UKRAINE: ON THE FRONT LINE
Special forces leader Hummer takes cover from Russian tank fire
never thought I could be cruel, I never thought I’d want people dead,’ Throughout the film, Olly was always asking ‘why are you doing this? why does this mean so much?’
...That was the encapsulation of all their answers.”
The next step was for editor and filmmaker to talk exhaustively about the scenes and events, to sketch out what happened in each location and with each character, how the footage might work in term’s of the film’s narrative and themes. After five days, they had a rough structure of five chapters containing a handful of potential scenes in each, with well over half the film already on the cutting room floor.
This was all done remotely, using Lucid Link software, combined with Post Lab, so that both Dixon-Spain, based in the Midlands, and Lambert, based on the South coast, could connect to a central Avid project, just like a Nexus.
“The way I cut is slightly idiosyncratic,” says Dixon-Spain. “I don’t do a long assembly. I cut quite quickly…We talk about a sequence - say the mortar mission on the first day - and I
will pull it, knowing all that information we discussed - how he felt about it, where it sits in the film, in our story or proposed narrative. And I would pretty much fine cut it straight away. For me, I need to understand the tone to know whether or how it’s going to work and whether it’s going to fit. It has the added effect that I can give it to Olly and that might inspire other stuff and we can get to a pretty good cut quite quickly.”
FEELING OF FEAR
Watching the rushes from that first trip, driving with Kostenko to the front line, Lambert explained that he was terrified. Dixon-Spain needed to ensure that the viewer feels this fear. “How Olly was feeling, sometimes that conveys itself through the rushes and sometimes it didn’t come across as he felt it… For that drive, we recut it a few times. In the end it was brevity, the pace, that conveys the drama.”
Mike Radford at the BBC was thinking the same thing and persuaded Lambert to create a first-person narrative to ensure that the impact of Lambert’s personal journey was not lost.
Winter 2022
televisual.com 147
“One of the things I like
about working with Tom is his complete impatience with anything that isn’t working,”
OLLY LAMBERT FILMMAKER
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