By Justin Kramer

As we gear up for our new Education program, which will run all year, we are looking forward to bringing all the cutting edge filmmaking techniques and equipment to our students here in Doha. Our budding filmmakers will be exploring all aspects of storytelling including directing, shooting, lighting, acting, and the last, but certainly not least step in filmmaking; editing.

Before the digital revolution and the introduction of software like Avid and Final Cut Pro, editing your short film was a much harder task.

I distinctly remember sitting in our “media lab” in high school spinning wheels on a linear editing machine that costed as much as my first car. I’d be making extremely rough edits from one vhs to another and desperately trying to make no mistakes. A mistake meant a world of headaches and hours of hard work down the drain.

Yet now, hitting Command + Z on your keyboard is like instant acting Panadol. Nothing is final. Nothing is un-fixable. Thanks in large part to the implementation of non-linear editing systems like Final Cut Pro.This inexpensive, easy to use editing system can be found on nearly every student’s Mac Book Pro. It is being used by grandmother’s to make slideshows for weddings, moms and dads to cut videos of their baby’s first steps to host on YouTube, students who are desperately trying to break into “the biz”, and even iconic filmmakers on their newest big budget releases.

A perfect example of this is Final Cut advocate and long time editor for Francis Coppola, Walter Murch. He is quoted saying “You can use it out of the box on the simplest kind of home video and you can use that same software all the way up to the largest budget film”.Walter Murch broke into the business working in sound in the late 1960’s and quickly made his way through the ranks and has now been nominated for numerous awards, including 3 Oscar wins (Best Sound for Apocalypse Now in 1979 and Best Sound and Best Film Editing for The English Patient in 1996).

His impressive list of editing credits include work on The Godfather Trilogy, Apocalypse Now, Ghost, and most recently, The Wolfman.His work with the program can be seen in films like Cold Mountain (which scored him an Academy Award Nomination for Best Editing in 2003), Jarhead, Youth Without Youth, and Francis Coppola’s latest release, Tetro.

In an effort spread the joy of editing and to develop young filmmakers in the region, we at Doha Tribeca Film Festival will begin Final Cut Pro workshops as a part of our new Education Program.

For more information on the workshops click here:
www.dohatribecafilm.com/education.

Recommended reading:
“In The Blink of an Eye: A perspective on film editing” by Walter Murch

Also see numerous videos and articles directly from Apple.

Other notable films that used Final Cut Pro:
The Rules of Attraction (2002), Supersize Me (2004), Napolean Dynamite (2004), Corpse Bride (2005), Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), 300 (2007), Simpsons Movie (2007), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), 500 Days of Summer (2009), and 2009 DTFF film, A Serious Man.