First we were told by Ben Stiller that Severance won’t have another three year wait for the next season, and now he’s spilling everything about it’s making.
Well, it’s more Severance supervising editor and three time Emmy Award nominee, Geoffrey Richman, that’s giving out all the technical details – but Stiller is clearly loving working with Apple.
Richman is all in with Apple and uses a combination of his iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pro to work on editing the show.
Talking about the power of his setup he said: “In cutting the marching band [a scene from the season 2 finale] there were about 70 angles and takes to choose from, so we synced them all up in one multicam clip with banks of nine [3×3 arrays].”
“Being able to play nine angles simultaneously in real time — and switch quickly between all the different options — made it a whole lot easier to find what we wanted at any given moment.”
Apple connectivity when editing Severance
Beyond power it’s connectivity that he wants to shout about. This helped in the smooth flow of the end result by allowing him to move freely.
Richman pointed out: “I can work on my laptop and I can work on my iMac, and I can work at the post facility or I can work at Ben’s office, and as long as I’m logged into my account, everything I do shows up everywhere.”
At one point he even showed up where Ben Stiller was staying and plugged his MacBook right into the TV so they could play with the edit there and then.
That marching band scene
Music and the score were also worked on at the same time as filming, meaning composer Shapiro would send music over and Richman would listen on his iPhone and AirPods Pro 2 wherever he was.
The marching band footage organization took over a week with all the angles to pick from, with the potential for hundreds of ways to cut the scene.
“Those were definitely scenes where I was jotting down notes on my iPhone and then — to get a different perspective — I’d work on my MacBook Pro, sketching ideas while sitting on my couch or in bed, before bringing those thoughts back to my iMac,” Richman said.
