"I just, like, you think I could just, like,
borrow that for one second? -Mike, Mike, MIKE!” This scene from The Bear Season 2
Episode 6 titled "Fishes" is one of the most suspenseful scenes
I've seen on TV in a long time. [CLIP] "Throw another fork at me,
you're gonna get f***ing rocked! -But what makes it so intense? Is it the fact that the emotional stakes of
the episode were set to simmer 40 minutes ago… [CLIP] "Carmy, you handle
mom?” "Yeah, I handle mom.” …Have never had a chance to cool
and are now coming to a head? Is it the fact that this is the first scene
in the episode where the cacophony of music and chaotic sounds from the household kitchen
have quieted, leading to an eerie silence? [CLIP] "I love you, okay? "I love you too, Sugar.” Is it the electric performances
from the entire cast including Jamie Lee Curtis whose character
has been building in intensity the entire episode And who seems like
they might explode at any moment? Those are all key ingredients
but I think what really pulls the scene together and makes the
tension so emotionally harrowing and almost overwhelming to watch is
the way the ingredients are assembled. The person responsible for assembling all
these ingredients and serving them to us, searching through hours of
footage to choose exactly which reaction we're going to see at which moment
is Joanna Naugle, one of the editors of The Bear. [Joanna] "There's so many different layers
of like, who is feeling comfortable in this situation? Who is feeling stressed?
Who's everyone most focused on?" -And she expertly draws the viewer
into the emotional intensity of the scene by prioritizing a specific kind of shot: [Joanna] “I think by watching people react to
what is going on, that's actually how you're able to build the tension in the scene, and I
think that's actually how you're able to connect where everyone's head space is, and as much as
possible, I was just trying to clock, you know, Sugar watching Donna, Donna watching Michael,
you know, Cicero watching Carmi watching Michael, like just looking for all the moments of
people clocking each other, and make sure that you understood the shared history and
how we got to this point of other chaos.” These shots, where we're not seeing the character
who's speaking or performing the primary action, but instead the faces of the other
characters reacting, make up almost half of the running time of this nearly 14
minute scene. To really underscore just how much narrative work these reaction shots
are doing, consider the fact that Carmy, who is one of the shows main characters, doesn’t
speak during this scene. And yet an entire emotional arc is convey for his character,
just through the reaction shots we see. To craft a scene like this,
which is made up of 258 edits, Joanna has to meticulously comb through
hours of footage to find the perfect expression in a performance that conveys what
a character should be feeling in that moment. But each choice also has to fit within
the larger flow and pace of the scene and make sense for the character's
arc in the larger story. And finding the right placement and length of a shot
can come down to a fraction of a second. The reward for this effort is an emotional
pressure cooker. We're not just seeing mounting intensity, we're seeing and feeling all the
emotions around the entire table. The dread, awkward embarrassment, anger, fear, and sadness
about what is playing out in front of them. To edit like this, Joanna has to intimately
understand the story itself and its characters. [Joanna] “Is this whole family this
way? That like if they don't have a certain amount of chaos like they literally
will like disappear within themselves and that's why nobody can help themselves at
dinner when it escalates the way it does.” Character arc, emotional subtext, backstory are
usually things that come up when you're talking about writing, acting, and directing.
But when I talk to editors who are at the top of their game, I often notice
how frequently the conversation veers from the technical into the realm
of story, characters, and emotion. The Bear uses editing to its fullest potential.
There are incredible high-intensity chaotic scenes in the kitchen, beautiful montage sequences,
and many scenes where they understand that the perfect edit is none at all.
But as cool as all this editing is… [Adam] “It's not style for the sake of
itself, it's style that is serving a purpose, either pushing the story ahead or
setting up something thematically.” …Adam Epstein, another of the
Bears editors, explained how, as flashy as the show's editing gets at times,
it's always grounded in character and story. "It's less about like, okay, now we're gonna
get crazy more about let's try, you know, as directly as possible to get something into
the interiority of what's going on in Carmen, what's going on in Sydney's head,
how Richie is feeling right now.” I want to know, how exactly is do you do this? How does shot selection and timing
inform a character's emotional arc? Lets look at how Joanna and Adam used editing to
help construct and motivate Richie's character arc throughout season 2, something they
started setting up in the edit of season 1. [Joanna] “The first time I think we really
try to create that empathy for him is in the second episode where there's that really long
phone call scene. He's sitting with Sydney in the car after being such a jerk to her. And
then all of a sudden he gets a phone call and we just stay on that angle for a really long
time and we just hold on his performance. And there's so many places where we could have cut.
