. That is where the sun would be and we’ll paint that out.” But it’s so all the light is happening in the right location. It was very impressive.

KENNY: What did your organization workflow look like? I assume they weren’t slating the flight footage.

BILLY: Not the aerial unit, because it’s very story boarded and it’s very much set for what they want. It’s almost like you went back to old school filmmaking that whenever they could take a little break, we would go into this screening room. I was only there for Week and the pilots and the dp, the aerial dp, there’s about eight people. And, and then we, we set up a post production group. This is actually just a couple people. They would review the dailies and then point out exactly, okay, this is H125 and this is H123. And she would be flagging it and it would be like “this is take one, take two, oh no we can’t use two, let’s use three because this one, their wings are too close or whatever.”

KENNY: Right. 

BILLY: And so when it finally would get to me, it would all be then broken down that this is the turn for H123 and this is the dip for 11-14. And, then there was this massive amount of material that’s not boarded.  You would find great stuff but it didn’t really have a home.

KENNY: On the more technical side, how do you personally like to kind of organize all the footage you’re getting?

BILLY: You know, it’s funny, it’s like that old question in terms of, in this case, editing is: is it normal? I have no idea because I never really have sat with another editor. So how I structure my bins and how I structure all of that…it’s a world that I’ve created over time and you know, every editing system, every NLE allows you to do certain things and frustrates you in others. In this particular case, we edited Devotion on Adobe Premiere and one of the advantages that Premiere gives you is the ability to structure your folders and scenes or sub scenes inside of sub scenes, inside of sub scenes. Some other editing systems make it a little more difficult. But you know, whatever I’m working on, I just try and hone it down to “here’s everything I need for that scene” and start this process of honing it in and honing it in and you know, then, and then the painful process of trying to cut to cut together that first really god awful ugly assembly. And it’s not until I have a beginning, middle, and an end that I then feel like I’m editing. But in that beginning stage where you’re looking for a shot and “I need this” and it’s just so painful. But once you’ve got a beginning, middle and an end is when now you can start molding and you start really finessing and looking what really works and doesn’t work.

KENNY: You’ve worked on a lot of sort of more musical films right? Did you get to work with music that they were kind of intending to use in the film that you could potentially temp everything to? Or were you just kind of going in and…

BILLY: Well, you know, every movie is completely different and the structure of how you do things in, in regards to music, it’s really different. There are many movies that I temp in everything. I find the music, I temp it in, I do the music editing… and then after photography, after the director’s in the room, you know, they start to talk to composers. We may have a music editor at that point and, you know, we’re replacing music and it kind of falls outta my hands because I have to deal with the director. In the case of Devotion, it was kind of an interesting situation. The composer on this movie, you know, JD had already selected and she was involved from first day of photography.

KENNY: Oh lovely. 

BILLY: So I never really put, not never, but rarely put any temp score. So some of the cues that you’re hearing are things that she composed literally while they’re still shooting. And then it would develop more and more and more and more. So it was a different process. It was really cool. And again we didn’t have that much temp music.

KENNY: I would imagine that’s preferable because, even on my little indie side, finding the right music is always such a pain in the ass. 

BILLY: It’s hard and it’s particularly hard when you’re trying to flesh out “what is the tone?” What is the music… like on Straight Outta Compton it was very difficult to find what is the music that fits against NWA or can work with NWA. And then there’s a lot of source music. So it was a took forever to find the music tone long before a composer was brought in that that fit. In this particular case, we had some source music, we didn’t have a lot, we had some. You know, Shonda was wonderful. Very impressive.

KENNY: I know with Premiere there’s a lot of tools that allow you to kind of do “other people’s jobs”, which kinda makes it nice, like I said, on a more indie side where I can do everything. How much like non-editor stuff were you doing or were, or were you allowed to do or chose to do in this film?

BILLY: I like to do all of it. I really love working with the music and I love the mix and I love working in sound effects and building out those tracks. I love doing visual effects and doing temp comps and all of that. And oh by the way, I like to do the editing. The problem is one only has so much time and ultimately, you know, I have to deliver an editor’s cut a week or two after they finish photography. So I have to be kind of running as fast as I can. So I would like to do it all, and on certain movies I have, but oftentimes I peel the sound off to assistants. We have a visual effects editor who’s already, you know, temp comping this or post vis-ing that or whatever. So it depends. The bottom line is I love to do those other things. I also like to get my head outta the editing and peel into music for a while and just get my head away from editing, playing with the music, kind of looking at ideas, then go back to editing for a while, then peel over into sound effects and play with that for a little bit and do those and lay in some beds and some art effects. Now go back into editing, then come back. And I do a lot of split frames where I change the timing and sometimes they’re fairly complicated with people crossing and, you know, crazy stuff. I love to do them. But they can be a little time consuming. So I’ll rough it and it’ll be so astoundingly ugly, but the timing is exactly what I want. Exactly when that person and the, when the lines are read and I’ve changed the performance, you know, and then I’ll hand that off to one of my assistants.

KENNY: I love split comps and I’m wondering if you have any tips for working with split comps when the camera is moving. Is there certain shots where you just can’t get ahold of it or you going into After Effects and, and tracking and like matching shots up like that? Or just relying on your VFX team? 

