How I Met Your Father

Today on Art of the Cut, we feature one of the recent editing nominees for this year’s Emmys: Russell Griffin, ACE. Over the course of his career, he’s been nominated for three primetime Emmys and a Kids and Family Emmy, and won an ACE Eddie this year for the How I Met Your Father episode, “Daddy.” This year, he’s Emmy nominated for the How I Met Your Father episode “OK, Fine, it’s a Hurricane” in the category, Outstanding Picture Editing For A Multi-Camera Comedy Series.

His previous work includes The Upshaws, for which he was nominated for an Emmy, and Mad About You.

Russell, thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut. It’s so nice to talk to you. Congratulations about your Emmy nod. Again!

You so much, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be with you and it’s a pleasure to receive another nomination for such a great show.

You did a session at EditFest last year, didn’t you? 

 Yes, I did.

Tell me a little bit about what you told the people during that session. What’s a great piece of advice from your EditFest session?

Something I always tell people is: no matter how much you think a note is not going to work, do it. Because I oftentimes find myself biting my tongue saying, “There’s no way this is gonna work,” and then I just do it earnestly and find out, “Oh, that actually did work.” Or you find a different way around the problem to solve it in a different way.

So, if you’re there with directors or executive producers or anybody in your bay and they give you a note, the best thing you can do is say, “Let’s try that!” It doesn’t matter what you think about it. If it’s bad, they will see it, and if it’s great then you are the hero for making it happen.

Plus, you look really bad if you say “it won’t work” and they make you try it, and it does work.

Yes!

That’s really not good.

Oftentimes, we’re given paper notes sometimes, and so you’re in your bay doing them before people come into your bay and I’m writing responses down and sometimes I’ll even write, “No, we can’t do this…” then I stop midway through replying and I just do the note and I have to erase and say, “Yes, this will work and we’ve done it” or “here’s a different scenario or a different way to get around it.”

But it’s a great thing to make sure that you’re respecting other people’s point of views and remembering that it’s a collaborative medium so that you take other people’s notes and make the thing better, even if you don’t think it’s necessarily gonna happen.

Your Emmy nomination is for Outstanding Picture Editing For A Multi-Camera Comedy Series. What is the difference between Multi-Camera and Single-Camera comedy series?

Multicam sitcom is what you think of when you think of the classic sitcom. Think of: I Love Lucy, think of: Friends - any sitcom that is shot in front of an audience. Multicam is mostly like a play. It’s shot in front of an audience where you have three walls and then the fourth wall is where the cameras are.

We have multiple cameras, which is why they call it a multicam, even though “single camera” also uses multiple cameras oftentimes, too. It’s the industry term for a sitcom shot in front of an audience.

It’s shot on a stage typically (sometimes on a backlot - especially on How I Met Your Mother and How I Met Your Father, we shot quite a bit on the back lot, but it’s typically shot on a stage), three walls where the fourth wall is the audience itself.

I’ve cut a bunch of multicam stuff myself but never comedy. I’m sure it’s different for a multicam music special or I cut a few Oprah’s Book Club shows, for example. Tell me about the use of the line-cut in a sitcom, because in my stuff I did start with the line-cut. Also, explain to the Art of the Cut readers what the “line-cut” means.

What the line-cut is, in terms of the stuff that you were mentioning (like Oprah’s Book Club , where it’s not necessarily actors, but it’s somebody who’s performing in front of an audience for like Bill Maher or something like that) is a live-switched show. 

If you’re dealing with a Multicam sitcom, you’re dealing with everything a single camera sitcom does. You just happen to have an audience for a soundtrack and you happen to have four cameras simultaneously shooting. A line-cut is what they used to use back in like the I Love Lucy days.

They would live-switch the cameras and that would be the cut that they would use - that would eventually become the episode. It was very much like a play and you recorded “as is.”

Russell Griffin, ACE, editor, How I Met Your Father

But in this day and age, ever since, Friends or something, you would never see a live cut. If you’re in the audience watching a live taping, there is a live switcher who is choosing which of the four cameras they’re showing for that particular take.

But for today’s day and age, if you’re cutting a Multicam sitcom, you don’t ever see the line-cut. It’s nothing that gets recorded. It’s nothing that gets translated to you as a multicam editor. And, certain times, I can tell where the audience switcher hits a certain angle.

Oh interesting.

