Contenders – Editors Chris Dickens and Melanie Oliver on Les Misérables

"For the new movie version of the hit theatrical show Les Misérables, the filmmakers engaged in a rigorous 70-day shoot with musical sequences realized live on set. Aboard from the beginning was editor Chris Dickens who faced the technical challenges of cutting a production without the traditional method of editing a musical by syncing the music in post to lip-synced on-set shots performed to playback. “It’s more like cutting as you would a straight drama with sync sound and putting the music on later,” Dickens stated. “In that way, it was more the kind of workflow that would be used on any movie. The tempo may be different from take to take. [Director] Tom Hooper wanted the actors to flex their muscles and give a proper performance and develop it as they were shooting.”

Without question, with actors on set listening to a live piano accompaniment through a small earpiece, not only would creating final musical performances from a vocal standpoint present many options, but adding finished orchestral music after picture was locked created further editing choices. “That creates another challenge: picking the right performance to complement the music,” Dickens related. “The music was going to be finished after it was shot later, so we can change the music a bit as well if pictures are operating a different way, or if scenes are operating differently from the stage musical.”

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