Dylan Tichenor, editor of Brokeback Mountain, participated in a discussion with Ken McGorry of Post for the keynote of NAB Post Production World 2006. Tichenor began as an apprentice, and then assistant and associate, editor for Robert Altman films in the early ’90s. Back then, as an apprentice editor, he worked on a KEM flatbed. The editor would cut frames off a reel of film, and hand them to Tichenor for him to tag and file. Often these would be requested for retrieval later – with both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.

“Editors today in the nonlinear world, for all its advantages, consciously have to let assistants into their process,” Tichenor says. “Because they’re in another room with their own computers and their telephones.” They wouldn’t come into his suite unless he invited them, which makes it more difficult to pass on the art and craft of editing. Another blessing and curse of the nonlinear process is that editors “can try 100 times as many things” as they could before. Of course, “Sometimes it’s better to have a little more time than the computer requires” in order to reconsider a cut.

Tichenor illustrated some important aims of creative editing using examples from Brokeback Mountain and Boogie Nights. For character development, he screened the scene in Brokeback in which Ennis (Heath Ledger) receives a postcard from Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) as his wife (Michelle Williams) looks on. Tichenor explains that throughout shooting, Ledger often made affectionate gestures toward his wife, but the character needed to be depicted as more aloof. In this particular scene, Tichenor made a “kind of awkward” cut to delete one of these gestures and ultimately serve the story better. From Boogie Nights and Brokeback, Tichenor screened montage clips that effectively convey the passage of time.