Beast Games

Today on Art of the Cut, we’re speaking with the editorial team of Beast Games, including lead editor, Mack Hopkins, Nolan Ritter, Charles Kramer, ACE, Beast post supervisor Joshua Kulic, on-line post supervisor Lydiane Heckly.

Mack Hopkins is lead editor, co-host, and co-creator of Beast Games.  He’s also a credited writer on the show.

Nolan Ritter is a senior editor at the MrBeast YouTube channel in addition to his editing of Beast Games. He was also an editor on the upcoming series “The Larry David Story.”

Charles Kramer, ACE, is an Emmy-nominated editor of such shows as The Voice, The Osbourne’s, Project Greenlight and Big Brother.

Joshua Kulic is the Post Production supervisor and Executive Producer on Beast Games and MrBeast. His other TV work includes World of Waves and What Drives You.

Lydiane Heckly was a post production supervisor on Sneaker Wars: Adidas vs Puma, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, and History’s Crazy Rich Ancients. 

Welcome everybody. Thanks for being on Art of the Cut. It’s so nice to have everybody on the show. Since we have five people on the show with us today, we need to let everybody put a name with a voice. So could just say your full name and what you do on the show.

HOPKINS: My name’s Mac Hopkins. I am credited as one of the creators of the show. I lead the editing process. Weirdly, I’m also one of the co-hosts, so kind of a mixed bunch of roles there.

RITTER: Nolan Ritter. Just an editor here, but happy to be involved. I’m a senior editor at Mr. Beast YouTube channel on the main channel, and I was honored to be involved in working on the Prime show.

KRAMER: Charles Kramer, I’m one of the editors on the show, brought on through the Amazon side. It was an incredible experience to work with these guys. I’m really looking forward to season two.

KULIC: I’m Joshua Kulic. I’m the head of post over at Mr. Beast and I was an executive producer on Beast Games.

HECKLY: I’m Lydian Hackley and I was one of the post supervisor on the Beast Games.

Since we have so many people on the call, I thought what we would do is pair you off and have you vote on who gets to stay on the podcast.

KRAMER: Only if there’s bribes.

I’m kidding of course…Before we get started on some of the creative stuff, I would love to understand the editorial logistics of the show. What was the shooting schedule like for the first complete season?

KULIC: It was supposed to be a lot longer than it was. Production ended up pushing about two months.

But Jimmy was pretty adamant that we needed to hit our launch date still because it launched with Thursday Night Football on Amazon.

We started cutting in earnest the first week of September and then delivered all 10 episodes to locked cuts before December 17. It was a very tight turnaround, and it was a nightmare at times.

How big is the post team? I saw 10 editors on IMDB.

HECKLY: There was way more than that. There were like 22, I think, and there were around 23 AEs.

KULIC: I think the turnaround made it that kind of scale at the end of the day. We started out staffing this TV show up as more traditional. We had people like Charles and some terrific editors like Ben Striz.

They basically started the show with about 22 editors, I believe, then it just expanded. At some point we also rolled in our main channel editors like Nolan and Josh Rock and Gavin DeSantis into this so that they could give it that Beast feel as we graduated from a traditional television feel to more of a Beast-oriented feel.

Did editing start during the shoot?

KRAMER: We were already cutting - which had its own challenges because the assistant editors were at breakneck speed trying to put things in and get it to us as quickly as possible. Luckily, it’s a good team of assistant editors with Don Fisco and Matthew Chiaramonte and those guys getting stuff done.

But the process of getting things in was very different than how you do it on a traditional show ‘cause there were so many cameras and so much media that it basically had to be reinvented from the very beginning. From the ground up.

HOPKINS: This is the most advanced production I believe that Adobe Premiere and the Adobe Suite has ever dealt with. We’re talking multicam within multicam - just super advanced. Over a thousand cameras in episode one. How many petabytes was that, Josh?

KULIC: The total series was at one point a little over 1.7 petabytes. Episode one was floating around 800 - 900 terabytes.

HOPKINS: Even with a pretty large team. We have a lot of talented assistants, a lot of talented editors. A lot of what ended up making the final cut technically was stumbled upon with probability because there just is not actually a possible way to audit every second of all that footage from all those angles, which is one of my favorite parts of the show.

Basically I learned a lot of things when we were cutting - specifically episode one. For example, I can listen to five people talk at once on 2X speed, but not six people. The sixth person is when it breaks.

You basically would have people in these clusters, a thousand people in this massive arena. Basically, we have this whiteboard on the wall and we know who wins the show by the time we’re getting into the weeds of cutting.

So we had this whiteboard on the wall that shows this sort of guesstimation projection of who the villains are gonna end up being, who’s gonna do what, and who the final six are, who wins the grand prize.

Characters that make it certain lengths need their characters built, so we loosely know what we’re looking for. But the thing that’s really fun about episode one, is it’s such an introductory phase of the whole show.

You’re looking for a mode of responses, so the probability comes in: there are a thousand people and I could transcribe each of the thousand mics and we could go through and try to find certain phrases, but then they’re not phrasing it with the emotion we want.

So weirdly, when there are a thousand audio tracks, what you end up doing is you just start clicking through angles and waiting for really strong emotive things.

