Paul Day is an editor who has worked in film and television for 20 years, and is one of the founders of the newly formed Canadian Cinema Editors association. His credits include the series Dead Like Me, Odyssey 5, This Is Wonderland and The 4400. He’s received nominations for outstanding picture editing awards from the Directors Guild of Canada and the Geminis. He’s now cutting season two of The Movie Network/Movie Central series The Weight, about two cops living in a suburban wasteland.

I look at editing like cooking. In this recipe for The Weight, many talented people are out there grocery shopping for series creators George F. Walker and Dani Romain to get the right ingredients.

This recipe is full of great things to tantalize the senses – hard drama, comedy, tenderness, action and so much more. It all gets put into my kitchen, and with a few months of simmering, basting and letting it all boil down, we have a great show. And I don’t have to eat any more elephant…

Back in the summer of 2007, when I was asked to cut all eight episodes of season one of The Weight – virtually simultaneously – I looked at the editing like eating an elephant, one bite at a time – one cut at a time.

As an editor, I’m trained to concentrate on story as the buckets of dailies get loaded into my Avid. George and Dani (creators of This Is Wonderland) have such a strong grasp on these characters – where they came from and where they are going – that I could concentrate on eating the elephantine 57 days of dailies. I got through it with what I think is some of my best work.

We tackled some giants in the process, like combining three episodes into two, different types of music and transitions, finding the right editing style for each episode, and doing it all in four months after filming stopped.

Season two of The Weight started filming midsummer, and after almost 50 days of shooting, I’m feeling the pressure once more – another elephant to eat.

With so much story rolling around in my head, I basically just tackle one scene at a time, one cut at a time.

The entire eight episodes are block shot, which means that I could potentially get material for all eight episodes on any given day. I get the dailies in the morning, jump right in, and cut all day. Around 6 p.m., a cup of tea in hand, I sit and watch an episode or two – get a feeling for the pacing of the show. Often I walk to my car boggled.

I do a lot of finessing (sound FX, temp music, creating exciting transitions) on all the episodes, and I won’t be doing that ‘fine-tuning’ until the end of the 12 weeks of shooting. I get up every morning thinking of every scene in every episode. Well, sort of…

Some perspective: for all of season two, there are approximately 426 scenes covering 523 pages. Many multiple-character scenes (sometimes as much as seven speaking parts) will have as much as 90 minutes of dailies. On average, I receive between two-and-a-half to three hours of dailies each day – not including the additional hours of transitional material that come in sporadically. In the end, I’ll have about 175 hours of material on my Avid to cut down to eight 50-55-minute episodes.

For season one, we reinvented the wheel a few times to come up with the right rhythm and pacing. What evolved is that many characters have their own specific editing style. With some main characters I would use more reaction shots – others have the annoying tendency to not let a character finish the other’s line, deliberately making him or her cut the other actor off. It makes it very real and organic in a way.

Utilizing two cameras for the entire shoot, directors Gail Harvey and Shawn Alex Thompson collect a shopping cart full of coverage and offer up many options in the cutting room.

George and Dani love fast-paced dialogue… really fast-paced dialogue. Characters jump off the screen as they get into some heated scenes. It’s so much fun to cut them, and the actors are all great to watch sinking their teeth into some fantastic dialogue.

Movies like The Bourne Ultimatum and The Departed were inspirations for me. Those films, like our series, go against almost everything that picture editors typically work hard at – creating a seamless, unnoticeable cutting style. The Weight is fragmented and fast – but it works so well for the material that it takes on a life of its own. It’s exciting to watch months later in a mix theater here at Technicolor with all the great sound work done to it.

Andrew Coutts is my assistant and a fine collaborator. He handles not only the loading of the dailies but he cuts the recaps and pre-caps, as we call them – a piece that comes at the end of each episode telling what’s coming up in the next week. He keeps the machine well-oiled and we talk endlessly about the shape of the series as it unfolds in our cutting rooms.