If we’re revealing something I can hear where the audience reacted to a certain thing. I know that that audience switcher has switched to that camera before or after I think the timing should be, so I have to go in there and adjust that. But multi-camera editors today never see a line-cut.

As a matter of fact - in terms of all of the award categories, the Emmys and ACE Eddies - if you use any portion of a line-cut, that gets moved to variety or a different category, it’s no longer a multicam sitcom.

As an editor I was thinking about the choice of when you cut to the mom - Kim Cattrall - she plays the future Sophie. Can you talk about the pacing and the timing of cutting to Kim Cattrall’s character?

 Yes. In terms of the How I Met Your Mother/How I Met Your Father universe, the basic premise is that a narrator is telling someone how they met their mother or how they met their father. In How I Met Your Mother, it was Bob Saget telling his kids how he met their mother.

In our universe, it’s Kim Cattrall telling her son how she met his father. The difference between How I Met Your Mother and How I Met Your Father is that we do a little bit of reverse. In How I Met Your Mother we never used to see Bob Saget and we would always watch the kids and their reaction to what he was saying.

But in our How I Met Your Father universe, we are actually seeing Kim Cattrall and hearing the son. We never actually see the son, which allows there to be some mystery in terms of what race his character is.

We start with Future Sophie telling the story in the year 2050. Then we cut back to present day and see Hilary Duff and all of our other characters act out the story Kim tells. In terms of timing, it’s written in the script, but it is something that you have to adjust and get just right in terms of a comedic timing.

Sometimes she starts the story. Sometimes she plays off something that you’re seeing in present day. She’s commenting and going back and forth. As you know, when you’re dealing with comedy, the timing is really essential to the joke.

So how do you cut to that person who actually is delivering that portion of the comedic event and still get that reaction, still make people laugh and still make people feel that emotion when you’re cutting to it?

Avid timeline screenshot for the Season Finale of How I Met Your Father

In your episode that was nominated last year, Daddy there’s a cut I call an “answer cut” - where you hear Hillary’s character say, “Oh, he’ll never do that.” And then you cut to Kim Cattrall immediately saying, “Oh, he did that.” Whether that works is a total timing thing.

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, it’s that age-old joke of “What’s the hardest thing about cutting comedy?”  And I always tell that joke where… Ask me the easiest thing about comedy, then ask me the hardest thing about comedy.

What’s the easiest thing about cutting comedy?

(Awkward Long pause)

 Timing.

And what’s the hardest thing about cutting comedy?

(Stepping on my question)

Timing!

[laughter]

That really is it. It’s about when you can get to that joke and when you can make that moment the most comedic. Sometimes it’s pausing, sometimes you’re taking a performance and you’re lengthening it to wait for a reaction.

Sometimes you’re speeding it up and pacing it up and just trying to get to that comedic moment a little bit faster. Something that rings really, really true to an audience member.

Tell me about the difficulties of deciding between using different takes cut together to get the best performance versus whatever the tonal change would be if you use take one versus take two.

It’s very similar to a feature editor or a single camera editor. You’re watching the take itself, you’re seeing about performance issues, you’re trying to see if the character is making sense, if they’re trying to stay present in their character.

Then you’re trying to choose the best performance for not only one character but every character. And you’re also trying to see about using reactions from a different take. When we shoot four cameras, you would think that you would have a lot of coverage, but just like any show, sometimes we have eight characters in a scene and we don’t have coverage on everybody in one take.

So you have to use take four where we have a single coverage on a tertiary character so that you can work that into the cut and make sure that it makes sense and you’re keeping everybody alive and you’re servicing the narrative with the coverages that you actually do have.

You have to decide, “Can I mix take one to take two?” If take two has this better performance but you think, “it doesn’t feel like it’s the same character or the same moment.”

You also have the technical side where you want to avoid any continuity jumps. And as a multi-camera editor, you’re kind of supposed to make it look like it was a play - live-action, shot as-is, which is why there’s the misconception that you’re just kind of cutting between takes.

No. We’re making it look like it was shot in one take, but I’m actually using seven different takes, shot over two different days. It’s just like regular editing. But you just have a lot more coverage. Then it becomes a choice of filmic language and which takes are you going to go to next? Are you gonna start in a master? Are you gonna let this play in a master?

Are you going to go to a two shot, or to a reaction shot? Are you going to let it play in singles? You do have a little bit more variety if you’re able to get that coverage, but you have a lot more choices.