 

For example, people maybe exclaiming, or talking with their hands, scratching their head, looking stressed -  things like that. Just what we happened to stumble upon.

That’s what ends up making the story. I think normally if there weren’t so many contestants, the probability would be a little bit more stressful, but when you just have that many people recording for that many hours, you do end up getting almost everything that you could possibly think of.

This is not scripted. People compare the show to Squid Games all the time, which is annoying because Squid Games is a scripted show. This show is unscripted.

But because of the sheer volume of people in emotional states and conversation, you can craft an almost dream story scenario, and it’s likely to be there in the footage just because of how much sandbox is occurring for the length of time it is occurring, which is really fun.

I remember we’d be in the editing room and it’d almost feel like people would all freak out, “We found this person that we were looking for finally do this thing that we wanted them to do!”

They look nervous, so we need to plant them as a nervous character because in episode two, we find out that they don’t handle stress so well. And that whole process was just unlike anything I’ve ever worked on in my entire life.

How did you determine where the breaks were going to be in the episodes? You’ve got all these different challenges. Some of them are longer, some of them are shorter.

KRAMER: In most of the cases, it was done by the executive producers, like Mac and Jimmy. They really had complete creative control. Ultimately in episode eight and nine, originally we were going to get into the telephone game at the end of eight.

Instead it felt better to set up the fact that a lot of you are about to get eliminated and you’re gonna be able to bribe each other and it set it up so well that people were definitely gonna come back.

So I think the cliffhangers became almost the most important thing to get the viewer onto the next stage and keeping retention.

Lead editor and co-host, Mack Hopkins

HOPKINS: There were definitely times when things would naturally occur between these people that would create stronger cliffhangers than the ones that we assumed would be the break between episodes.

At the end of eight, bridging into nine was an editorial choice rather than what we planned before shooting began.

KRAMER: In episode one and going into episode two, I think we went back and forth a little bit on where that was gonna end, right? It was always “get to the city and set up the city at the end of the episode.”

I think that was done in promo almost at the end, like a big super-tease of what’s to come. Then just to show the city and the grandeur of what you guys created and how big the scope of this show is, and how much money was spent and how much went into it at the end of the season ‘cause you’re coming off of this giant stage with a thousand pillars where people are dropping into them and dying basically.

Then suddenly you’re being thrown into this new city and you realize, “This is this is enormous.”

One of the things that I thought was interesting that I heard in one of the final episodes, maybe it was the final episode, was Jimmy saying, “We ran a simulation of this game seven or eight times and it always went seven or eight rounds but when we filmed the real thing, it only went one round.” So you have no idea how much material you’re going to get on a given game until you see how many rounds there are.

HOPKINS: The final game for episode 10 is such a different beast than basically anything else in the show because there aren’t that many cameras. It’s almost the inverse of what I was talking about earlier where it’s like a sandbox in episode one. Anything you can dream of, you could probably find.

That final episode in the final game, not only is it two people conversing, but they don’t even talk too often. Jimmy’s loosely involved, but that game ran one round.

Normally when you’re have the crescendo building up for the whole series, the pinnacle point where we find out who the winner is, you would - as an editor - really like to have more than one round so you can shuffle through what the best reactions are, the best lines, the best moments of tension.

What ended up happening is that in real time that game played out pretty quick. It played out a little bit faster than you would like. I remember being on set. I was in co-host mode, but I was watching it and in the back of my head I was thinking, “Oh no! That’s gonna be a pretty tough edit.”

There just wasn’t enough time to build tension. The name of the game on that specific challenge - the final game - I wanted to tell this story, that 831 - Jeff - was reading Tawana’s mind.

I took a lot of inspiration from John Carpenter’s The Thing where they do this thing where they just hold a little longer than you normally would on conversations, and it just creates this sort of uncanny valley uneasiness that I really want to string in at the last moment with Jeff.

He’s a great guy. He had arguably one of the best causes to win this money, so it’s a dream scenario that he did win. He’s this nice guy and you don’t really see this sort of calculated side of him when he is playing the game hard.

Everyone’s trying to win this thing. And this side to him came out with this intimidation factor that I really wanted to focus on, and I think just holding extra long on him, and if that means it didn’t happen in real time, that long cutting to different angles and just holding on him and making it appear that he’s going 30 seconds without answering the question.

If Tawana says, “Hey Jeff, what are you thinking?” And then he answers immediately it feels like a pretty normal conversation.

There’s not a lot of stakes there, but if you can make it so he just stares into the eyes of Tawana for a little bit, it creates this really uneasy feeling.

Going off of John Carpenter’s The Thing, there were so many different types of artists in the post-production side of Beast Games.

You have all of these phenomenal editors that are well seasoned in TV and have made some of the biggest shows the world’s ever seen.

Then you have our squad of people that work for The Beast YouTube channel. We are acclaimed experts in audience retention and captivating audiences and holding them close to the screen, whatever the scene is.

And I found that the best way to communicate amongst artists was just shared libraries of movies that we all love.

There are a lot of times where we would take a scene and I would say, “Cut this exactly the way this was cut in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet or All Quiet on the Western Front. There’s a specific sound effect of a WWII horn that they used in the soundtrack.

