The featurette below is undoubtedly a 5-minute commercial for Adobe’s Premiere Pro editing software, which long-time David Fincher collaborator Kirk Baxter used on Fincher’s latest film Gone Girl. However, the video also provides some insight into the editing process used by Baxter and his team to help bring Gone Girl to the screen, and to do so without bogging down the post-production process. According to Baxter, Fincher’s newest film is “about a decaying marriage and the repercussions of what happens due to that decay.”
He continues: “Then you’ve also got the whole sort of investigation, which is kind of part of the mystery, but you’re experiencing the mystery through the lead character and you’re experiencing the mystery through the people that are trying to catch him. There’s a lot of moving parts.”
Using Premiere Pro gave Baxter and his staff the ability to bring visual effects closer in the post-production workflow to the editing task. Baxter explains:
“I have the same sort of disease as Fincher, where I want everything to be done as soon as possible, straight away, so you’re reacting and working with finished things… It’s always about story, it’s constantly about story, it is all about getting the movie moving at the pace that it works best.“
I seem to always find featurettes for Fincher’s films interesting; his movies utilize technology that, though not obvious on-screen, works in sync with the story and the performances to make for a polished final project. This video for Gone Girl is no different, even if the video below is basically a 5-minute commercial for Adobe’s editing software. Give it a look to catch a glimpse of the process used by Baxter and his team.