Talk a little bit about how much you need to shorten or adjust for time, because you’re trying to hit an exact time on these, correct?

Yes and no. For a streamer like How I Met Your Father, which streamed on Hulu, there’s no time constraint, per se. We would typically end up shooting maybe 26, 27 minutes, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.

But our show-runners - who are fantastic, Isaac Aptaker  and Elizabeth Berger - inherently felt that the sitcom format feels better around a 22 minute timing. A network sitcom kind of goes 21-and-a-  half minutes. That’s the target content time.

So they said they wanted to kind of have that 22-minute mark as the ideal timeline and then let it kind of play shorter or longer depending upon what the needs of that particular story, that particular episode needed. So we would kind of aim for 22 minutes and if it needed a little bit more, we would go for 22 and a half, maybe 23.

Conversely, if you’re doing a network sitcom, you do have to hit the 21:30 or the 21:35 and you’re trying to cut for time regardless.

When you are cutting for time, whether it’s a streamer and you’re cutting just for story or if you’re trying to get down to a specific time, that’s when you’re working with the show-runners and the writers because you’re dealing really with story and content.

Sometimes they’ll say, “We really don’t need this particular story moment, but I know it’s gonna be hard to cut it out.” So they’ll turn it over to us and we’ll say, “Got it. If that’s the 30 seconds that we need to cut out, I’ll work around it and figure out a way that it looks seamless and it looks like it was never in there to begin with.”

But it does become a challenge even on How I Met Your Father where you’re going from 27 minutes down to 22. You’re cutting out five minutes of content. What is crucial about each scene? What’s important that you have to keep?

And then what can you streamline and tell faster in terms of the narrative jumping between stories?

A lot of times with sitcoms there’s an A, a B and a C story or at least an A and a B story. Can you talk about any differences in the script of cutting between those or is it usually pretty much as scripted?

It’s usually as scripted. So yes you have, you know, typically an A story, certainly a B story, sometimes also a C story and you’re going from scene to scene. And, doing that How I Met Your Father Universe takes it kind of to another level because we do have the future Sophie - Kim Cattrall - playing in 2050 that we’ll cut to as well.

Then, what we often do on How I Met Your Father is cut to a reenactment and then back. So they’ll reference something that they’ve done in the past, we’ll cut to it and see them dancing or doing something and then cut back to it and reference it.

That’s just the show’s style. So there is a lot of cutting between temporal times - either future or past and then back to the present - and that’s obviously done in the edit, so you’re kind of cutting between stories more than you would in some sitcoms.

In a lot of traditional sitcoms, you’re in the A story scene, then you’re gonna be in the B story scene, then you’re gonna come back to the A story, have a C story and be back. But the How I Met Your Father universe kind of cuts quickly between all three. 

Is that something that you felt you needed to teach the audience how to watch in the pilot?

I think when How I Met Your Mother came out, it was a different way of treating a multicam.  And then when How I Met Your Father resurrected that universe, I think people understood it inherently.

But yeah, it was something that had to be set up in the pilot. It had to be shown in that first season and through the rest of all 30 episodes in terms of: this is a story being told by a mother to her son about her and her friends falling in love and dealing with the relationship issues in present day.

So I think that the audience kind of caught on pretty quickly and they understood that it was the same universe but that it was just a new reinvention of that same story.

When you get all of this footage in from a couple of days of shooting multicam, how is it organized - or organized for you?

What is unique to Multicam is that editors are typically on the set when we’re shooting. Every episode takes a production week, so Monday rolls around, we do a table read, they’ll go rehearse while the writers punch up any jokes, have network notes and do everything that they can to see what’s working on with the story.

Tuesday rolls around: we’ll go back to the stage after rehearsal for most of the morning and they will put together a producer’s run-through and we will see a show on its feet as we move from scene to scene and literally we walk from set to set to set and watch the entire thing.

They’ll go back and do rewrites again that night. Wednesday rolls around: we’ll have the network run through where all of the actors will do the same thing that they just did Tuesday, but with the new rewrites and the new timing and we’ll go through set by set by set and watch that run through.

Then Thursday rolls around: they’ve got the final rewrites and we have a shooting draft and we’ll do what we call “pre-shoots.” So anytime we’re shooting on the backlot, anytime we’re shooting a stunt, anytime we’re shooting something that’s tricky - say with kids or with animals - something that we can’t really shoot in front of a live audience easily, something that’s gonna take a lot more time and we don’t wanna bore the audience - that is what we’ll do on a Thursday.