We would, have sound effects made and crafted for when Jimmy would press buzzers - when things would go off in the show.

It was really cool that even though we all have different backgrounds, we were all able to communicate together with the spiderweb of movies we all love and we were able to create references and it bridged our communication gap.

Because the shooting got pushed back, the show’s already impossible to edit. We got two months vaporized out of the timeline when the show got pushed.

So when you put a team in that position, new ways are learned to accomplish finishing a product at that speed at that scale.

I think that was a really efficient way to communicate rather than just describing it at length. Instead of saying, “Hold here for five seconds” I’d say, “Cut it like Spielberg would here in this movie.” That was a good fluid way to communicate.

KRAMER: I learned so much from looking at your work - Mack and Nolan - the cinematic references that you used and how that kind of shaped everything because I used to think that way.

I got so into cutting these shows in a formulaic way that what it did was bring me back to when I did the Osborne’s and I turned a bunch of footage into a sitcom. We just shot with Ozzy and his family.

We were genre-bending. What you brought to the table is you were taking multiple different cinematic references - comedy, horror, suspense - and saying, “Hey, cut it like this Nolan film.”

Charles Kramer, ACE

Nolan, we haven’t heard from you too much. As somebody brought on to keep the Beast brand alive in this show, what does that mean? What were some of the things that you needed to do to make this feel like Mr. Beast.

RITTER: At Beast I think the two things we focus on most importantly are clarity and stimulation. We want to make sure that if we’re doing a montage, that we’ve established what it is that we’re montaging clearly enough so that it doesn’t just feel like chaos for chaos’ sake.

Sometimes people when they get into an edit - if they’re not from Beast – they might assume: cut it fast, make it high energy, add a lot of memes in there, and humor, but what it really is I think at the base of it is clarity.

I always tell everyone in the editing room, “Focus on one idea at a time, one emotion at a time, Then everything after that is just make it as good as you can. I remember the first episode that I worked on was episode two.

I was editing the scene where the two towers were competing with each other and they were able to call each other. We called it “Psych Out” internally. It was two towers and they had phones and they could call each other.

It was confusing because there’s a million people talking and there’s all these different conversations going on, but I know that from our videos: Establish what the rules are. Make that make sense.

Then one call happens, just one. Let the audience watch an entire phone call between two humans play out.

Once you understand that concept, then you can slowly start introducing “In the Hall of the Mountain King” type energy music, and you start to have more and more of these characters involved.

Because once you understood that first call and you understand how it applies and what the stakes are, then we can get into the chaos and the emotion and the fun.

Nolan Ritter

Then you bring it down at the end and have some really epic conversations play out - some really high stakes moments.

That’s the formula for everything we do. You have to understand it, you let the audience see it at scale because scale is such a big part of Mr. Beast. Then you end it with something really memorable and you’re done.

Before we talk about some more creative decisions, I want to understand a little bit more about the show. We already talked about that the NLE was Premiere. I’m assuming the entire thing wasn’t in one project, probably using Productions. What other technologies were involved? Were people editing remotely?

KULIC: This was a hybrid approach. These editors are spoiled. Usually, we have a six and a half petabyte, SSD array that they work off. We get crazy throughput. For this though, we cut off a NEXIS. It was a lot slower.

There was a lot more learning curve on that. Basically an onsite DIT captured to a NEXIS device. They shipped it over to Santa Clarita and then the facility QSR provided support to us. We remoted into it. It’s weird to remote in ‘cause we typically are an onsite company.

There’s a lot of benefits to that. We basically are usually in the room together. This was the first time we had another 20 editors, so we had to figure out ways to communicate.

Some of that was through EverCast, and some of it was through Mack recording a video and sending it in a message group. It’s a weird amalgamation of different technologies, but at the core, it was a NEXIS device going in to Mac Studios with 192 gigs of RAM using Jump Desktop.

Beast Games editing team Zoom call

KRAMER: The workflow did change a little bit at first. I think some of the post supers that were involved tried to use a conventional proxy workflow.

That wasn’t quite working for the Beast team because they’re used to taking things in and doing really cool stuff in After Effects and using all these third party plugins and things that a lot of editors out here are just not allowed to use ‘cause our post super would say, “If you use that, it’s gonna screw up our online.”

They give us all these reasons why we can’t use these third party things. We started getting to dynamic linking a lot.

A lot of the editors that came on the show hadn’t really done that, but After Effects connected to these media pieces using a proxy workflow doesn’t always quite work well, so we ended up going to a full-res workflow, which actually sped up everything.

Once we changed over to a full resolution workflow, then we knew how much we could push in on shots. We knew how much we could get away with in After Effects.

I feel like that really opened the door to where our collaboration between the freelance team and the Beast team started to really cook. We don’t normally get to work that way.

KULIC: Episode one had a thousand VFX shots. It’s not a normal unscripted show. It’s huge. Beyond that there’s 250-ish After Effects comps. Mack and Nolan are so proficient in After Effects, they can jump in and do what most motion designers do.

Part of the Beast style is basically mirroring those two things. Audiences today have always had a smartphone.

They know what a match cut is. They know how things move. They’re playing with things. Social media teaches them so much.