And instead Chris and Josh and Joanna were like we should just hang on him this entire time and
seeing him try to be a father. And I think that was like the first time we're starting
to feel a little bit of empathy for him. And in season two, like when he
realizes he was wrong about the mold, we just hold on this really long shot of him just
looking really dejected, covered in, you know, stuff that fell on him, leaning into that and
making those feel very long and extended.” -As an editor, time is one of the most powerful
tools you have at your disposal. So lingering on a piece of performance really can
highlight it for the audience as an important beat. If you changed nothing else
about the show, and just cut these moments where we linger on Richie, we’d feel
entirely different about his character. [Joanna] “I think that just emphasizes
like, yes, he's prickly and yes, he's rude, but also like he has a lot of self-loathing. He
has to live with himself also, like that also creates some kind of misery. So that's also how
you can kind of put these breadcrumbs of like, I think there's more to him. There's more to him.
He just needs the right environment to flourish.” If you changed nothing else about the show,
kept all the dialogue the same, but removed all these shots that linger on Richie, we'd feel very
different as an audience about him as a character. -This gave Adam a foundation to work from when he edited "Forks," Richie's
big episode in season two. [Adam] “I tried to really lean on the
moments and kind of like the stolen looks in a lot of his closeups, him kind
of internalizing and taking things in.” - To really sell Richie's arc in "Forks,” one of
the key ingredients was again, reaction shots. [Adam] “Even if it's a 20 frame shot, but if
that 20 frame shot says "look at me learning" and really taking in what's happening, the
more of that the better. Even if it goes quick, you're still getting moments that really
feel like you see something landing in him.” - But Adam also helped sell
Richie's transformation by expressing what Richie was feeling
internally in the tone of each scene. [Adam] “We're setting up a tone for something
that's going to evolve over time. If Richie was kind of scared of something, what would
that look like and what would that feel like?” -For Adam, creating this tone started with
working on the sound design for this scene, something the editors of The Bear did a lot of. [Joanna] “I'd say this is probably the show at
least I've done the most temp sound work on.” [Adam] “Yeah, not even close for me as well.” [Adam] “When I was building the open to that, it
was more about the underlying kind of sonic bed that would give you this sense of unease that
almost gave it like a bit of a dream logic. [Clip] “Chef are we done with the forks?” [Adam] “The right sound I think lets
you get visually faster a lot of times because you're having two senses that
are clocking something.It lets you kind of be a bit more free-flowing
in kind of the experimentation.” [A brief aside here, one of the things you'll
notice if you pay close attention watching the bear is that each kitchen environment has its own
unique pace and tone. This is expressed through a combination of set design, cinematography,
sound design, and of course editing. [Adam] “When you're in the beef in season one,
it's chaos and it's messy chaos. And then when you're in Empire, which is the high-end
kitchen in episode two of season one, it's intense, but it's almost, you know,
like fascistic to an extent. It's really just nailed down and everything is an assembly
line and it's like it's fear-based chaos.” ]
But back to Forks: –What's special about this episode is
that the tone of this restaurant changes throughout the episode as a reflection
of Richie’s changing perception. So while tonally we start here… …and eventually get to here… By the end of the episode we end up here… It's the same location, but to us and
to Richie it feels completely different. Adam of course used careful editing to show us
Richie's transition between these different tones. [Adam] “Right after he sees the teachers get
comped the meal and the reaction they have, you see you see on his face just him really
taking it in and then the music sort of like it's a gentle rise and then this this crazy dutch
angle of the subway just like it's in slow-mo blasting by that then takes us out to outside
and I kind of saw that as like this is sort of his mental portal kind of between the two worlds.” -When Joanna was working on
the season two episode Sundae, she used a different approach in the
edit to put us inside Sydney’s head. [Joanna] “We're starting to see her like
piece together things for the new menu.” -Here it’s an abstract montage that
expresses the character’s internal landscape. [Joanna] That was something that was really
abstract when it was explained to me. [Joanna] “I got an initial cut from this other
editor, Naya Amani, who did an amazing job pulling out all these selects. And then I kind
of messed around with a bunch of different music, figured out how to condense it. So it felt
like we were actually going into Sydney's brain and kind of seeing those synapses fire
as she's connecting, you know, seeing snow falling on the river to then seeing Parmesan
falling on pasta, finding match cuts between swatches of colors with windows to then square
ravioli that all kind of had similar shapes. And then also putting in photos of like
Ayo actually as a kid, you know, as Sydney, you know, thinking about her past, we put in a
shot of one of the dishes she made in season one, trying to visualize what creative inspiration
looks like with match cuts and music and find different connections between the
footage that made it feel abstract, but also relatable, and you could follow that
thread as it's coming to life in her head. The script for that episode, because they
shot it a little bit more like a documentary, they didn't get exactly scripted shots.
