In Apple TV+'s Sunny, Rashida Jones plays Suzie, an American woman living in Kyoto, Japan, whose life is upended when her husband and son disappear in a mysterious plane crash. She is given Sunny, a new class of domestic robots made by her husband’s electronics company, and at first the robot helps to fill the void in her life. The two gradually develop an unexpected friendship, and together uncover the dark truth of what really happened to Suzie’s family.
Amelia Allwarden served as an editor on the show and worked closely with Sunny's composer and sound design team to navigate the show's mix of tones, which range from dark comedy and drama to mystery and thriller. Here, she shares insight into her work on the series, which began streaming in July and spans 10 episodes.
Hi Amelia! How did you get involved in editing Sunny and what was your approach to the project?
“I first got involved with Sunny in early 2022, when I read the first two scripts for the series. As soon as I read the first two scripts, I knew I wanted to be a part of the project. The scripts were such an interesting balance of tones. They were really funny, but they were also incredibly thrilling and mysterious, and I wanted to know what happened next. I have a background in editing multiple genres of television. I have experience in drama, comedy, mystery, sci-fi and horror, so it was really fun to be able to read a script that blended some of those elements.
“When I was actually working on the project, my approach was really to draw from the background that I have in all those different genres and kind of apply them on a case-by-case basis and scene-by-scene basis, depending on when it was needed. I really wanted to come from a place of editing that felt true to Suzie‘s emotional state. She’s a really closed-off character who is going through incredible grief and loneliness, and I felt that it was important to reflect that in the editing style that I use. Sometimes, she’s really using dark humor to cope, and sometimes she’s actually breaking down and so terribly lonely and sad, and showing us as the audience that emotion. So I would change up my editing style, depending on those moments or the feeling that we needed to embody.”
What was the timeline on the project and your day-to-day workflow like?
“We started filming in Japan in the summer of 2022, and that’s when the three of us editors started on the series. We were all editing the series from Los Angeles, so we shot the series for six months, and after production wrapped (showrunner) Katie Robbins and (EP/director) Lucy Tcherniak returned to Los Angeles, where we all edited the show together.
“When we were in production, our workflow was receiving the footage from Japan daily, checking all of the footage, making sure everything was good and assembling all the scenes. Sometimes we would work remotely with Katie and Lucy, but it was pretty rare because of the time difference between Japan and Los Angeles. That’s not to say we didn’t have a few editing sessions on Evercast, where Katie was in a van to set first thing in the morning in Japan, and we were working late at night on Evercast with her here in Los Angeles. Once they got back from Japan, we all worked together in-person editing the series, which I think was really important to the way this series came together. Working in-person allowed me and the other editors (Taichi Erskine and Tyler Cook) to bounce around in each other‘s rooms and look at each other’s scenes and kind of work together to shape the story because it could kind of be edited in so many different ways.”
Tell us about the tools you were using?
“We edited Sunny using Avid Media Composer. It was really important for us, since the show is mostly in Japanese, for us to be able to easily translate and work with foreign language footage. We definitely wouldn’t have been able to edit without using Script Sync in Avid. One of our assistant editors, Charlize Toratani, speaks Japanese fluently, and she would translate and write out the phonetic spelling of those translations for us so that we could understand phonetically where we were in the actors’ performance. She would also make notes for us in the script, like if there were takes that had incorrect pronunciations or other notes that would be helpful for us given the fact that we didn’t speak Japanese.
“We also worked with our amazing visual effects editor, Andrew Trainor, who did all of our temp visual effects using Avid. We required plenty of split screens and CG movements for Sunny when she was at her physical limitation, if we wanted to change how her face looked in a shot, or slightly adjust the visual performance. It was key for us to work (in) Avid so that as we were editing each scene, if we wanted to slip a shot just a little bit, we had all the tools in there at our disposal so that we could change the shot and not have to send a shot back out, or request more handles or anything like that. It just made our workflow really easy and simple.”
What were some of the challenges of editing Sunny?
“One of the biggest challenges of editing Sunny was that we were working with a live practical robot. It was really nice for Rashida acting so that she could act with the actress Joanna Sotomura, who plays Sunny, live on-set. Joanna was there just off-camera, with a helmet on her head, so that her facial expressions could be projected live onto the face of the Sunny puppet. There was a speaker in the Sunny puppet, so that Rashida could hear her, and they could talk back and forth, which made it really nice so that Rashida wasn’t acting off of a tennis ball or something like that, but it also meant that we were going to have delays and issues with physical limitations of a puppet. The puppet was being controlled by several roboticists, so sometimes it’s not always going to be in the position that you want when you’re editing the scene, or maybe she’s not going to be as fast as you want, so we sometimes had to do some manipulation in editing to make sure that Sunny was doing the right things at the right time…Because we could pair any of Joanna‘s vocal performances with any of Sunny’s facial expressions captured on the day, it meant that we could elevate Sunny’s performance to our exact precision using Joanna’s abundance of wonderful performances.”
Can you share one or two scenes that were most interesting for you to cut?
“One of the sequences that was my favorite to edit in the series was in Episode 4 - the sequence in the sauna. I loved editing that sequence because it’s mostly in Japanese, and I get to play with the amazing performances of the Yakuza. I also get to juxtapose some comedy and some drama, which is my favorite thing to infuse together as an editor. The comedy being Suzie and Mixxy stuck in the sauna, getting hotter and hotter, using a can to cool themselves down, while it’s intercut with this really serious stuff going on with the Yakuza. Then, of course, it escalates into full drama when Tetsu beats Botan in the bath, so I really loved being able to switch gears really quickly there and making it super violent.
“Another one of my favorite sequence was editing Episode 8, when Masa’s in the cabin going through Hikkikomori. I loved editing the sequence together where he and Sho are working together to figure out his programming. I thought it was such a beautifully-shot sequence by the director, Dearbhla Walsh, and it really was fun and beautiful to play with Hidetoshi Nishijima’s performance. I loved being able to dive more into the headspace of Masa, and he gave me such an incredible playground to be able to play in terms of his performance. I also just thought Sho was so cute and that he was also a practical robot, and had a lot of fun things that he did physically, so it was really fun to put together.”