So we elevate that further. Mack had 250 comps. The whole video wall in episode one was built by Mack, not a VFX person.

HOPKINS: We kinda had this idea that throughout the series, the Beast Factor would fall off a little bit and it would become a more married product between traditional TV and traditional Beast, but episode one was flooding TV markets with our core audience.

We were very careful about how we wanted episode one to feel, and the front half of the episode, I actually ended up cutting mostly myself and a lot of the After Effects also was mostly myself.

But the thing is I wanted to go into it with the same mindset that we do Beast, which is full creative freedom. There isn’t this online process later.

We’re usually not sending off to do VFX because there’s hardly ever VFX on these videos. So it’s mostly graphics. But when you have that many shots Dynamic Linked into After Effects, then we had to send off to Spin, who did our VFX for the episode, the Dynamic Link thing did throw a little bit of a wrench in getting things handed off to Spin.

What ended up happening is that right before the episode was locked to go on Prime, we had to basically recreate all those After Effects comps again with the plates having had the set extensions from Spin on them.

HECKLY: That was a nightmare. Usually when you create those you can marry it to video. You have to be very clean on your timeline. Unfortunately, when those graphics are married within the video, when you get them to online, you have to dissect everything.

And those are built with 12, 15 different comps per graphic. So it’s 250 graphics that have to be rebuilt in two days.

But I think the big difference is that we are trained to do things a certain way because we had to deliver to networks and networks are all very specific and they have specific specs and they have very tight deadlines and schedules.

So you have to do things a certain way. So I think that was the curve that each team had to learn, to work together on that.

Lydiane Heckly

KRAMER: I think that Beast Games is going to be the flag that’s put into the ground in terms of establishing some of these rules and how we work together on these workflows because we were discovering it as we went.

We had to figure this out. We had Adobe engineers on hold ready to rewrite code for us to be able to make some of these things work.

And we had these comps and things going on within After Effects and then going over to Spin and coming back in the future when you’re dealing with that much footage and that much media, we will have it figured out and ironed out for other shows and for our own show moving forward.

You mentioned that episode three was an editorial challenge…

KULIC: Nolan is the rock star of this episode, honestly, and this is how we use Nolan across the whole series. He’s just doesn’t get bogged down by a thousand different things happening. For some reason he can find clarity.

Nolan, you should talk about your edit style ‘cause it’s just so much different than Mack’s or anybody else on the team.

We said, “We have three days left to cut the cube scene at the end. It was about 45 minutes and it felt more like an assembly and it didn’t pick a direction yet. It got there because I think there’s a lot of different notes that took it in different directions, but no choices had been made.

So we dragged Nolan into that one then obviously Nolan said, “This isn’t possible for one person.

We ended up adding four other Beast editors to run the rest of the scene together and they’ve worked together for so long and in the same room together that it provided a lot of ability to make it feel more cohesive.

Editors Kramer and Hopkins

HOPKINS: Managing editors is crazy. There’s so many different personalities and there are some who are really good at specific tasks, and there are some who are able to remain focused through an unbelievable amount of things happening at once.

Nolan is, out of all the people that I’ve ever worked with, definitely one of the best at maintaining a clear head and objective path forward when there is too much footage to go around. A lot of people get bogged down.

They can’t make choices in environments like that. Nolan is definitely one of the most capable on the entire Beast team about making decisions under that kind of pressure. And we do end up being under that pressure a lot, so we were in a position where we were scrambling to get episode one done. We barely got episode two done.

And we did not have a refined cut ready for episode three. We had some sort of rough cuts thrown together, but it was not where we needed it to be. Now this episode is due in five days.

The locked cut needs to be sent in five days, and we are at a rough cut stage. We don’t have the final music and sound design choices aren’t there.

We need someone to lead this project at the end of the day. I can go in and I can write a plan on the whiteboard, but we need basically the structure. But when we have lead editors like Nolan, who make sure everyone feels like part of the same product.

So Nolan was the guy who needed to be the lead editor during this episode. Now Nolan, I think it was 3:00 AM when we were all sitting around and trying to figure out how we were gonna put this thing together.

RITTER: That whole month feels like it happened at 3:00 AM! I have no idea at what time anything happened. We were in that room so much, I’ve never worked so hard on anything in my life.

So for me it was like, “What are the elements in this episode? There are contestants going in groups of three into cubes. But backing up from there, where are these cubes? Where is it in relation to Beast City? Is that clear?

Then once you’re in there and you understand how many cubes there are, you’re going in groups of three, what’s inside the cube? How does everyone feel about being in the cube?”

Once we understand all that, maybe we can get into some gameplay, but it’s let’s take a step back, let’s establish clarity here. You can’t have something be entertaining until you get it.

Let’s take all these elements and make ’em make sense. Also, part of this game was that the contestants could ask for anything. As we saw in the episode, that got pretty chaotic at some point. Somebody ordered a horse.

Somebody ordered a tattoo artist. It’s very tempting to get in and shoot that shot as soon as you get into the edit because it’s the most interesting and dynamic and unique part of this bit.

I knew that unless you watch games play out as they’re intended to - meaning somebody’s just playing monopoly, somebody’s just playing dice - you have to understand the basics of the challenge.

