Sundance Production: Casino Jack and the United States of Money

For Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Editor Alison Ellwood used Avid Media Composer in two different locations to piece together source material from Beta and Betacam SP, HDCAM, and DVCAM tapes, plus DVDs and QuickTime files.

© Richard A. Bloom/Corbis

The new documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, directed by Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) got a very timely premiere on Sunday at the Sundance Festival. Last Thursday, the Supreme Court rendered a 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that effectively opens the floodgates for direct corporate funding of political campaigns.

Gibney's Casino Jack, which is about the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, focuses on the same intersection of money and politics. Like most documentaries about newsmakers, Casino Jack relied on a broad range of source video formats for its archival material: Beta and Betacam SP, HDCAM, and DVCAM tapes, plus DVDs and QuickTime files. For original interviews, Jigsaw Productions shot DVCPRO HD at 23.98fps.

Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff leaves the courthouse in Miami on Aug. 18, 2005.

&copy CARLOS BARRIA/Reuters/Corbis

Editor Alison Ellwood, who also worked with Gibney on Enron, used the Avid Media Composer 3.5.1 system at the production office in New York as well as a Media Composer system installed on her MacBook Pro at home in Massachusetts to piece together these varied source materials. She reported no serious issues integrating the formats. "Avid has gotten better about handling archive material that comes from a variety of sources," Ellwood says.

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However, considering the hundreds of hours of footage the production team was plowing through, it wasn't always optimal to follow the most pristine transfer practices at the outset. "We got some material that was filmed in PAL in Angola," Ellwood says. "That was a huge amount of material that we would have potentially had to transfer. So we rented a PAL deck and literally shot DVCAM off the monitor. Once we realized what we were using, we did a proper PAL transfer."

Most HD material was downconverted to DVCAM for creative editing. That level of compression allowed Ellwood to transport dozens of hours of material on portable 1TB hard drives. When Ellwood worked from home, the production team relied on a shared workflow that involved Jigsaw's Avid Unity MediaNetwork storage system. "We've come up with a system that's at times less methodical than it should be, but for the most part it works," Ellwood says. First, all footage was loaded into the Unity, and then the producers made sure that all footage, timecode, and file names were uniform between the house system and Ellwood's portable drive. When Ellwood wanted to share a cut with the New York office, she sent tiny project files that pointed back to footage loaded on the Unity or posted a QuickTime to the company's FTP server.

From a creative standpoint, Ellwood says that the challenge was telling an extremely complicated story in a short amount of time while incorporating the crucial parts of hundreds of hours of interviews and archival footage. The editor says she and Gibney and the producers approached the documentary as a series of chapters. The section about Abramoff's dealings in the Marianas Islands garment workers scandal, for instance, was initially an 90-minute segment that Ellwood says could easily have stood as a full-length documentary on its own.

Abramoff poses in his deli, Stacks, in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2004.

© Richard A. Bloom/Corbis

After an early private screening, Casino Jack's story seemed too Byzantine in spots. Ellwood says Gibney and producer Zena Barakat secured three late interviews that allowed the film to be less dense and more enjoyable. Despite the heavy nature of the subject matter, Ellwood says that there's a very dark vein of humor that courses throughout the documentary.

Ellwood's next project with Gibney, Magic Bus, should produce laughs that are less mordant. It tracks Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters' road/acid trip across the country, and it relies on a wealth of restored 16mm film shot by the subjects themselves.