NEW YORK – PostWorks worked closely with director Nora Ephron and editor Richard Marks to complete the Academy Awards salute to New York films, which featured classic movies set in Manhattan. PostWorks provided Marks with two Avid Media Composers and an Avid Unity to whittle over six hours of footage down to four minutes.
The challenge of the project was to create a coherent thread that held the various scenes together around the theme of great New York films. The four-minute compilation is not a simple montage set to music but incorporates dialogue and sound from the selected scenes. One sequence features Al Pacino’s famous rallying chant from Dog Day Afternoon while the song “Staying Alive” from Saturday Night Fever is heard underneath. The music rises just before the picture cuts to John Travolta strutting down the street. The classic Taxi Driver (pictured) was also featured.
Source footage came from DVDs. PostWorks allowed Marks to offline edit uncompressed. The studio also did some minor color-correction to fix occasional glitches in the DVD material. Engineer Matt Foglia collaborated with Ephron and Marks on the final mix.