Then you bring in these fun additions, which a lot of times didn’t even have the people who ordered the horse, they just wanted to see how far they could push the challenge and the dynamic of ordering whatever you want from Jimmy, which is more fun than anything because a lot of times the horse has nothing to do with whether the person stays in or gets out.

We see the games play out, we understand the stakes, then we bring in this fun, chaotic montage.

Once you understand everything else, then you introduce chaos, because if there’s chaos too early with even any amount of doubt, the viewer’s gonna be confused and they’re gonna be checked out.

KULIC: There’s 80 something cubes. There’s different conversations going all over the place. We have white walls everywhere in our studio that you can marker up.

So Nolan goes to the board and he starts breaking this down with Mack and the rest of the team to try to figure out what the structure is.

Nolan knows at this moment that he can’t cut this whole thing, so we bring in four of our other editors who were already on other projects.

One of the videos was one of our bigger ones of the year on the main channel, but I had to pull them off that to work on this. We were getting ready to run an all-nighter and basically Nolan’s setting things up.

We broke it down into basically four to five acts because you had five editors. We basically said, “You are gonna set this up.

You’re gonna pay this off. You’re gonna set this up. You’re gonna pay this off.” So that whole wall was just filled with this plan. I think that’s where Nolan undersells himself. And he does this on his timeline as well.

We’ve gotta find the tone. We have to make something interesting and polish it as we go. Nolan  is very unique in the sense that he can find a rhythm and then he starts “text slugging.” He knows this is the story. He knows Beast so well.

He knows the structure so well. He knows the interesting moments. He’ll go back and polish it, but he’s laying this whole timeline out so that when an assistant editor or a story producer wants to go in and make some pulls, they’re gonna be able to find what he’s looking for.

RITTER:  It’s a huge part of my workflow. Our assistant editors literally move mountains every single week with our main channel videos, but with this show I would never, ever have been able to do any of this without them.

First of all, I’ll just watch the main cam, or just Jimmy’s camera. We base the whole story off of Jimmy. Jimmy is our backbone. He’s our skeleton.

Then once you start getting into more character stories. I can see the structure, but I don’t always have everything ready to go. It’s somewhere.

But with these tight turnarounds, the organization is not always exactly where you want it to be. don’t have time to watch every piece of footage. Jimmy will say, “How do you guys feel about your cubes?”

And I need a mix of people booing and I need a mix of people cheering because they’re not sure how to feel - at least that’s what I want to portray. They aren’t sure how to feel about this new environment.

So I’ll put a text slug: “Character’s boo” or “This character boos,” because I wanna focus on them because I know they’re getting out this round. I wanna plant those little seeds. I’ll just put a little text slug in in the timeline.

By the time I go to bed that night - if I ever do - one of our AEs will get started, then in the morning I’ll come back and a lot of those text slugs will have a little clip under it or three clips for options. So that was a massive part of how we were able to get any of this done.

KRAMER: One of the things that’s usually done in a competition reality show or un-scripted show is that a story producer puts together a string out and then the editor takes that string out and shapes it.

In this show I felt like it was the story producers and the assistant editors on the Beast side were giving us the raw clips, then the editors became almost the story producers where we were literally just trying to put the puzzle pieces in front of the Beast team saying, “Here’s the puzzle” because there was so much media that you had to go through.

For example I think of episode 101 when Jon Emerson found 830 and 831, the two finalists at the end, saying, “Hey, let’s get to the city together.”

And or I think of 102, where Ben Striz is finding these great little moments where the captains are arguing and there’s this intensity leading up to the cliffhanger.

So a lot of the freelancer team was really just working at this pace to be able to deliver the initial story to be able give it to The Beast team to be able to shuffle it around.

And that was actually one of the most interesting things about the way that this show worked, because I don’t think we could have done it differently without having that workflow.

I think that really made a big difference. For example, in the ball drop where Yoshi found moments where the one team thought they had won, but they didn’t. Then there were so many elements to be able to craft that into an exciting moment.

Then a lull. Then another excited moment where the other team realized they had won. Speaking of Ben Striz’ editing, everybody respects it so much. He turns everything into a song, so I think a lot of the Beast team realized they weren’t really touching his edits as much as some of the other stuff that came back.

But I think of 103, and the cubes. I talked to the original editors on that - Myron Santos and Duane Fogwell - the sheer amount of media that came through on cubes on the initial pass, and to get that to even that 45 minute string out, I think that they did their best to try to give you guys the puzzle pieces. Then you guys really took it and Beastified it.

The clarity made it a lot easier for people to digest at home.

HECKLY: The Beast team found a way to bring those freelancers together –they know their editors so well and I think eventually they were able to try to figure out our editors and how they work.

Joshua Kulic, post production supervisor

KRAMER: I feel like we were getting mentored by people half our age, and I absolutely love that. I came into Beast Games with this sense of, “I’m gonna learn how these guys do what they do because they own the market right now.

We are seeing a decline within traditional media and legacy media and a astronomical rise within what the Beast team does and what, a lot of the YouTube creators are doing.

We, as editors, were excited to get these tidbits of information on how you guys make the sausage over there and I really feel like now that we’re going into season two, I’m hoping we can emulate what you create over there and I think we can. I think we all got a lot closer to what the show was later in the episodes.

