Configuring Comandante

Adventures in Editing Oliver Stone's Documentary

Fidel Castro sat down for more than 30 hours of interviews withOliver Stone. Editors later sifted through that material to produce the99-minute documentary.

Before bringing his video conversation with Cuba's Fidel Castro toHBO (at press time, HBO announced it was delaying the documentary's TVdebut indefinitely) and the Sundance Film Festival, director OliverStone produced more than 30 hours of source material for offline,online, and sound editors to sort through. The first step in producingthe documentary, Comandante, was having DP Rodrigo Prieto andoperator Carlos Marcovich tape the unscripted chats using two SonyPD-150 MiniDV cameras. Stone then asked two editors to separately plowthrough that material, sprinkle in pieces of archival footage, andcollaborate to produce a 99-minute rough cut, later finished by artistsat Riot Santa Monica.

Editors Alex Marquez (Hyena Editorial, Santa Monica) and ElisaBonora (Harley's House, Santa Monica) individually cut the piece onAvid Media Composer systems. Stone later met with them to merge theirtwo visions into an official offline.

“We digitized all the footage twice, worked separately on ourAvids, and then we periodically met and compared the work we eachdid,” says Bonora. “We actually worked as if we wereseparate editors, and then Oliver brought us together. I would arguefor why I cut something a certain way, and Alex would do the same, andthen Oliver would tell Alex to ‘do something’ with my cut,or vice versa, so that in the end, the material was truly a combinationof our efforts.”

Bonora adds that she enjoyed the unorthodox collaboration because itgave her a chance to experience other approaches to the same work.“I always wonder, what would another editor do with the samefootage, and this approach gave me a chance to find out. I know Idefinitely learned from Alex. It was interesting that we each werepassionate and fought for cuts that we believed in, but in the end, thepoint was to present Oliver Stone's vision of his visit with Castro. Sowe both checked our egos at the door, and the result, in my view, issomething we were all happy with.”

Building separate HD and film masters of the documentary took aboutsix months' worth of digital, tape-to-tape color correction, editing,titling, and 35mm film output work at Riot. Company artists first hadto create a DV master, and then they up-rezzed that material to HDresolution and output it to film to build the film master thateventually premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

“This was a challenging documentary because we had to matcheverything — just matching the MiniDV material together wascomplicated,” says Clark Mueller, senior colorist on thetape-to-tape build of the video master. “I worked on it on our daVinci 2k system, and the ability to tweak little bits in Power Windowswas really crucial.”

Riot editor Randy Lauder eventually conformed the DV master afterMueller had finished. That master served as the benchmark for the filmmaster that, although planned from the beginning, suddenly became anaccelerated priority when Stone decided to premiere the piece atSundance. In just a few weeks, according to Riot scanning and recordingmanager Matt McFarland, Riot up-rezzed the piece and recorded it tofilm in time for Stone to take the film version to Deluxe Laboratoriesfor additional color tweaking.

“The idea was to hold up the integrity of the color-correctionwork that Clark did on the da Vinci for the original videomaster,” says McFarland. “We had to match that version, sothere was a big issue in figuring out how to up-convert it all, andthen, how to record out from high-def so that we had all the detailsright. Oliver was very particular about the shadows and how Castroappears. He didn't want to lose that detail in Castro's face, which wasa concern regarding the up-rez, since they shot MiniDV and there wereno movie lighting setups in Cuba.”

The up-rez solution was simply to use different conversion boxes fordifferent pieces of the documentary, according to McFarland. “Weused a combination of things, depending on the material in question. Weused Discreet software — Fire — for some things and a UFC[universal format converter] for other pieces, mostly.”

In shooting the piece out to film, Riot chose a new film recorder— the Producer 2 Digital Cine Film Recorder from Lasergraphics,Irvine, Calif. “We chose that system because it's capable ofrecording high-resolution video to film at the rate of 1fps,”says McFarland. “Using it was really the only way we could makethe Sundance deadline. The other important choice in going to film wasthe decision to shoot the piece out to 5245 Kodak stock, rather thanthe 5242 Intermediate stock usually used with laser recorders. We didthat because we felt that stock would give Oliver a bit more of a colorcurve to play with in sitting through the traditional color-timingsession at Deluxe to tweak the film.”

Using an AMS Logic 2 console, mixer Mitch Dorf of POP Sound, SantaMonica, took charge of producing both the theatrical 5.1 surround mixand the two-track stereo mix for HBO. Dorf says Stone emphasized thatthe documentary was meant to be dialogue-driven. Therefore, Dorf had toconcentrate on cleaning up, restoring, and matching pieces of theongoing conversations, which came from different sound sources,recorded both to DAT and MiniDV tapes using lavalier, camera, and boommics, as well as archival material. Dorf also had to make sure Castro'soff-mic interpreter's voice became a seamless element in theconversation.

“The challenge was to find a uniform sound between thesesources and make it as seamless as possible,” says Dorf.“For whatever audio that came from sources other than the lavmics, I had to rely on my sound-restoration tools to match materialfrom those other sources with the primary dialogue tracks. The otherbig challenge was dealing with Castro's interpreter. The film hassubtitles for Castro's dialogue, since he speaks only Spanishthroughout the documentary. His interpreter, who has been with him formore than 30 years, is audible off-mic most of the time. At times, sheseems to know what he's going to say, and interprets it even before hefinishes speaking. It was amazing how she translated back and forthfrom Spanish to English, English to Spanish, while Castro and Oliverwere still talking. There was rarely a pause where she wasn't audible.This made it extremely difficult to find easy places toedit.”

Dorf also had to handle the stock footage audio carefully becausemuch of it came from old, grainy pieces of rare film.

“These were historic Castro speeches from very oldsources,” says Dorf. “I tried to clean up those tracks, butwhen I'm involved in a documentary like this, I'm a firm believer innot taking away from the integrity of old, historic recordings. Theserecordings have a certain sound, and I tried to improve on theirclarity without compromising their foundation. There was a lot ofdecision-making involved — analyzing each sound file and decidinghow far to clean it up.”