This Sunday night, a show airs on the History Channel called “World War II in HD.” I was one of the editors on this fascinating, and very challenging show to create. Now that I’m done, and have a little time off to reflect, I would like to share with whoever is interested some thoughts about the interesting creative challenges that went into this show, from an editing standpoint.
The ten-hour series follows the experiences of twelve real American characters who took part in the war. Using something like 1,500 hours of raw, unedited footage, almost all of it shot in color during the second world war, we created reenactments to stories that these characters have told in either books, letters or diaries. I worked on five of the ten episodes. A lot of the footage was shot during battles. The footage is incredible, infuriating, stunning. I am not used to seeing World War 2 in color. It makes it all even more disturbing, even more alive. This material demands great respect, and herein lies the main editing challenge.
Making the real unreal
It is extremely easy, with great up-close footage of blasts, carnage and fast-moving planes, to create high-energy montages with exciting music, that are simply “cool” to look at. These are the types of films I used to make when I made films for the air force: cut to the beat, high drama, adrenaline-filled, fun. “Kick-ass stuff.” Not only is it easy to execute, but for an editor who works on the ninth year of the 21st century, who is used to fast-moving movies and music- videos, it is also very tempting. But it also doesn’t work. Not for this material. As an editor with a strong background in action scenes, a love of cutting music-videos and a natural inclination to often treat scenes with a rhythm and a high-energy style, it was surprising to discover that the “kick-ass” approach, which works so well in fiction, simply does not work with real footage from world-war 2.
On the other hand, to create a full scene such as, for example, the Omaha Beach scene in the opening of “Saving Private Ryan,” you need the full scope of footage that they recreated for that film. If you watch that scene, you will notice it is actually edited slowly. My natural inclination, when faced with a lack of footage, tends to be to cut quick, kick-ass, exciting - in other words to do something so that you don't notice the lack of footage. In this show, some events we were telling stories about did indeed have an enormous amount of footage, whereas sometimes were faced with an event that was just not covered with as much footage as "Saving Private Ryan" had. But a fast, high-energy approach, in other words a "treated" approach, needed to be balanced very delicately with another, more careful style.
And it is exactly because the footage demands great respect. Because it is real, it cannot be made to feel too much like fiction. While we’re creating a movie-like style with this real footage, it can’t go too far. It cannot feel like a Rambo movie, even though a Rambo movie might be great. Because then it becomes strangely unreal. Even though it’s real footage! So I find that I need to sometimes let footage play, just let it happen, and resist the temptation to "do" stuff to make it more exciting. But on the other hand, the battle scenes do need to get edited in an exciting, film-like way. This very thin line between documentary and film-like treatment was something that myself and the other editors thought about often. To me, it was a very interesting, constant balancing-act.
So how do you find that right balance? For me, it was by keeping enough elements in the edit that feel real and uncut, even though these elements might be within a scene that is cut fast and exciting. In a battle scene, staying with a shot sometimes after the action is done – something I would very rarely do in a fiction action-scene, because it would feel rhythmically wrong to me (of course, I am generalizing like crazy right now) – helps because it creates the feeling that something is happening after the moment we just saw. Something real, not just an actor letting down his guard after he finished the action of the take. This creates the sense that the action continues. No one is yelling “cut!”
Comedy
In a strange way, this show presented another challenge to me that I find present when editing comedies – a genre which, due to the challenge I am about to speak about, I do not love editing (though I love watching.) When cutting comedy, if the scene is funny, or if the take is funny, it is funny once. Maybe twice. When you edit, you watch the same moments many times, and it is always difficult to be affected more than once by the material. Therefore, you must constantly try and remember, almost intellectually, the first reaction you had to the material. So that you “know” that it’s funny, even though it isn’t instinctively funny to you anymore. The solution to this it to constantly screen the material to new people. Through their reactions, you experience the scene anew.