KULIC: How we found Charles and how we figured out that Ben was really strong - and a lot of these editors, honestly - it’s just jumping into their timeline and seeing the care that they had. They were dicing up their own music and had tons of sound effects.

Not every editor had that. There were certainly standouts amongst them, and you can just tell the level of care they took in sound design.

That was a big thing for us ‘cause, since Mack’s joined the team, he’s said, “This has to hit!” It’s almost like a trailer at times where you have to build and build, then suck oxygen outta the room and hit. You want those moments to stand out.

So you can see just by judging the timeline on its own who really is into the content and really cares about it. Charles and Ben and a few others you could really tell right from the timeline alone.

Talk about the shared resources that editors had to work with, whether it’s sound effects or VFX or graphics, those kind of things. How were people sharing those and getting access to them and contributing to them?

KULIC: We used Extreme Music. We recorded our temp V.O.s through Jump Desktop, which allows you to record. Obviously we’re on a strict Tier One lockdown for security reasons. We don’t want the show to leak.

We used Epidemic Sound for their sound library. Extreme Music for its music library. Beyond that, there were editors just recording their own Foley.

Episode nine opens on a dial tone thing and our editor, Matt Mayer, did a great job taking you into the moment where it’s literally dialing out. He was just recording sounds - long pressing on his phone.

They get creative in the room. That’s the benefit to having people who are also musicians like Nolan. They’re playing around with sound all the time.

HOPKINS: Editors with musical backgrounds are like the biggest hack. Everything that happens in the scene, including dialogue is slightly, re-timed to a BPM.

These are things that are subconscious. These are things that make an edit feel more satisfying. And if you were looking at it, from outside in, it’d be hard if you weren’t an editor to pick out exactly why they feel the way they do.

Editors who have a background in music tend to learn way faster. They do really great work in my experience,

KRAMER: Ben, he’s a drummer and he thinks in a certain way, like a drummer does. I’m a keyboard player and background vocalist, so I think of everything as  musical notes. I learned so much by looking into his timeline thinking, “I’m gonna emulate this pacing.

I’m not gonna use the same effects and I’m not gonna use the same music, but I’m gonna emulate his pacing.” And that really gave a freedom.

As musicians we can treat things as like the pacing is the beat - the drummer. The bass is almost like the tone and the story is like the melody and the harmony.

Musicians are good at seeing patterns too. So you’re seeing a pattern, a rhythm pattern in the timeline. One of the things I wanted to ask about was the VFX. When you’re adding glows: sometimes the balls are glowing white or the patterns that people stood on in one game all of the patterns that started to glow…

HECKLY: A lot of things would be done in online.

KULIC: There’d be some shifting colors to save on VFX for sure. The online team did a great job helping us get there, but in general the Beast style is about focusing on things. So actually for episode two, you’re talking about the red ball getting thrown down into one of those big cups.

Essentially they would highlight that - we just call ’em light sweeps. Tthey would light sweep that in After Effects. And that’d usually be one of the offline editors doing that - sending it to After Effects.

Then the online during conform would break it apart. Sometimes they’d have to recreate it, sometimes they’d clean it up.

We had 200 After Effects comps in episode one. I’m sure that continues through most of the series, because our YouTube channel also has close to a hundred After Effects comps by the time we’re done with it.

That’s always about clarity and how you focus attention. Sometimes it’s not just cutting every two seconds, sometimes it’s creating stimulation, and sometimes that’s like sending something to After Effects then having the camera digitally moving back and forth.

HOPKINS: If there’s a sea of a thousand people and we want you to focus on two people. We can rotobrush them in After Effects.

This would not be an exterior VFX team. A lot of the editors were just doing this as the show progressed. Rotoing out people, highlighting them, desaturating, and putting some artificial post-camera blur on the rest of the scene, so you’re focusing on things. Even the 3D stuff is all internal as well.

RITTER: With effects, sometimes the question is “How do you want them to feel?” So with episode three, occasionally we are going to this glitchy security camera look, and the choice is made there based on that I want the viewer to feel like they’re watching something that’s happening, not like they’re observing people in a room that don’t know they’re being observed.

Like interrogation footage or something like that. Sometimes you add an effect just to create a subtle vibe that separates the viewer in a way. So there’s a lot of choices like that made too.

KRAMER: We had editors making graphics. We had our in-house graphics team making graphics, then we had these outside vendors making graphics.

The level of graphical overlay that happened on this show is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in an unscripted competition. It’s beautiful stuff.

KULIC: To Mack’s point, we have three VFX people, three graphics people and they’re generalists in 3D and they’re generalists in motion design. What they’re able to pull off is pretty amazing.

We did start with a company and we used them for some of our graphics. Eventually we’ve more or less moved on from them. And I think that was because of the speed which our team is used to working with and efficiencies.

It was estimated that to model out Beast City was going to take 10 days. I remember looking over at one of our 3D artists named Max and asking, “How fast could I have this?” And he said, “Eight o’clock.” He modeled the whole city by himself.

They’re more interested in it and they’re passionate about it. So the efficiencies and the way they build procedurally is just unlike anything you really would see in traditional effects, because we don’t have time on the main channel We can’t miss a deadline.

