Child of Digital Filmmaking

Moritz Laube is spending noisy days at the Berlinale Talent Campus in the quiet auditorium of the Editing Suite. While completing his studies in a film school, the acknowledged editor of Wenders´ “Land of Plenty” is running a workshop on digital editing. Laube offers his students the chance to re-edit the footage of this film. The result is three totally different versions of the film, composed of the same material.

How did digital technologies transform the profession of an editor?

“For me it’s hard to say. Actually, I’m a child of digital editing. I’ve learnt on the computer. That’s how I started. I edited on film as well, because I really wanted to get this experience, but I have never edited a feature movie on film. Still I think the profession of an editor has changed greatly because of digital technologies. Many people would say it’s bad. But I wouldn’t. The good thing about editing on film is – when you do it, you have to think hard before making the cut, because it’s really hard to replace it afterwards. But digital filmmaking brought us great freedom. Now you don´t need a lot of money to make a film. All you need is the desire to tell a story. Take DV camera, shoot the footage, then edit it on your laptop, and you have a film. That´s the great thing about that. What´s also important, when you´re making a film this way is that you get much more material than if you had shot it on film. For “Land of Plenty” we had 170 hours of material. Of course that wouldn´t be possible if they shoot the movie on film. And editing time increases incredibly. But still I think it´s a kind of freedom”.

Do you use some special approach during the workshop on the Campus?

“The thing is I never learnt how to edit. I studied it myself by making errors, correcting them and trying to find out what would work for me. So I basically don´t have a method. I actually don´t think there is one. You just have to be sensitive towards the material you get. Just look through it and see what you could do with the material. That´s why before the editing I spend the first week just watching and watching the material, trying to get a feeling of a movie. You have to get started not with the final film in the head, but with the feeling of the final film in the head. That doesn´t mean you´re right, and the feeling can change while editing, but you must try to see what´s in the material. I think it´s the only thing I can suggest. I don´t talk a lot, I just told the participants of the workshop what´s my approach to editing. It´s much more important that they learn how Wim Wenders worked, how he developed the scenes. I leave them rather alone, but I´m there in case they have any questions”.

You also shot several films as a director. How the roles of director and editor coexist in one person?

“I study directing in a film school, I´ve directed several short films and now I´m preparing my diploma. When I make a film as a director, I never edit it myself. I have an editor, because as a director you have to edit the film in your own mind. You know what you want and you know how to do it. But the editor is your third eye. And hopefully the editor has a completely different - or similar but different - view on the material you have. He has other ideas than you have as a director. I love directing very, very much, but I would never leave editing. And I would still love to edit another feature film”.

Oleksiy Radynski

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2006