Talking with Yahoo UK, Rogue One’s editor Colin Goudie talks about the unusual technique employed to bring an initial edit of Rogue One.
I’d worked with Gareth [Edwards] previously. I cut his movie ‘Monsters’ so we’d already got a relationship and I’d actually done a couple of projects with him before that as well. So he got me on board in September of 2014 and asked me to do a story reel for ‘Rogue One’.
There was no screenplay, there was just a story breakdown at that point, scene by scene. He got me to rip hundreds of movies and basically make ‘Rogue One’ using other films so that they could work out how much dialogue they actually needed in the film.
It’s very simple to have a line [in the script] that reads “Krennic’s shuttle descends to the planet”, now that takes maybe 2-3 seconds in other films, but if you look at any other ‘Star Wars’ film you realise that takes 45 seconds or a minute of screen time. So by making the whole film that way – I used a lot of the ‘Star Wars’ films – but also hundreds of other films too, it gave us a good idea of the timing.
For example the sequence of them breaking into the vault I was ripping the big door closing in ‘Wargames’ to work out how long does a vault door take to close.
So that’s what I did and that was three months work to do that and that had captions at the bottom which explained the action that was going to be taking place, and two thirds of the screen was filled with the concept art that had already been done and one quarter, the bottom corner, was the little movie clip to give you how long that scene would actually take.
Also interviewed by Yahoo UK were his fellow editor John Gilroy; its a long and very insightful piece so be sure to take the below link to read the full article.