With "WWII In HD", I found a similar challenge in terms of the initial shock to the fact that this is real footage. Every time I saw a shot for the first time, I had some sort of gut reaction to it, which I don’t have in the same way when first viewing dailies of a film or of most other documentaries. Usually, when I first view material I am going to edit, I look at it in a certain way and start building an idea in my head of how I will approach the cut. With this footage, there was the added sensation of “whoa, holy crap, this is insane stuff because it’s real.” That reaction obviously only happens once. But in that once, you can look at a shot for a long time. While editing, my inner-editor takes over, that internal musician that says “time to cut here so the rhythm is exciting, so it's not boring.” But to the viewer who views a comedy for the first time – he will laugh, even though I won’t after seeing it several (thousand) times. To the viewer seeing a man running through the woods, chased by snipers, it will remain fascinating even if I stay on the shot longer than I would in a staged scene. Because it’s real. Because that man is still running, even after he left the frame, even after the camera started shaking, even after the camera panned over to nothing in particular. That man is still running for his life. The viewer knows that.
Historical Accuracy
Another great challenge was historical accuracy. We made every possible effort for the show to be as accurate as possible. I’m sure that here and there a gun blasting off a ship is from a different part of the ocean (even though it’s the right ship,) but that’s not a big deal. For every scene I had to cut, I was given a script, and I would then go into our vast database of footage and start gathering images for my scene, with which I can recreate/represent the story being told by the character (by the way, a whole other challenge here was to do one’s very best to not use the same footage in different episodes, since all the editors were using the same database while working on different scenes and different episodes.)
As I was gathering footage, I would always call our resident historian, a brilliant dude with a computer in his brain who would look at my footage and say, “yes, you can use that” or “no – this ship is incorrect – see the number on it? It was in a different battle on the date where your story is happening.” Then he would go and show me sources to prove it’s true. Amazing. So we constantly had to check ourselves and make sure we’re using the right planes, the right guns, the right ships, the right soldiers – can’t use Marines if we’re with the army, that sort of thing. Many times it would be frustrating when we would find the perfect shot! And then we were told we can’t use it because of a historical detail. But this makes the show cooler, no doubt.
Personal Fascination
I grew up with World War 2 as a very present subject in my family. Especially on my Father’s side. His mother was in the camps, entire family obliterated. He was born very soon after it was over. When I think about this war I think about the Jewish Holocaust. Plain and simple. I’m well aware of the rest of the war and that many people died all over the world – but to me the war is the Holocaust because it’s so present in my history and in the collective history of most Israelis. And so, suddenly I was brought face to face with so much footage from everywhere, so many stories from all over the war, battles in the Pacific, all over Europe, even Alaska. There was just so much of it. It adds to it a scope in my head. A scope I always knew about and was aware of, but now it is much more vivid.
Living with these images for a few months was not always easy. I had no nightmares but there were moments of such disgust that I had to take a walk and rest for an hour. A lot of the footage is dreadfully hard to look at. Two images that stuck to my mind are one of a soldier getting hit as he storms the beach at Tarawa, throws his hands up and falls into the water, dead. Another is a Japanese woman at Saipan who races to a cliff, looks around, and jumps to her death. Due to the fact that the show is told from an American perspective, it only gets to the Holocaust later in the show (since the American soldiers arrived at the camps only at the end of the war.) I thought I’d manage to avoid dealing with any of those images, and almost did, until in my last few days I had to do some work that involved the liberation of Dachau. That was a little draining. But you know what is weird? And sick? Just like the rest of the footage, after staring at the same images, dreadful as they were (and they were) I still somehow became somewhat desensitized to them the more times I saw them.
The footage, I will say for the 10th time, is fascinating. And it’s interesting what catches your attention. Sometimes, as I searched for footage, I would find something unrelated and just begin watching. On one of my last days, I stumbled upon footage of Eva Braun, as I was trying to confirm that some shot I wanted to use was indeed her. And there was a whole collection of images of her. I just stared at it. Here’s this stupid little idiot, living the care-free life and sleeping with Hitler, while the world is burning.
The show was produced for the History Channel by Lou Reda Productions, and most of it was directed by Matthew Ginsburg. Here is one of the promos History made for the show. This one has been playing in cinemas. I'm having trouble making the youtube embed wide-screen. If it's playing weird for you, you can go to the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsFSPYytSL4
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