We’ll pre-shoot all that stuff. And as the editor, you’re there on set to basically be a backstop and say “Do we have everything? Do we need a single here? Did the camera miss the move?” Everyone’s looking at the show but you’re the one who has to put it together, so ultimately people turn around and say, “Are we good to go?” And we’ll say, “You know what? We really could use a two shot here. We really missed this or we really should get this.” 

So they shoot everything for pre-shoots and then starts the clock and that’s when you really start feeling the crunch because you’ve shot all that pre-shot material, now you’ve gotta get it in some fashion or form to be able to play back in front of the live audience on Friday. So any pre-shot scene that we shoot on Thursday, I’m editing overnight and Friday morning to then play it back in front of the audience.

So, for example, the audience will see a live scene, then they’ll see a playback of what I’ve just edited overnight and then they’ll see two live scenes and then they’ll see two scenes of another playback.

So for an audience member watching a full recording of an episode, they’ll see it from beginning to end, whether most of those scenes are live - with just a few playbacks - or if a lot of ’em are playbacks and only a few of them are live, but they’re getting to see the whole episode from start to finish.

Then Friday rolls around, and we’re recording in front of the live audience and I’m there on set again making sure we have everything correctly and working with the director, working with the show-runners.

And then after that whole week, that next Monday, that’s when I start working on all the footage. We have assistant editors who bring in the footage, they group it back into the four camera quad split, so you’ll see cameras A, B, C, and X. So we have it put into a quad split into the Avid, so when I’m editing I can see all four cameras simultaneously linked together and choose which camera to go to take by take by take.

We also use ScriptSync and it really is a sprint from then on out because you’re working on multiple episodes at a time, dealing with episodes that are shooting for the next week and trying to get director’s cuts done, work with the producers on a very extensive producer’s cut and then giving it to the studio and the network. So there’s a lot of time that is spent on the cuts.

On the episode that you’re nominated for, I’m assuming the hurricane footage would’ve been a pre-shoot? 

 Yes, yes. 

Anything else?

 No, we had a couple scenes that we did just because it was something that we wanted to. It’s called a “shoot and remember.” We have “shoot and forget” and “shoot and remember.” A “shoot and forget” is something like the hurricane scene where we know we’re not gonna shoot it in front of the live audience.

A “shoot and remember” is a scene where we shoot it because we have a lot of coverage, a lot of people, but we’re also gonna do it in front of the audience. We’re gonna get coverage AND shoot it in front of the audience.

So they need to remember their lines and remember what they’re gonna do. It’s a big finale for the series with the big hurricane. We have a very large romantic moment outside and rain on the back. Lot of rain and thunder and stuff that couldn’t be done really in front of the audience. So that’s something we pre-shot, that’s something I edited and then we would have played it back.

Can you think of anything that would’ve been a “shoot and remember”?

Yeah, we actually shot the opening of that particular episode because there were some light gags. The power was supposed to be out in the story so we had a lot of movement and a lot of moving pieces and we just wanted to make sure that we had it and so they shot it and I edited it, but we didn’t need to play that back in front of the audience because we knew that we were gonna actually perform it live for them.

What about Kim Cattrall’s clips? I assume they’re pre-taped or post-taped?

We had Kim for maybe four or five production days throughout the season. So we would have episodes edited and leave placeholders for where we knew we were going to use Kim. And once we got Kim - after maybe four weeks - we’d have four different episodes where we needed to get her footage, so we would “shoot her out.”

We would shoot her for all four episodes - all the different things that we needed - then we would cut that back in. It just makes sense in terms of production so that you can get her and use her time wisely. But it also made sense because as we put these episodes together, sometimes our show-runners would say, “You know what we need here? It would be great if Kim could comment on this.”

So we would be able to say, “Great, let’s put a placeholder here. Or once the scenes came together, her original scripted lines weren’t quite as impactful as we could make them. So they would rewrite and make a little punch up or do something that would shift the actual footage that we have for that particular episode.

So we had Kim Cattrall on those days and we’re able to kind of work her into the episodes that we’ve already edited together.

Let’s talk about how you screen multicam footage. You’re talking about how fast you have to work. Are you watching multicam in a quad-split or do you try to watch specific angles?

