Jonathan Baltrusaitis is the Calgary-based editor of In a World Created by a Drunken God, a made-for-TV movie based on the play by Drew Hayden Taylor about a half-native man who is approached to donate a kidney to the father he never knew. The Pyramid Productions movie is slated to premiere on APTN in 2008.

This fall at Pyramid Productions we hosted a director in one of our edit suites for daily cutting sessions – despite the fact that he was 3,700 kilometers away.

After Montreal-based director John Hazlett (These Girls) came to Calgary to direct In a World Created by a Drunken God, Pyramid’s first made-for-television movie, he was able to spend only about 10 days in the edit suite with me.

It was barely enough time to establish a cutting style and finish a first rough cut; there was clearly much more work to be done. We were then faced with a workflow based around a painfully slow feedback loop: edit a ‘pass’ of the film, print a DVD, courier it to Montreal, wait for notes to come back via e-mail; repeat. Even if John could return for another stint in the suite later, it seemed a cumbersome way to work in the interim.

Our solution came through Apple’s iChat video conferencing software. I had been using it to keep in touch with my relatives for more than a year, and it had usurped phone calls altogether because of the extra level of intimacy video brings. While chatting, my family often commented that it felt as if we were ‘sitting around the kitchen table’ together despite our being scattered between Toronto, Calgary and Australia. With a little reorganization of my desk space, I was able to create a similar illusion in my edit suite at Pyramid.

I pointed a video camera at my HD monitor and hooded it to eliminate reflections on the screen. The camera’s signal was sent to the Mac through a FireWire cable and then broadcast to John in Montreal via iChat.

I saw John sitting at his desk in my iChat window, and we could talk to each other in real time. As I edited the film (in Apple’s Final Cut Pro), John watched the changes happen on the monitor from the comfort of his living room. He commented: ‘At first it was a little strange, but once we got working it felt just like I was in the room with Jonathan – it started to feel very normal.’

There were some technical limitations. The video signal occasionally stuttered or was dropped when either of our networks became too busy. The iChat video signal was also compressed, which meant that the resolution John saw wasn’t crystal clear.

Despite these limitations, he agreed that the technology was a godsend considering how it enabled us to work – and considering that it was virtually free. iChat comes pre-installed on every Mac and works over a standard DSL or cable Internet connection, and there are no subscription fees.

John and I would call each other on iChat and pick up where we had left off the day before, often editing together for five or six hours. Once or twice a day, I would upload a higher-resolution file of a scene to my iDisk (an Apple FTP service) that John could then watch for greater visual detail. It took about 10 minutes to process and upload a scene in the background while we continued working. The process worked remarkably well, and our iChat editing sessions were just as productive as if we had been in the same room.

Technologies to enable collaborations like this will undoubtedly improve. The latest version of Apple’s operating system already makes it possible to share desktop screens via iChat.

Given the choice, John and I would like to be in my suite at Pyramid when we work together again. But working via video conferencing is definitely the next best thing to being there.