The Music Dance Experience on Season 1 of “Severance” was so memorable that the director and executive producer Ben Stiller wanted to up the ante for Season 2.
Stiller pitched the idea of a marching band sequence for the show’s finale. So, when Mark S. (Adam Scott ) finishes the all-important Cold Harbor file, Milchick (Tramell Tillman) serves up a marching band complete with full choreography.
Geoff Richman was one of the show’s three editors, it was Richman who was tasked with cutting the finale. “I was terrified of the marching band scene going in,” Richman says, speaking with Variety‘s Artisans, presented by HBO. The sequence had been shot over four days, and Richman found himself with a “sea of footage.” He says, “I’d never cut a music video before. It’s like, we want to enjoy the marching band, but we also need to keep the story moving forward.”
In order to achieve that, Richman says he spent a lot of time cutting the two marching band songs. But that proved to be a challenge due to the sheer amount of footage. “On top of that, within the scenes, keeping track of our main characters. What we did is after the first song, we dropped in this beat with Jame (Michael Siberry) entering this viewing suite, and then also a check-in with Cecily (Sandra Bernhard) and Gemma (Dichen Lachman) heading to Cold Harbor. It’s this stark reminder that this is happening. That the final test is going to happen, and Mark has to get out of there.”
With the cut to Cold Harbor, Richman reminds audiences that the test is about to happen and keeps viewers on the main storyline.
Richman explains his approach to editing a scene: “The way I like to work a lot of times is I’ll stack different options at any given moment. All these different tracks are not many video tracks playing at the same time. What they are are other options of where we can be at any given moment. Just find it really handy to be able to turn on and off different selections and see how they interact with each other. It’s one of the earliest little pairings that worked well.”
Later in the episode, when Mark is running through the hallway, Richman again had a finite number of options to choose from. “He’s running, and the next shot almost feels like his POV. It looks like we’re approaching the wall, but then we turn the corner. Oh no, we’re down on the testing floor with Gemma.” Richman continues, “It creates this grammar in the edit where Mark is running. Where’s he running? He’s running to get to Gemma before she finishes the Cold Harbor test.”
He reveals that the moment was actually scripted as one scene. “She arrives at Cold Harbor and goes into Cold Harbor. But it’s like, we want to keep all the balls in the air. And she gets to Cold Harbor. There’s so much intensity and emotion and expectation rooted in this moment that the best thing to do is let’s leave it for a second and let that resonate.”
When the scene cuts, it’s back to the marching band. Richman explains that it’s an earned moment because “We’ve established enough new mystery.” After that, he advances the story with Dylan’s return.
Later, when Milchik is on top of the vending machine, there needed to be a chaotic energy to the moment. “We don’t even play the sound. It’s literally just jump cuts, band, no sound, no dialogue, and you see him even saying stuff, but you don’t hear it. That was our way in the edit of going up to the next level and having something that’s different than anything we saw before.”
As for the show’s freeze frame moment, Richman explains it was an idea that Stiller had. The idea was that it would feel like a film from the 1960s. “The final shot was transferred to film, so you see the film grain as you are moving in, like an optical effect. All of this is film grain. And then when it goes to red, all of that solid red is not just pure digital video red, this all went through the film process.”
variety.com
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