You get pretty good at looking at a quad split. So you can see all four cameras simultaneously and you know where you’re gonna cut to and from and and what seems to be working, what doesn’t seem to be working.

You’re watching all different characters and their performances. Once you’ve strung out your cuts and you’re re-editing them, then you’re looking at individual performances and you’re going back to other footage and trying to cut in different takes that seem to be better for this particular character or that particular character.

So just like any kind of single camera editing or films, you’re really watching it and then reworking it and trying to make sure that you’re using the best performance in every particular instance. The other thing that you’re doing is: we deal with laughs.

I heard it explained very nicely by somebody from Curb Your Enthusiasm (a single-cam show with actors who have done multicam), which was: “On a multicam the laugh is almost the soundtrack.”

So you’re using the laughs as another kind of score. You’re listening to the audience but you’re also making sure that you’re not having something that’s standing out - something that when it was shot it didn’t quite play that well or it played more funny than the moment really deserves - so you’re adjusting the laughs and you’re massaging them as you’re screening the entire episode too.

Then on How I Met Your Father, we often did a lot of score, so we had the score of the audience and also the score of the music and trying to build that emotion to another level.

Obviously the laugh track (audience applause channel) is a separate thing that you can determine how to use, outside of exactly where it’s been recorded?

Yes, to a degree. Inherently we’re crossing takes, so I’m using take three on this one, I’m using take two on this one, then I’m using take six. So the way the audience laughed in take three is gonna be slightly different from the way they laughed in take six.

So you’re having to smooth out those laughs and maybe use the laugh from take three or use the laugh from take six or you’re gonna have to use a laugh from a different episode because the dialogue’s bleeding through. You’re always trying to make sure that it’s organic and feels right. I think that there are some multicam viewers who say, “Oh I don’t like laugh tracks.”

But, I think it’s mostly because sometimes back in the eighties or the nineties they used laugh tracks incorrectly. It was almost like they were punctuating laughs to tell you where something should be funny as opposed to recording a real audience and letting them tell you where something is funny.

So we are trying to smooth it out and ride the laughs and create that score but we’re making sure that it’s organic and something that’s natural that the real audience really did. Now in Covid and other things where we had to shoot live audience shows without a live audience, we manufactured laughs.

So you had to make it seem as though there’s a live audience. You had to put laughs from a bank of laughs that you could create. Then when you’re in the mix we have mixing engineers who are very specific about laughs and can create new laughs and smooth things out to create that illusion of a communal audience experience.

You talked a little bit about the schedule of the shooting: the production week. What happens after that week? What’s the schedule like from then until you lock a show or even past that - when you lock a show and go to a mix stage and maybe the DI?

Once you are finished shooting, that starts your editor’s cut and you have three or four days to get an editor’s cut done.

Then you’re dealing with the director. In the Multicam universe, the director comes in - in my instance, they don’t usually have too many notes ‘cause they know that in this medium it really is the writers who are the show-runners and the ones who are gonna do the deep dive - so they’ll make sure that we didn’t miss anything but they won’t give too many notes.

Then we start the heavy lifting of working with the show-runners - working with the writers who are cutting for time, cutting to make sure that we have a beat that’s gonna pay off three episodes from now is still in there and it’s still working properly. That’s where the bulk of it happens. So we’ll work maybe three days, four days with them and then we’ll turn it into the studio.

The studio will give notes, we will try to do their notes and see if there are great notes to do and then do the same thing with the network. Then finally we’ll lock the episode. But while all of that is happening, we’re shooting other episodes so we’re having to take time off, we’re having to do notes whenever we can and then continue on that particular episode.

So on a typical Multicam shoot you’ll have hiatus weeks built in, which allow editorial to catch up a little bit. But once we start day one, I’m behind until we wrap. Editorial is always sort of behind, always playing catch up, because we’ve got so much footage and so many episodes that we’re cutting.

I was looking at the Emmy nominations in some categories - like for example some of the reality stuff, there are maybe 20 editors, and some have two or three. Typically is multicam a single editor and why?

Yes. So typically for a multicam there’s only one editor. I think it comes from the days of when it was closer to being live-switched where you know you were almost just kind of correcting, like you mentioned, a line cut.

But once you started getting into Friends and today’s multicams, you started to realize, “Oh they can edit everything that you have in there.” Why it’s one editor is still a little bit beyond me, but you will typically only have one person or that particular season. Sometimes if there’s a a very big crunch and they need episodes faster, we’ll bring on another editor.