We need to get to 26 videos every year. We have to upload every two weeks. There’s always big brand deals tied to it, so they’re used to building things procedurally and fast. So it’s in our blood. That team’s amazing.

The coin flip montage is a huge effects extravaganza. How did that evolve? Did it start with an editor choosing “This is gonna happen, then we need some voiceover, and then here’s a great shot of this person?”

HOPKINS: There was really never enough time to do what I’m about to say. Normally it is exactly as you say. Usually I will green light what the graphic is before it’s sent off to the 3D people or the VFX team so that, that’s some of the extensive work that if you’re one degree off could end up really being far off what you want. You don’t wanna have a lot of work being expended in the wrong direction.

I actually learned After Effects when I was nine years old and I’m 25 now, so I’m doing After Effects for a long time. So I have a pretty extensive graphics knowledge as well. For the 3D I worked with this guy - his name is Desert Sage.

This is a real name. I asked for his ID. He is a 3D generalist. He is probably the most capable human being I have ever seen in 3D. Unbelievable talent in 3D.

He and I worked together before Beast. When I came onto Beast, I brought him with me. We had to revisit this problem of making something that’s revision-proof so that when it goes through other filters -  if Jimmy wants to change something – then we could revise it.

He is really talented at basically building procedurally in a way that can be altered if need be. The coin flip graphic breaks all of the rules.

It’s the most triple-baked down thing of all time. Basically the situation was that all these other editors are cutting on episode nine and I’m already on 10 and I know that there needs to be some insane speech.

I know there needs to be some insane graphic here. So Desert Sage and I work on this sequence together by ourselves for probably about five days.

We got to the point by the end of the season where we could budget this time and could make a graphic this impressive and could push the boundaries of what was possible, especially with these deadlines.

I wanted the graphic to summarize what the show was about and this edit kind of shines a light on that.

The show is this real time playing out as an unbelievable unscripted sandbox of people all making decisions, constantly deciding who they want to keep on their team, who they want to stab in the back, who are they gonna save?

How are they gonna make choices when they’re put up against bribes? When you have so many people making these decisions, the odds of the show occurred the way it did. The numbers are unbelievable.

It’s staggering when you have a thousand people making these decisions. Not to mention the 2000 that started before the show even began in Vegas. So I really wanted to harp on the wild number of how many different ways the show could have turned out.

It all came down to the coin ‘cause that one decision was basically the pinnacle of a pyramid of a billion decisions. So we go into the macro of the coin. We do a 3D swap. The coin is the easiest thing of all the stuff I’m about to say.

There’s a video of me and Desert Sage coming up with this in real time. I looked at Sage and asked, “Can we put people on the coin?”

And he said, “Yeah, we could put people in the coin.” I asked, “Can we put a thousand?” And he says, “Yes.”

We rigged up three or four different human beings - two boys and two girls - and did this crowd simulation running across the coin. We cut paths in the grooves of the coin in which they would run. And we basically did it on one of the coin flips.

So on a wipe around the people would appear - all this is timed up to this voiceover - and I’m constantly refining the voiceover.

We eventually decide it’s the voiceover we’re gonna stick with and we can’t change it ‘cause everything’s locked to it. It’s my voice then Jimmy will rerecord later.

So there are these people running and I ask, “What if we did a smoke sim? For sand, like a dust simulation?” Because there are new tools, on a whim we can create an extensive simulation with real-time tools.

Of course, traditional tools like Houdini make this sort of sandstorm peeling off the edge of the coin. So we’re in this situation where Sage is doing all this groundbreaking technical stuff like crowd sim mixed with massive dust sim on a coin that’s moving.

This is in an area that is uncharted territory for us. Meanwhile, I’m over in After Effects taking montages that are are being handed to me, picking shots doing things like the glowing eyes and them walking through fog in 2D, sending that back to Desert Sage.

He’s putting it on the coin in 3D again. I would bake down something, give it to him, he would bake it down, give it back to me, bake it down. For a week we just cooked like that. We ended up in this spot where I think it is a really beautiful graphic.

It’s a beautiful commentary on the show:  crowds of people and in After Effects we’re tracking particles bouncing between all their heads to symbolize the massive number of decisions that are occurring in this sort of simulation. I think it’s really special.

That graphic’s really special to me because it sums up the entire series. It’s not de-immersive. It leaves you in the moment of the coin ‘cause everything’s still about the coin, but it still is able to basically give this commentary on what this whole show is really about.

And it’s so dramatic. You see all these highlight moments from the whole show of people. From the most memorable moments, it’s irreplaceable and I think me and Desert Sage pushed ourselves harder than we’ve ever been pushed before.

I think a lot of artists who do 3D and After Effects don’t get the chance to just go all out. But we were able to go all out on the topic of what the plot was, and that all marrying together was one of the proudest moments I have had in my entire editing life.

KULIC: You somehow undersold it because it wasn’t a week. That was like two and a half days. Mack was here on a desk. It was Sage here on the desk. Mack would say, “Dude, I’m gonna try this thing. Can you do this?” “Yeah, I’ll do this.”