We were also kind of working with what was captured And we had a ton, a ton, a ton of
V-roll, Chicago footage, construction footage. And then on top of that, you know, our
amazing post team was also pulling like, oh, can we see, you know, architecture
plans for the corn cob towers, like in downtown Chicago? “And they were like,
yep, here's eight options.” And I was like, this is incredible. This one
matches the angle perfectly.” [Adam] “The first time I saw what Joanna
put together, I was really blown away. She's selling herself short, I think a
little bit. You know, obviously you need the idea and you need the story, but that
thing was made in her edit in my opinion.” - This montage itself is beautiful,
but it's also a beautiful example of the show creators are thinking about
editing as a storytelling device. In this episode, the audience connecting with
Sydney's feeling of inspiration is an important story beat, but instead of relying on dialogue
or exposition to communicate that, the episode's writer and director trusted the editors to be able
to communicate that feeling through the editing. [Adam] “One of the reasons I think
I've been very lucky to work on this show is the freedom to experiment and
to try interesting things and to take what might be a seed of an idea
and really kind of run with it.” I don't want to rag on the editors of
other movies and shows. Editing is an incredibly difficult profession. Bad editing
often isn't even the fault of the editors themselves. But when I watch a lot of shows
and movies though, it really feels like the editing is often an afterthought. It's treated
mostly as a way of just assembly what was shot and what was in the script. This is a big part of
editing, but it misses editing's full potential. Neglecting editing is like putting
all your attention into selecting the perfect ingredients, and making sure
they're perfectly cooked. And then just throwing them on a plate without
a care for how they're presented. And good editing requires quality
ingredients. The performances, the writing, and the cinematography -all have to be doing
their job in order for good editing to take place. This freedom that The Bear’s editors had really
helped establish editing as part of the language of the show, when get the audience used to editing
being a part of the expression of the character’s internal space, you can more freely do things
in the edit that might feel jarring otherwise. For example when Carmy ends up locked in the
freezer in Season 2, Joanna was able to start creating a montage of shots from other episodes
that express what Carmy is feeling and imagining in that moment- and it doesn’t feel like a
flashback, instead it feels seamless because the show has time and time again used insert
shots in this kind of expressionistic way. And when you trust your editors in this way and when those editors really understand
the story and character motivations, there's potential for the script to be
reshaped in ways that benefit the story: [Adam] “In season one, episode
two, kind of when they're talking about the health inspector potentially coming.” [Clip] “She's not nice, she's not your friend.” [Adam] “...and Tina and Ibrahim
are outside talking to each other.” [Clip] “Look around, this ain't no more.” [Adam] “...and then Karmi and Sid are
talking about what needs to happen.” [Clip] “So we could just have
somebody go and pick it up.” [Adam] “All these are scripted as like,
here's a scene, here's a scene, here's a scene. They're not scripted as far as cross
cutting. This is more something that kind of, I think Joanna really did such a great job of
having a track that is playing kind of throughout, and yet you're dipping back into these
conversations, but it doesn't feel as manic as like, you know, a full cross cutting
thing. And it doesn't feel as montage-y as a full montage-y, but it's definitely
not just, you know, divided scene work.” [Joanna] “Yeah, we did that
again in episode 208 also. There was a scene where Carmi and Fack are in the
fridge and they're talking about Claire and like, they're like, what is a girlfriend? And that
was filmed as a one take, but it was kind of a long scene and it actually felt like an instance
where the one take probably wasn't gonna work. So that was something that Megan and I, who
edited the episode with me, talked about what else we could like interweave. And we almost
like braided together three or four scenes. So we weren't only in this one take, we were
kind of coming back to it as like the tent poles, but we had this one beautiful December song
underneath it. And then it was like, you know, a little bit of Fack and Carmi in the fridge.
Then we go to Tina and Richie, then we're back to Fack and Carmi, then we're with Richie and
Sydney. And it was just a way to kind of be in multiple places at once, keep the pace going,
but also link them all at the same time too.” [Adam] “And that type of thing is a great example
of, you know, when people talk about like editing, being the final rewrite. It's not scripted. All
the words that are said might be there, but the order and the way that the scenes are weaving in
and out of each other, that's not on the page. That's something that you gotta experiment
and you figure it out and you find how do you get the truest version of what's
written but in a way that allows the tools of filmmaking to elevate it to
what its most ideal form could be.” -Editing when used to it’s full potential, isn’t
just the means by which scenes are assembled, or the best performances are chosen- it is
itself a big part of the language of filmic storytelling. The Bear showcases what’s possible
when everyone from the writers to the directors to the editors themselves really understand
the motivation and emotions behind the story and it’s characters- and how editing can bring
those characters and their experiences to life. One of the best examples I’ve seen
in a movie recently of innovative editing that draws you into the story,
is Park Chan-Wook’s Decision To Leave. This is an example of a director
who meticulously planned the edit before they even started shooting
as you can see in these storyboards. Decision To Leave is available right now,
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