But you typically will only have one editor per multicam. In terms of the other shows, the unscripted shows, I mean you have some of these shows that are incredibly complex. They’re shooting packages that have to be edited by these teams and so you end up with a massive amount of very talented editors who’ve worked on this particular episode.

And in some of the unscripted world you also have what they call “series body of work.” They will say for the series we’re gonna nominate all of the editors who worked on all of our particular shows for that season. So that’s why there’s quite a lot of people who are working on those shows.

How important is it for you to understand the arc of the season on what might happen with the stories and characters? For example, in your Daddy episode, one of the characters is discovered to have written a love song for another, do you need to know how that’s gonna play out for the rest of the season, or no?

You do. And your show-runners will work with you and give you the insight in terms of what’s gonna happen down the road. Sometimes you don’t have that information and you start cutting something and then when you’re in the edit bay with them they’ll say, “Oh you know what?

This is an important story point. We wanna make sure to hit it hard or to at least set it up for the next episode that’s gonna happen.” So then you’ll rework it to make sure that you’re servicing the arc of the entire series and the season as opposed to just one particular episode.

The better show-runners and the people who really understand editing are the ones who involve editors pretty early so that they can say “Here’s what we’re trying to do with this particular character over a mini arc, over a season arc, over a series arc,” and you can kind of work it. 

Now that’s not to say that halfway through the season things don’t change. I’ve worked on shows where we thought this romantic direction was gonna go with these particular characters and then it took a turn, so now we have to set up a different thing. But it is helpful to have those insights and the direction of where things are going. 

Do you get to read many scripts ahead of time, or no?

We get outlines. Multicams works very, very fast. So all of the departments - especially construction and set design - they need a few weeks lead time so that they can rebuild the swing sets. Where are you gonna shoot on the backlot?

So they have outlines where the large principles are described and we get some of that. But a lot of times our first time to see the episode is at the table read once we’re right there on that first day of production. 

What are some of the challenges of cutting comedy compared with say, drama or action?

Mostly it comes down to comedic timing, which we discussed earlier, but it also has to do with trying to make sure that the characters themselves are relatable and likable and people are gonna enjoy these characters week in and week out. In comedy, as opposed to drama I think, there’s a lot more relatability that has to happen.

Sometimes you have the bad guy or the good guy, but in terms of a long story you wanna make sure that these people are relatable and something that you can really respond to. I think people say (especially the show like How I Met Your Father, which is really almost a romance) instead of a sitcom, it’s a sitrom.

It’s a situational romance as opposed to situational comedy because we do have comedy but there is such a a big element that is romantic and tells a lot of different love stories throughout it.

So I think that there’s a lot of crossover in terms of what comedic editors have to deal with and what dramatic editors have to deal with. But I think the joke timing and the pacing is something that comedic editors deal with more so than dramatic editors.

What about punching up punchlines? Do the actors always do it perfectly or are you in there working away and helping ’em out a little bit?

We are absolutely helping ’em out. You get fantastic actors that are an editor’s best friend where you watch ’em nail it and you think “this is fantastic.” Then oftentimes where their pacing was just a little off, you go in there and you help ’em and you you pull out frames or you add frames or you’re able to give them a little bit better timing and help them out. But if you have some of these fantastic actors like we had on How I Met Your Father, it’s really a treat because you don’t have to do that very often.

Ending acts before commercial breaks: I would think that’s a written thing - that “here’s the punchline before we go to a commercial break.” And also do you have to worry about Hulu where sometimes you get commercial breaks and sometimes you don’t? Or do you always know when the commercial break is?

That’s a great question because when streamers first started coming out we didn’t make act breaks in story for a commercial. Now, even if it’s a streamer we’re having to build in commercial breaks. So after you’re finishing a scene and you hit one of those big jokes - which we call “the blow” - once you’re making a “blow” on this particular scene, you know that that’s the end of the scene.

You’re going in and you’re dipping to a commercial, then you’re coming back after that commercial. Whether or not people are actually watching it that way, it’s kind of out of your hands. But even if you’re watching on Hulu, you’re seeing it dip to black, then it comes back, so you experience that it’s the end of a chapter.

If you’re reading a book, it’s the end of that particular act and it’s scripted, but you know that you’re gonna have to come in there and make it feel as though, “Ah, this is where that commercial would go. Or this is the end of a chapter.”

