Craft
Editing is the department you notice only when it fails
A cut is a decision about attention. Most of what people call pacing is somebody choosing when to look away.
Sloane Mercer
Editor, After the Trailer
Sloane edits After the Trailer and is more interested in the second act than the opening weekend.
Contact Sloane through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
56 articles
Craft
Lighting tells you where to look and how to feel about it
Cinematography is often discussed as composition. Most of its effect is contrast, direction and colour.
Streaming
Release strategy shapes what films get made
Whether something opens wide, platforms slowly or goes straight to streaming is decided before shooting, and it changes the film.
Archive
Film restoration is interpretation, not just cleaning
Every restoration makes choices about what the film looked like. Those choices are contested and rarely explained.
Archive
Repertory programming is curation, and it is under pressure
Somebody chooses what old films are shown, in what order and beside what. That choice is the whole value.
Craft
Costume tells you who someone is before they speak
Costume design is character work, continuity management and a logistics operation, usually in that order of visibility and reverse…
Craft
A lot of the dialogue you hear was recorded after the shoot
Re-recording dialogue in a booth is routine rather than a rescue. The difficulty is matching a performance given on a set months…
Craft
Stunt work is engineering, and rehearsal is the safety system
Screen action is designed to be survivable and repeatable. What looks improvised has usually been rehearsed to the frame.
Craft
Prosthetics have to survive a close lens and a twelve-hour day
Makeup on screen is a materials problem. It has to look like skin, move like skin and stay intact under lights for longer than…
On Screen
Genre is a contract, and breaking it has to be paid for
Genre sets what an audience is promised. Subverting that promise works only when the film gives something back in exchange.
On Screen
The first ten minutes teach you how to watch the rest
An opening sets the register, the rules and the rate at which information arrives. Audiences calibrate fast and hold that…
On Screen
Fear is built from anticipation, and the reveal spends it
Horror technique is mostly about controlling what the audience expects and when. The monster is the least interesting part of the…
On Screen
Adapting a book means deciding what the book was actually about
A faithful adaptation is not a transcription. The medium changes what can be interior, what can be compressed and what has to be…
Streaming
Churn is the number that decides what a streaming service commissions
Subscriber cancellation rate governs strategy more than viewing figures do. It explains release patterns, genre mix and why some…
Streaming
Licensed libraries do more work than originals get credit for
The shows people actually watch on a service are frequently ones it did not make. Licensing is where a large share of the money and…
Streaming
Your streaming catalogue is a licensing map of where you live
Two people paying the same subscription in different countries are buying different products. The gap is contractual and largely…
Streaming
Autoplay is an editorial decision disguised as a convenience
Interface design on a streaming service decides what you consider watching. Countdown timers, autoplaying previews and row order do…
Industry
A script spends most of its life in development and most of it dies there
The gap between a project existing and a project shooting is measured in years. Understanding what happens in that gap explains…
Industry
An awards campaign is a marketing budget with a deadline
Prizes are decided by voters who have to be reached, reminded and persuaded. That work is a professional discipline with its own…
Industry
Franchises exist because marketing costs do not scale with quality
The economic advantage of a continuing series is not that audiences prefer it. It is that you do not have to explain it from…
Industry
Cinemas make their money at the counter, not the screen
Exhibition economics are the least discussed part of the business and they explain ticket prices, programming choices and why the…
Series
The showrunner exists because television is a production problem
The role combines head writer, executive producer and factory manager. It exists because somebody has to make hundreds of decisions…
Series
The pilot did a job that straight-to-series orders now have to do elsewhere
Ordering a single episode to test an idea was expensive and wasteful. Skipping it removed a rehearsal that some series turn out to…
Series
Act breaks survive in shows that have no adverts
The structure invented to hold an audience across a commercial break turned out to be good storytelling architecture, and it…
Series
The limited series label is a commissioning category, not a promise
A story designed to end is a genuinely different structure. A story labelled as ending because that is how it was sold is a…
Series
Writing around a departing actor is a structural problem, not a scripting one
When someone leaves a continuing series, the story has to absorb a hole it was not built for. How that is handled reveals how…
Series
Multi-camera comedy is a different machine from single-camera
Two production models, two performance styles, two economies. The choice is made before a word is written and it determines almost…
Archive
Orphan films are the ones nobody has the legal standing to save
A large body of film survives physically and cannot be restored or shown because no one knows who owns it. Copyright outlives the…
