Editor Ali Comperchio introduces the world of Fallout with remarkable ease. It’s no surprise she’s nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing For A Drama Series for her work on the series premiere, “The End.” She juggles an array of characters, exposition, and extreme tones with a deceptive effortlessness.
None of it’s easy, but the editor makes the loads of character and world-building look easy.
Comperchio crafts an engrossing, entertaining hour in which the characters and rules are established. Everything and everyone receives the proper amount of care. It’s weighty yet light, which is a fine balance Comperchio recently spoke with Immersive Media about nailing.
With the opening, you tell so much story with so much emotion, showing Cooper and his kid at the beginning of “The End.” How’d you land on how much time that opening and those emotions required?
Yeah, that scene was definitely one that we worked on for a while in terms of finding the tone for the scene before we reveal it’s turning the wrong way. You want to feel the intimacy between Walton’s character and his daughter, and you want to get the sense that something’s up. These people are at a party, despite the fact that there may be events in the world going on that they’re trying to ignore it.
It was really important that you have a chance to connect with Cooper and his daughter, so that when the event happens, it’s very tense. Sound is an incredibly important part of my process and it is to our director, Jonathan Nolan, too. We played a lot with when to bring in the score, when to drop out the sound effects, and let it just go kind of high end and make you feel the importance of what’s about to happen.
How was working with the VFX team on the shot of them on the horse and the blasts? How’d you time that just right?
That was a little bit of back and forth with VFX. Jay Worth is our VFX supervisor, and he and his team are great. I am very much a timing by instinct editor. I kept adding frames to the end of the shot as the animation came in, because when we first started cutting it, it was a blank plate with no explosions. Our music editor had helped us find this beautiful kind of tense piece of score that was very minimal.
As the nuke glass animation happened, then I would retime it in the AVID and pass it back to the VFX team. Then they would do another pass, but we kept making it longer and longer and longer. Then it is a little bit about when to cut it off to get to that full height, that filling the frame and then cut off.
The other challenging but also fun part is figuring out the audience is in such a gut punch right now, absorbing the main title and ash onto the frame, and then when to punch them in the face with a whole different tonal shift with introducing Lucy’s character in the vault. That was a lot of fun. I would just play the timeline and stop it where it felt like, all right, this is where we go.
With those tonal, shifts, how much delicacy do they take?
It’s playing around with it. It’s a little bit instinctual, and then when you get to the point where you’re sharing the cut with Jonah and the producers, with our showrunners, Graham [Wagner] and Geneva [Robertson-Dworet], you kind of feel the reaction people have when they see it for the first time. You can feel it when it’s right.
There’s probably a large part of the job where it’s just feeling rather than something you can put into words, right?
Yeah, it is. It’s a little bit about making people wait a little longer than they think they’re going to have to wait. Switching gears before expecting you to switch gears, that’s where the kind of punch with Lucy’s montage comes in.
For Lucy’s world in the vault, did you want a sense of perfection in the pacing, or did you want something to be a little bit off as well?
Honestly, it was less about perfection or feeling something a little bit off at that time. Well, I guess maybe always in the vault things should feel a little bit off. It’s not quite cut like a metronome, not that rhythmic. It’s more about how the shots flowed from one to another to give you just enough of a taste and fit with Lucy’s speech and the reactions to the weird things she’s saying.
So much clarity in the chaos during the attack on the vault. How challenging was bringing together all those moving pieces?
That vault scene was one of the most challenging scenes to cut, in part because there were so many camera setups. It was filmed on three different stages, one of them a volume stage, three different spaces spread out over weeks apart. We also shot on film, so there’s a little bit longer time in dailies processing, because the film would have to be shipped from New York back to LA to process the photo chem. Then the dailies were organized and sent to me.
It was a lot to just wrap my head around creating the space and making it feel seamless. We did start that scene ahead of time with some animation before shooting. Jonah invited me to go to New York to be on set for the first block of shooting, so that I could work some of those things while production was still going. We could make sure that we have everything we need while there.
