EDITING
ping pong match – with occasional interjections as Taghi asks questions.” Once complete, each category ran to around five hours.
PREMIERE PRO Adobe supported the film, working with them to adapt and develop features for Premiere Pro, setting up the cutting room and work- flow with Murch. “We were at the frontier of Premiere Pro, improving and enhancing,” says Amirani. “It handled our extraordinary amount of material well.” “There was a very nice triangle
between editor, management at Adobe and the engineers at Adobe,” says Murch. “I had this need to cut on the fly, with accurate timecodes. And I said, ‘can you do that?’ and there it was.” With the material organised, “we
began to weave the threads together,” says Murch. Murch brought composer Robert
Miller on board who blended traditional Iranian instrumentation and Western sensibilities. Murch crafted the sound design
including live recordings on location, and creating pieces of sound, such as noises for riot scenes recorded with a group of young Iranians in an alleyway in Fitzrovia. There were three associate
editors during the making of Coup 53, with one leaving owing to a hiatus in funding and another being offered a job too good to turn down. Evelyn Franks came on board before the final push. She mastered the Premiere Pro, organising the huge volume of material, as well as cutting some sequences. “There were all these very
beautifully crafted elements coming into the edit: the animation, music, motion graphics,” says Franks. She describes her role at “the nerve centre” importing material and sequences into Walter’s edit, managing, checking, matching. “Walter is incredibly creative
The film is constructed of nearly 500 hours of footage
and highly organised,” she says. “What was great with Premiere Pro was the ability to have a very organised folder structure and have multiple sequences open at one time, to dip in and out of.” Franks used customised work
spaces for example when editing in ‘sound effects’ or ‘music’ mode and she colour-coded footage in the archive, graphics and animation folders to know their status. “Purple was for finals,” she remembers. The first full assembly ran to
over eight hours, with music mixes, cliff-hangers, it had all the makings of a streamer documentary series. But there was no funding for a multipart production, so they spent the next eight months finessing it into a two-hour movie. Despite the resoundingly positive
reviews, distributors have been very shy of Coup 53, with the film ultimately releasing via VoD and limited theatrical in the US and UK. As the film became available
through online platforms, the makers of End of Empire said that the film suggested dishonesty on their part. There was then a possibility of legal action. “This had the effect of poisoning the well,” says Murch. ITV, which owns the rights to the 14
minutes of End of Empire footage appearing in Coup 53, withdrew permission for this archive which had been previously licensed. “A theoretical broomstick was stuck
into the spokes of the wheels of the film,” says Murch, for whom it was the best reviewed of all his films. In the end, ITV dropped its
objection to using the archive.. For the follow-up film, Amirani has
continued with Premiere Pro, using its new AI features, including its text to picture edit and auto transcription, which he has been running initially from his laptop. He’s used Premiere Pro Productions
which has raised the game in terms of collaborative working and managing long timelines and large projects. The Text Based Editing tool has made editing to rough cut speedier. “I keep thinking if only we had this at the beginning of Coup 53, the auto transcription is so good that we’d be doing in five minutes what it took us days to do.” While Coup 53.1 is a story in itself
Amirani hopes that the release of the coda will also raise the profile of the original feature documentary. “Strangely the film feels more timely and relevant than when it first came out.”
Summer 2023
televisual.com 117
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