BILLY: Well, one of the things that I like to do, if possible is hopefully you’re shooting it in a larger ratio. So I have room to actually eliminate the camera move in it and stabilize both sides of it and then do the comp and then put a move back onto it. In fact, putting back on from the tracking data you put back on the same camera move that was actually there from the beginning.

KENNY: Oh, that’s fascinating. That’s a great idea. 

BILLY: Yeah. One of the first steps is you determine which one is the so-called “master” You get your tracking data off of your master, you stabilize both sides. You do your split, you make it as pretty as possible, and that’s why you need room is because you’re gonna have to zoom into it a little bit. So ideally you would wanna be, I dunno, 8K or 6K so that you have room to put that move back on it. And then the problem too is if they’re radical camera moves and pretty crazy, you can’t do it because you have motion blur, you have other artifacts that if you’ve stabilized the shot and now you put motion and then you put the tracking data back on it, it gets pretty funky. So it’s each one you have to look at and determine if you can pull it off or not.

KENNY: That’s always a question that as a DP gets talked about ad nauseum is whether or not, you know, 6K, 8K, 12K, is worth it. And I think a lot of people think of shooting the frame that your DP is expecting in 8K… maybe not worth it, but as you’re saying, overshooting, framing for the crop, is where the value comes. 

BILLY: It helps, it also can cause problems on a technical level that you’re, you know, ultimately you’re seeing the right image on the screen. The right ratio. You’re seeing it exactly the way the DP had composed it. No question about it.

KENNY: Right. 

BILLY: And sometimes we’ve received calls from Erik where he goes, “wait a second, that framing is weird because that person is a little too far to the right. Why is that not right?” And we discovered there was an error when they were transcoding some materials. So you have to have really super strong first assistants who really know what to look for and make sure that from your framing chart, everything is lining up exactly with what the DP had shot.

KENNY: What was your relationship like with Erik? Was it a pretty collaborative experience, because I know he’s a pretty technical guy. 

BILLY: Yeah! Very technical guy. You know, every show is a little different on that regard. Some, there are a couple of them, there are some that really don’t like you to touch the frame. They don’t want you to blow it up. They don’t want you to move anything. They don’t want you to do anything, which is fine. And I respect that because I look upon it that the footage that I’m looking at, they own it. They shot it, they know what they wanted. It’s not up to me to do it. In the case of Erik and a lot of DPs I work with, they’re fine. “You gotta do what you gotta do. I’m fine with it. Let, let me see some of them and we’ll look at it when we get in the DI.” In the case of Erik, he was fine with pretty much anything I needed to do. Or JD, you know, he wanted to push this in a little or move it to the right.

KENNY: Yeah. Did you, did you have a, like a CDL or LUT or any kind of interaction with the colorist as you were editing?

BILLY: Well, that’s interesting… we did have a LUT certainly, it was “the grade” so I guess it did have a CDL. My 1^st would be more knowledgeable on this than me. It’s very interesting, a good portion of the movie, which is a testament to Erik, did not radically change when we finished the DI, what we were editing with and what the finished film became, were very close. Not exact, but very close.

KENNY: You love to see that as a DP (laughs) where, especially with like HDR monitors and more accurate monitors, you’re able to just look and go, “all right, I know exactly what that’s gonna look like” versus throwing a basic LUT on there and going  “It’s close enough, we’ll figure it out later” you know. 

BILLY: Well, but you also have the way it used to be with film and the DP exposed it the way he or she wanted it. And you know, you also didn’t have the luxury of making the incredible changes in a DI so in the older world, you know, the film is what the DP and the director intended it to look like with some variation. And now that you, I mean DI’s are the most wonderful thing and a problem, you know, they become a problem because all the tracking and the power windows and on and on and on, you know, you end up in the di you do some serious painting.

KENNY: Yeah, no, me and Darrin Moran were talking yesterday for Frame & Reference and he was saying that, you know, he doesn’t spend too much time in the DIT tent. But then he was like, “all I wanna see is, I wanna be able to track windows” you know “in the tent, in the cdl.” And then we were both quiet for a second and then he went, “actually that’s a terrible idea”. (laughs) The AD would just murder everyone.

Billy: Yeah exactly

KENNY: So were you using Productions in this case or were you using some abstraction, kind of your own system for collaborative work?

BILLY: Well about half of the projects I work on, I edited at home and sometimes it’s just the editor’s cut and sometimes it’s from first frame to turning over locked picture. So it’s a little yin and yang. But the collaborative aspect had always been something that hadn’t been quite developed [prior to COVID] and it was a bit of a frustration. And I know that like Evercast was already in development or was already out of course, but this was the first time I’d ever used it. I was intrigued when we started the director’s cut and JD was somewhere else and my 1st was somewhere else and everyone was somewhere else. And I was thinking, “wow, is this gonna be like, is this gonna be efficient? Is it gonna be frustrating? What is it gonna be like?” And it was spectacular. We had a ball, it worked fantastic. I feel like we pretty much maintained the same amount of work that we would normally get done on a given day. We used Evercast for the collaboration and being able to see the director on that screen. You know, and… OH! We we used Discord as an intercom system!