Jonah has such a strong sense of point of view and world building, and part of that is that you’re experiencing the scene through someone’s point of view. In this case, it’s Lucy’s point of view. Part of the tension building up to the raider scene is her being alone in the apartment with Monty, her new husband, and starting to hear that something’s off and then getting deeper and deeper after she has to fight him and then steps outside her door and starts seeing victims.
And then because that entire sequence is in slow motion, it allows you to cut faster in a way, because your eye can take in what’s happening in the frame faster when there’s not a lot of movement, even when the frame is busy and colorful and beautifully framed. So, it actually allows you to jump through. If we’d cut that sequence in real time, it would’ve been a lot longer. In addition, it allows you to get a sense of the tone and feel the point of view of the world with Lucy.
You communicate so much information with ease in the pilot. Was there a lot of back-and-forth about what exposition to keep and cut?
We did some restructuring and definitely trimmed lines to get down to time. With Jonah and everything, again, it’s a sense of feeling. Is it lagging anywhere? Everyone is constantly asking themselves those questions of, do we have enough? I think one of the things that allows us to pack in so much information in an entertaining way in the pilot is, we’re shifting gears so many times.
Shooting on film was a part of you like, oh, let’s break out the old moviola. Did you want to cut any by hand or go for the perfect marriage between old and new school?
Man, I think with the amount of setups that fight scenes in the vault, they ran through the alphabet into a third time for the number of camera setups. I think it was scene 24 and went through… It starts at 24 and then A and B, C, D. It was so many. If we had had to actually cut film, that would’ve been tough. But I did learn to cut film on a flatbed, and I am incredibly grateful that I had that opportunity.
I do think it gives you this type of instinctual sense of timing that is maybe harder to train when you can do anything non-linear. When you have a work print that’s very expensive for you as a college student to get made and then you have to decide where to cut it, you want to do that as few times as possible.
Would you recommend cutting film to aspiring editors?
Definitely. And sound too, like how to build and layer sound and use it along with the film. It helps to have an understanding of everything that goes into making a film, but also, again, that tangible sense of timing is a difficult thing to build. I would equate it to how in black and white, I could be wrong, you actually have to be better at lighting to do black and white than color. Color hides mistakes.
I mean, that’s an oversimplification for sure, but it’s a similar thing. It’s like how Picasso could paint a really good detailed photo, realistic painting. He knew how to do that before he broke it down. It’s understanding your craft, I guess. Then you make more choices, and I think that’s harder to do when you can do anything in the world of a non-linear computer.
Did you find yourself cutting different characters with varying rhythms?
I think it’s on a scene by scene basis, because they all have scenes that are a little bit lighter versus more tense. So, that scene with Max and the head cleric is another scene where you want to feel like you’re waiting a little bit longer for things to happen.
In terms of cutting with feeling, as you do, what was your feeling about how to go about the Ghoul’s introduction?
God, that was mean. Every scene was a delight to cut, even when it was challenging on this project, that scene was so much fun to me. I actually would’ve left it longer if I could have, because I just enjoyed watching Walton crack all his bones and take the time to look around. Giving him a moment, engaging with each character individually, it’s about making that feel you’re waiting a little bit longer than you want to for him to do something.
I could be misremembering, but the script had described him as very catlike, relaxed, but then he pounces, that is how I interpreted it. So even when we make changes in the scene from the script, you’re always honoring the tone and the intention that was there and what Jonah shot the scene with.
Looking back at your experience on the show, what did you find most fulfilling about cutting Fallout?
A couple of things. One is there’s so much nonverbal storytelling, particularly in the first couple episodes. You’re really leaning on the editor to find the pacing for that, so that’s challenging, but also really rewarding. Again, so many tonal shifts and finding the pacing and timing and when to switch gears that.
I thought the way that the showrunners and Jonah approached it, creating an original characters and original story in that world, was really great. It is an immense amount to make sure that it works for people who aren’t fans of the game, as well, as it works for gamers. I felt a lot of pressure in that way, and then to see how it’s been received, it ends up feeling very rewarding.
Fallout is available to stream on Prime.