Archive
Preservation is a refrigeration problem before it is a scanning problem
Digitising a film does not preserve it. Keeping the original element cold, dry and stable is what buys the decades in which better…
Archive
Public domain is a date, and the date is not the same everywhere
Whether a film is free to use depends on where you are, when it was made, whether formalities were observed and what else is…
Archive
Silent films were never silent, and the music was not standardised
Screenings had live accompaniment that varied by venue, city and night. Any modern score attached to a silent film is an…
Archive
Most old films exist in more than one version, and nobody tells you which you have
Censorship, territory, running time, television and later revisions all produced variants. The copy in front of you is one of…
Archive
Television was erased on purpose because tape cost more than memory
Programmes were wiped so the tape could be reused. What survives from early television survives largely by accident, through…
Archive
Trailers are historical documents about how films were sold
Marketing material records what distributors believed audiences wanted at a given moment. As archive objects, trailers frequently…
Archive
Colourisation, upscaling and frame interpolation are edits, not upgrades
Processing old material to suit modern displays changes what the image is. The techniques have legitimate uses and none of them are…
Craft
The person keeping the actor sharp is not looking at the actor
Focus is set from measured distances and rehearsed marks, not from judging the picture by eye. On a fast lens the margin is a few…
Craft
Making one afternoon last a week of shooting
Sunlight moves, weather changes and a scene has to appear to happen in a single continuous stretch of daylight. Managing that is a…
On Screen
Voiceover is a second author arguing with the picture
Narration adds a voice that knows things the camera does not. Whether that enriches a film or apologises for it depends on when it…
On Screen
Where people stand is the first draft of the scene
Blocking decides what the camera can see, what an audience infers about power, and how long the day will take. It happens before a…
On Screen
A payoff lands only if the setup was doing something else
Planting information so it registers without announcing itself is one of the hardest technical problems in screenwriting. Most…
On Screen
Tone is a promise, and breaking it costs the audience something
A film teaches viewers what kind of thing it is within minutes. Changing that contract later is possible, but it has to be prepared…
Streaming
Bundles quietly rebuilt the package that streaming was supposed to replace
Services that once sold themselves individually now arrive grouped, discounted and attached to other products. The economics that…
Streaming
Titles vanish from services for accounting reasons, not editorial ones
A film disappearing from a catalogue usually reflects an expiring licence or a write-down decision. Neither has anything to do with…
Streaming
The gap between the cinema and the sofa is negotiated, and it keeps moving
How long a film plays before it reaches the home is a contract term, not a tradition. Shortening it changes who takes the risk on a…
Streaming
A title is only findable if somebody described it properly
Behind every search result and recommendation row sits a description written by a person or generated by a system. Bad description…
Industry
Nobody enters this business the way the interviews describe
Entry routes into screen work are informal, geographically concentrated and financially exclusionary. The pathway stories that…
Industry
A film is not finished until the delivery list is complete
Between the final cut and a title appearing anywhere sits a long schedule of technical items that must be produced to…
Series
Long-running shows need a memory, and somebody has to be it
After a few seasons no single person holds every established fact. Managing that accumulated record is a specific job with specific…
Series
Television is edited while it is still being shot
A series cuts, mixes and delivers earlier episodes while later ones are on the floor. Overlapping schedules explain most of what…
Series
A show shot across years has to decide whether time passes
Performers age on a real calendar while characters live on a fictional one. Reconciling the two is a decision every long-running…
Archive
The film stock that burns is the film stock that survived
Nitrate base was dangerous, chemically unstable and optically superior. What replaced it was safer and introduced a decay problem…
Archive
The colour you remember was a chemical process with its own rules
Historic colour systems did not simply record what was in front of the camera. Each one imposed a palette, and restoration has to…
Archive
Old films were cut before release, and the cuts are often what survived
Classification regimes across the last century removed material at national and local level. What circulates today is frequently a…
Archive
A projectionist used to be running a live performance
Presenting a film on film required continuous manual work, judgement and repair. Automation removed the labour and, with it, a set…
Archive
Home movies are the archive nobody planned to keep
Amateur film records ordinary life that no professional production had any reason to photograph. It is also the material most…
Archive
Most of the world heritage sits outside the archives that get funded
Preservation capacity is distributed very unevenly, and it does not correspond to where films were made. The consequence is a…