KENNY: Oh nice!

BILLY: We didn’t use it for texting or anything like that. We had it set up that on my keyboard I would hit a button and I would talk to Russell and it was just like an intercom system, but he’s on the other side of the country.

KENNY: That’s a smart use of it. 

BILLY: It was perfect. I’d go, “Russell, what’s going on with such and such?” And we set it up so that when he talked back to me, it would come out the computer speaker. So it didn’t come through the big speakers. It came through very small little speaker, which was like, you know, that little speaker you never use or very rarely use. So that worked out good. And then we used Lucid Link. Lucid was truly astounding because you know, we’re in varying locations, but to us, “oh Reel 3 is locked. Hey Russell, will you release Reel 3?” and then *boop* unlocked. And you go, “this is great! It’s like he’s down the hall.” It’s so perfect. So there was that, and we were using Frame.IO, JD would sometimes do notes on Frame.IO and we would suck it right into into the sequence. So it was a number of different pieces of software. But the whole collaborative reality is basically clear that I can live anywhere. I don’t have to be driving into Hollywood for two hours to sit in an edit room by myself.

I worked on a show a long time ago and we went to the composer’s house and he was gonna play a bunch of cues that he had scored, or temp, you know. And I go great. And I’m at his house and I go, “wow… he’s at home… he can be anywhere he wants.” And at that time, the collaborative reality was you have to wear go where the big equipment is.

It was that moment where I went “Oh my God, this is so cool.” And then over the years it’s just gotten better and better and better. And now, you know, we’re having effects review on what I’m working on now and I’m just watching yesterday sitting in this effects review and there’s like 15 people and I’m looking at the screen going, “okay, he’s in Montreal and he’s in Toronto and he’s in New York and then that person’s in… There’s no one in the same city!”

KENNY: Do you have any tips for editors, or maybe anyone in your collaborative workflow, who now have the opportunity to maybe potentially work from home permanently? What should they do? Not only computer wise but like workspace wise, some things that have helped you out? 

BILLY: Well it’s interesting cause I look at all of the editing systems that I used in the recent number of years, it’s all kinda the same deal: Just gimme a big desktop. Just have a big, big flat desk. And it can rise or lower or whatever you happen to like, but give yourself some room, give yourself some big monitors, don’t necessarily cut with a laptop… They’re fine. If you need to get some work done or you’re on an airplane, that’s great, but you know, a nice big monitor. I also use the Avid S1 Mixer…

KENNY: Oh yeah, nice. 

BILLY: It’s fantastic. I wish more people would do it. It’s just so spectacular. So you can really do mixes and it records all of your key frames and it’s just wonderful.

You know, anything that makes you comfortable, just make sure. I would say don’t get too into the technical. Even if you enjoy technical. At a certain point, particularly when you come real close to starting photography, turn all that off. It’s now the edit, it’s now the creative and all the technical, you don’t wanna deal with it. You hand that off to the team you’re working with and let them deal with it and you know, you wanna stay involved in it and what’s going on. But it’s all about the creative and you wanna stay in that zone.

KENNY: One thing that I’ve seen a lot of people using these days is the Stream Deck. And I’ll use the Stream Deck for… do you not know about this? 

BILLY: No… OH the little thing with all the buttons?

KENNY: Yes exactly 

BILLY: Oh yeah! I wanna get one of those and I haven’t, that would be right up my alley.

KENNY: It’s funny because, you know, I’ve been using Premiere for 20 years or something, just forever, and so I’m just a keyboard guy. I have maybe like five other keys on the number pad that are rebound to other things, I have a few things on the mouse rebound to like switching between like the blade and the selective tool, all that.

BILLY: Yeah yeah yeah.

KENNY: But, but then there’s just like two or three things that I have on the Streamdeck cause you can bind macros to it. So like, changing the number of audio channels for instance. Instead of going right click, menu, blah blah, it’s just *button*. You know, little things like that.

BILLY: Yeah I need to get one of those. Definitely.

The other thing is that I’m mixing in 5.1 or I usually cut at 5.1. It’s not that the surrounds, they’re almost more nuisance, but certainly in LCR, big difference to have your dialogue to have that center speaker and then have left and Right. Big difference.

KENNY: Sure. Yeah, yeah. 

BILLY: And I’ve done it a million in LT RT. That’s fine. It’s fine-ish. It’s frustrating to mix that way.

KENNY: Yeah. Actually vaguely on that topic, are you, are you an iZotope guy?

BILLY: You know, we have iZotope. I’ve been intrigued by it. I just don’t have time for it.  I think it’s fantastic and when I’m at the mix and I’m watching them use it, I go on my God, what an amazing tool.

KENNY: Yeah. For like indie little shorts and stuff, but even all the like corporate stuff I do especially, like the EQ, Neutron, is great. I don’t have to think too hard. Even just the Voice Denoiser, it’s one button and then it’s just fixed.

BILLY: Very cool. You paint it out.

KENNY: Yeah exactly. Alright man, well I’ll let you go. Thanks so much for spending the time! 

BILLY: My pleasure Ken.