Richard Starkey has moved from Guillotine Post to join Priest in Cape Town. “I have been running my own company in Johannesburg for five years now, which has been great, but I am keen to focus a bit more on editing and a bit less on admin.”

Guillotine will continue in Jozi with Paul Hanrahan, Karen MacDonald and newcomer Jo Gibbon. In addition to his strong relationships with Cal Kingwill and Eugenie Tancred, Richard says he chose Priest because they have “a great reputation for being a professional yet relaxed post production company. Their offices are amazing, the staff are wonderful and they are interested in developing new Apple-based workflows.”

He’s also signed with Wild(child) for representation in the USA. One of his most interesting recent boards was Orange Airball, working for director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (Babel, 21 Grams and Amores Perros).

Serviced by McKenzie Rudolphe, the three-day shoot in a dirty bus station near Pretoria was shot with two cameras, all handheld, shooting 360 degrees.

“The first thing Alejandro said to me was, ‘I feel sorry for you,’ because of the way they were going to shoot the piece. Basically it meant a lot of footage overall, but also a lot of material with crew in the shot.”

Unsurprisingly then, his biggest challenge was cutting everything down to 90 seconds.

He wasn’t complaining though. “It was a truly incredible experience to work with Alejandro. He was extremely hands-on." "Every day I would show him my selects on set and we would discuss the takes and throw out whatever we felt didn’t work. After that I was free to cut using those selects but we didn’t go back to the original rushes until the very end. Once we had the edit refined and knew where the problem areas were, I went back to the rushes to see if there was anything we had missed the first time around.”

The ad shows a policeman confiscate a soccer ball, only for the game to continue with an imaginary ball. “The piece requires the viewer to believe that the ball was actually there. I tried to include the most believable camera movements to enhance the believability. Luckily for me, the DOP was Emmanuel Lubezki (Oscar-nominated for Children of Men, The New World, Sleepy Hollow and A Little Princess - ed). As in performance editing, you have to go with your gut and can’t dwell on takes for too long: you either believe a take or you don’t.”

Richard edited the spot in Avid Media Composer on a Mac, as requested by the French production company. “Otherwise I would probably have stuck with Final Cut Pro,” he says. “The piece was shot on 16mm and transferred daily at Pudding with a very specific look, as set by Emmanuel and Alejandro on test clips they shot. We transferred to DigiBeta and once on the Avid we immediately sent the tapes to France for them to digitise there. After that, whenever Alejandro wanted to send them a cut, we just had to email an Avid Bin to France and they could open it there. That way you can send as many edits as you like, as well as things like Selects, with notes attached and music edits, etc. Once the director’s cut was done, all we sent was a bin with one little edit in it.”
Kevin Kriedemann