And they’re going back and forth collaborating while still editing and doing their thing. That happened in two and a half days. I’m freaking out ‘cause our deadline at this point, is - I think - six days away.

HOPKINS: We are bumping up against the deadline and all I had to show them was a wire frame animation. I said, “Trust me guys. Trust me.” I’m putting my career on the line with all these people telling ’em to trust me on this freaking graphic. I think it’s gonna be so cool. We finally got it exported and everyone loved it. Jimmy loved it. Wild experience.

Did you have a plan going into it? Like you knew it was gonna be 90 seconds that you had to fill and you had a script that you were trying to get images for? Or was it iterative?

HOPKINS: The first thing I did was wrote the script. I recorded the script at the speed I wanted it recorded and I placed rough footage. Then I took that over to Sage and we sat down. We can’t render things in 3D ‘cause they take too long.

Just looking at the wire frame, we just eyeball how long things were taking. So I would just remember that, go back to my desk, start making cuts with the assumption that certain things would be certain lengths, giving handles for transitions, things like that.

It’s abstract, it’s hard to really talk about the sort of way we were working on this. This show is full of instances like that. There are some scenes that I cut just laying down sound design first before even putting footage in.

There are some scenes where I just picked my favorite moment and edited backwards. This show is just so full of these challenges and that as an editor to push yourself and keep yourself motivated.

Sometimes you’ve gotta pick the part about the piece you’re the most excited about and work forwards and backwards around that. And this graphic was that for the entire season for me.

Does anyone want to cover something that you was a big challenge or something you’re really proud of that you worked on?

KRAMER: Around episode five is when I felt like we were diving into the story of these characters so much.That was the island episode where they were competing for a private island. It was almost its own world, right?

Because they’re on this island and we’re diving into nine people at that point and really able to understand some of the motivations and get behind who these people really are. I think that’s one of the things that - unfortunately in the earlier episodes - because there were so many people, you just had to do quick identifiers then move on.

I really enjoyed cutting the bocce scene which leads to the final two where they move forward on a large board game. It was super fun to cut because it was like you had to make this simple game into the highest stakes game ever.

It’s the most expensive bocce game in history, literally. I found that some of the best moments started to come after the middle episode because we started to really be able to dive into the characters like in episode eight when it was the cash grab and the families came.

Those moments when you really get into the characters of these people and understanding their family and their motivations and why they’re here to win the money, that was the part where I feel like the audience had gone from the retention audience to the more conventional show where they were getting drawn into these people and these lives.

I feel like that was important because now we can take both audiences as we go forth into future seasons. I think that will be a format that we’ll maintain, but it will always be a challenge to inject who these people are and get to follow them and everything in the earlier episodes, ‘cause there’s so many people.

You take the things that some of the other editors did like Pi, he was going through the Navy Seals for the first time and narrowing that down into a first pass and finding the best comedic moments and driving the character development in that, or, Jason Groothius is going through the the section with the exes and Harrison’s inability to get anyone to trust him.

Nolan?

RITTER: I’m super proud of the team, honestly. It made me feel super lucky to be working with these guys. When you work on a project together with people so closely, it just brings you together. We can’t mention everybody, obviously some people off the top of my head, Keenan Panti  Bradley Krueger, Byron Carter, Gavin DeSantis, we said Joel De La Cruz, Josh Rock, who, Linus, Matthew Mayer, Mike Schaferniak all these editors that we have at Beast and of course our incredible assistant editor team.

Every night we were leaving when the sun was coming up, if we were leaving at all. Some nights it felt really bad, but I think we all look back on the whole show so fondly now as just like this unbelievable feat. Not only were we able to get it done at all - which was an accomplishment - but we were able to make something that I think all of us are super proud of.

KRAMER: The opportunity to work with this team on the freelancer side and the Beast side was a mentorship process like no other and the fact that we created a new genre in the process together, that alone was one of the most incredible experiences of my career. Learning and growing and having this time together was something that I don’t think I could replace. I’m looking forward to continuing to edit with the YouTube generation and audience retention in mind and the new styles and and software Mack and everybody has brought to us in the future. It’s just really been an incredible experience.

Does anybody know if that was Boris or Sapphire in those glows and some of the special effects?

HOPKINS: There is everything under the sun. I could talk to you for two hours about glows and plugins for After Effects. Boris and Sapphire are awesome.

KULIC: Maxon Tools, Red Giant tools. There’s a ton of Blender. Everything that Mac and I have tried to do with Beast and then try to bring over to the TV show is just empowering the creative. We don’t approach anything from technical limitations.

Everything’s about what’s the creative wanna do? How are we gonna be the best version of what we want? And we figure out the technical side and I think that kind of gets us in trouble sometimes, but ultimately I think that shows that there’s passion.

When we bring editors out - when Charles is involved, when all these television editors with crazy good credits come out and spend some time with us - I think they walk away with feeling, “I didn’t realize I get to be creative again.”

I love it when they tell us that. I think that’s why all those episodes just feel so different. There’s a western scene at the end of episode seven. It’s a 14 minute segment. That was a choice that one of the editors made that he just wanted to go that way.

Thank you all so much for joining me.

KRAMER: Thank you.

HOPKINS: Thanks Steve.

KULIC: Thank you.