Toronto’s Smash Editorial was founded in 1995 by editor Barry Farrell to do commercial and feature work. The shop has found a niche in both markets with an approach that focuses on creative accountability and control, although Farrell acknowledges that the Canadian commercial market has proved a tougher nut to smash for the four-person operation.

Smash recently completed work on Deepa Mehta’s feature Earth, which entailed editing as well as the creation of the opening titles and graphics. The film is the latest among the shop’s feature work, which includes two other Mehta projects, Camilla and Fire.

‘The goal of the shop when it was created was to provide a full-service editorial shop,’ says Farrell. ‘And it allowed me to become a supervising editor.’

For Farrell, steering the shop means assuming complete responsibility and maintaining creative control of a project throughout the entire process.

‘For feature films it’s crucial because everything has to work together and the only way it can is if there is someone who is making all these processes seamless for the director,’ he says.

The Smash team of post producer Sean Atkinson, editor/designer Robert Kraus and first assistant Leanne McCarthy delivered a full post solution for Earth using the shop’s own Mac-based Adobe After Effects system.

Kraus, who has a background working in graphic design in Prague, created all the graphics and opening titles for the feature using the After Effects system, allowing a cost-effective means of delivering the project and maintaining creative control, says Farrell.

‘Having our own gear we could put more into the project,’ says Farrell. ‘We would never have been able to create something as elaborate as the opening title sequence for Earth if we had to pay an expensive hourly rate for an out-of-house system.’

For Earth, the Smash team ‘figured out how to get film resolution on a Mac,’ says Farrell. This consisted of incorporating huge Avid-type drives on the system to accommodate the large amount (14Gb worth) of data involved in the project.

After creating and compositing the opening, the shop went to Command Post/Toybox to download the hard drives into that facility’s Domino film resolution system.

‘That took two hours rather than two or three weeks,’ says Farrell. ‘But it also meant we had full creative freedom to spend as much time as we wanted and put more into the project. It also allowed us to do complete post of the movie using four people instead of a crew of 10 or 12.’

Smash worked on the project from January to August, including sabbaticals for spot work in California.

Set in 1940s India, Earth is a two-hour film about the partition of that country. For the opening sequence, Mehta wanted a look that reflected the warm natural color palette she used throughout the film but that was also an impactful echo of Earth’s theme of disunity.

It was also Farrell’s imperative to create something different, ‘something that had the fragmentation of the politics and the color palette and that didn’t look like another copy of Seven.’

The result is what Farrell calls elegantly fragmented, with the title coming up in broken blocks which eventually join together to form a distinct word.

‘If you use the right technology it becomes invisible,’ says Farrell of the process for Earth, and for post on the whole. ‘Then you can operate more creatively and efficiently.’

Since the shop did not have unlimited resources to invest in equipment for creating effects, the gear solutions had to be efficient and allow artistic freedoms, says Farrell; hence the After Effects system used on Earth in conjunction with, among other things, a photocopier and a Hi-8 camera.

‘It’s all in the way you use things,’ says Farrell. ‘It gives you artistic freedom; if you’re not relying on one specific software function or button you’re relying on creating something from nothing and you’re exploring more.’

Farrell acknowledges that there was some risk involved in taking the technical route Smash chose for Earth, but as he has opined on a number of occasions, risk is an instrumental part of the creative process and one that he feels is in short supply on the Canadian commercial side of the industry.

Farrell estimates that about 95% of his commercial work comes from outside Canada, a figure that is higher than he would like, and results from a similar strain of the phenomenon that causes Canadian agencies to employ American directors.

‘I wish our business took more risks,’ says Farrell. ‘The level of acceptance I have in the u.s. is far greater than I have here, and that’s based on risk taking. Americans will risk working with someone new; when they look at a reel, they’re looking at the editorial, not the commercial and who did it.’

Smash is looking to gain more ‘selected’ feature jobs as well as continue its commercial work. Smash recently did editing work for Helix out of Palomar Pictures and for Kodak, edited by Kraus, out of Saatchi & Saatchi New York. Farrell also recently did a job for Bell South with director Paul Cade, with whom Farrell worked on short film by the director called Fine Line.