Outside of the laugh track itself, are you doing a lot of sound, whether it’s atmospheres, ambiances or hard sound effects?

Yes, we are. We’re doing everything from sound effects like a phone ringing to sound effects of a garbage disposal or some sort of practical event. What we’ll typically do is not necessarily play that in front of the audience because we don’t want it to bleed through and force us to be locked to it.

So it allows us the freedom to then - once we’re on the mix stage and we turn it over completely to the sound people - that they can manipulate it and create an entirely new soundscape for that particular show.

But in offline we’re doing everything from hard sound effects, like a door closing or rain coming in, hurricane sounds, we’re adding temp score, we’re adding our composer score.

The How I Met Your Father universe had a lot of different actual songs that you would hear that were part of the score, but we also had a composer write for the show if we had something specific that needed to be hit in terms of the emotion.

So we’re adding all of that stuff in the offline and then we’re turning it over to the mix stage and the mixer and the audio experts who really kind of flesh that out deal with the balancing the dialogue, smoothing out the ambience, creating even more crowd sound effects, making it sound real and authentic.

Do you find there’s a reason for you to go on the mix stage or don’t you have the time?

I don’t usually have the time. I’ll usually go once we get to the end of the series or the end of the season. So I’ll just go there because it’s nice to go there.

Sometimes I will Zoom in to a a session and if there’s any kind of temp sound effects, like sometimes we have some very intensive scenes where we’ve put in crazy sound effects for a lot of different things so they’ll ask me just to call in and make sure we didn’t miss anything, make sure that the narrative is still true and, for the most part, they do a great job.

But sometimes I’ll be there to say, “Oh did we miss this? Can we put back in the sound effect of him gasping ‘cause that helps this particular story point” or whatever. For the most, part you turn it over to those experts and it’s a treat if you’re able to go there and listen to it.

But they do that as their job and hopefully you’ve given them a good roadmap for them to finish up the episodes correctly.

You touched on music a little bit. Do you have a “Father” library? You mentioned temp score. Do you go find something outside the How I Met Your Father universe?

What I mean in terms of score is that we sometimes have a composer who will write something specific for a moment, but oftentimes in the How I Met Your Father universe, we would use a band that you would know of, so we would use a popular track of music and we’ll score that in there.

Like for the season two opener, we ended up using a cover of Sheryl Crow’s classic song (If It Makes You Happy) and we put that in there and we were able to clear it. We were able to get it licensed and make sure that was in our budget.

Other sitcoms typically only use a particular score or a needle drop or something. How I Met Your Father was much more about the higher-end music and the the pop culture of that particular moment.

What does your assistant editor do? Is the assistant editor work very different for multicam editing? 

No, they’re very similar. The only difference is that a Multicam assistant editor will have to group footage and put it back into the quad split. But very similarly, the assistant editor is in charge of all of the different elements, bring it into the computer, “scripting” (ScriptSync) it, assisting with outputs.

Sometimes they’ll do some small little sound effects work. Sometimes they’ll put together a temp VFX shot, but they are in charge of doing all the outputs, all the deliverables.

Once we lock an episode, their job becomes very, very heavy in terms of the technical side of delivering a show to the VFX teams, to the people who are gonna take it down the road. And then the mix and everything else.

You touched a little bit on working with the director when we talked about schedule. What’s the difference between working with a director in film versus this kind of comedy thing where the writers really are the ones in charge?

They also have to do the same thing where they don’t want their episode to seem like a different episode. They want it to fit within the universe of what show they’re actually doing. So oftentimes the directors will come to the editor and say, “Can I see some footage?

Can I see what you guys have done in other episodes? ‘cause I wanna make sure that what we’re gonna get and what we’re gonna create fits within that particular show.” In the multicam universe, a lot of directors are hired guns. So they will go from show to show. On How I Met Your Father, we were really lucky to have Pam Fryman as our primary director.

She did the lion’s share of How I Met Your Mother episodes, so she knew the universe and we were lucky to get her for How I Met Your Father and she did quite a number of our episodes. So she knew exactly what we were doing.

But any new director we would bring in, we would make sure that that director was up to speed and knew what the show’s vocabulary was so that they can match it. Then, once we’re in editing their job is not necessarily to cut for time.

