Daybreak is a Netflix Original series that takes place in post-apocalyptic Glendale, following Josh Wheeler and his group of misfit friends.
The episode I cut, Sing Your Life aka episode 7, was a bit of a beast, but I often find beastly shows to be the most rewarding. Every episode is a different person’s story, so it was a bit like working on a pilot every time – trying to find the tone for that character and such. I had multiple musical scenes to cut and a huge gladiator style fight scene with 10 people fighting all at once. The challenge there is really in the initial build – getting to know that footage, figuring out sync when it comes to the song – you see what your limitations are and then you can play and push it to be as awesome as possible once you know the boundaries.
Sometimes those big challenges lead to inspired fixes that turn out better than the initial idea, which happened with the big musical scene towards the end of my episode. It was meant to match a recording even though they did not have their earpieces in/were not singing along with the recording. So I had to create a sync map, getting them as close to sync as possible and then work from there, culling down to the footage that could sync and then culling down to the best of that footage. The EPs didn’t like some of this footage that was shot on a dolly a la Spike Lee, but I was able to add a montage that ended up deepening the emotion of the scene as we cut back and forth from the characters singing to seeing the story of their relationship unfold. So in the end what was initially problematic became more powerful.
A note on the crediting: this was billed as a co-edit with my mentor/friend/partner in crime Rachel Goodlett Katz ,as she left early on to cut a trilogy of feature films, but I just wanted to note that she left before the Editor’s Cut and left the major cutting to me, editing mostly some small interstitial scenes.