They know that id it’s five minutes over and they can give suggestions. They can say, “Hey, I would cut this. I would cut this. I would cut this.” But we leave that up to the show-runners ‘cause they know what’s important for story. In other episodes that particular director wouldn’t know that this is a crucial element that’s gonna be paid off in four episodes from now.

So you’re dealing with the director in terms of notes where they wanna make sure that if there was something specific that they wanted to get on set, we make sure that it’s included.

Make sure that that any of their angles that they really tried hard to get and they thought could be a good job in this particular episode, you work with them to make sure that that’s included as well.

How does How I Met Your Father differ from other multicam sitcoms?

Well I think that in terms of what we were talking about earlier, the How I Met Your Mother/How I Met Your Father, universe does jump around quite a bit, so you’re telling things from the future perspective and the past perspective.

You’re doing a quick flashback and you’re back. It’s a much more frantic pace. The other thing, like I mentioned earlier is it’s very much more romantic than other sitcoms. There’s a lot of sitcoms that are: set up / joke, set up / joke, and they don’t necessarily have a romantic arc between characters as much.

Everyone’s got romance in their particular shows, but this show more so than others is really a story about romance and love and all of the different character relationships interspersed with one another.

And it’s the story of how Kim Cattrall met the father of her child. So it has a lot to do with romance more so than just being jokes.

What do you think the future holds for multicam sitcoms, especially in this industry where people are struggling right now, work-wise? How is multicam gonna shake out?

Who knows? But I will say with Multicam through the years, people predict that it’s dead and then it has a huge resurgence and people say it’s the golden age of multicam comedies and then it goes back. It certainly ebbs and flows quite a bit.

I think we are in a stage right now where the industry has contracted quite a bit, but they are still going to create new shows. In some respects multicam is kind of at the leading edge of it because they’re a little bit cheaper to produce.

One of the first ones back was a multicam, after the strikes. Now that we’re into this contraction and trying to make things more economically feasible, there’s been a lot of multicam from the networks and some of the streamers I think because it’s a little bit more viable, it’s a little cheaper to produce and you still have great content. So I think that the future is very positive for it.

It does seem to me like multicam comedies are more a network thing than a streamer thing. So it is kind of interesting that this is a streamer multicam.

Netflix was kind of the first multicam streamer with The Ranch and that was kind of a groundbreaking thing back then. But now you have some kid shows that are multicam, they’re gonna have some other multicam coming back that are kid shows and then you have more adult shows that are multicam like How I Met Your Father and some of the network shows that are family friendly and kinda shifting towards adults. But it is interesting that there are both network and streaming multicam now.

The other thing I was thinking about when I was watching the show was Hilary Duff and how she has been doing this since she was a kid. I have a 28-year-old daughter, so I’ve been watching Hillary Duff for 20 years.

Yes. And it comes through on the set. I will just say Hilary is probably the nicest celebrity out there. She is really an incredibly genuine person to everybody on the cast and crew. And I will say that her talent is through her history of what she’s been doing.

She’s been doing it for so long. All of our cast is remarkable. Francia, Chris, Suraj, Tom, Tien, - and, I mean, Suraj is a film actor dealing with Ang Lee and stuff. He’s unbelievably good. Then you look at Hillary and you realize that her comedic timing is so good.

She’s been doing it for so long. Kim Cattrall is obviously a great film actress and you deal with talent like that and you realize they’re really good and they’ve had such a long career for a reason.

Do you have other shot sizes for Kim or is she always the exact same shot size?

No, we do have other shot sizes.  And the particular pretense of this is that it’s set in the year 2050, so we are using it almost like a video call.

We see the environment of where she lives. We see her house and then we have other coverage where we’re almost watching her look at the TV and then we cut to coverage where she’s actually looking directly into the camera as if we are having a video call with her.

So we do utilize different coverages throughout, but it is trying to get to that intimate moment where she is looking directly at us and we’re taking it from the perspective of her son. 

So it’s more the conceit of how the camera is? That the camera wouldn’t change size.

Exactly. We have different shots where you’re in the third person where you’re watching her move. And that way we do have camera angles and then once we’re into the shot where it is, the conceit of the television itself is the video call that’s sort of that directly locked off and does not have any kinda camera moves.

The reason why I was thinking about it - right at the end - it’d be a classic film grammar thing to cut to a closeup when we get to the end of the season or she finally reveals what she needs to reveal. But that’s not correct for you to do because of the conceit of how the camera is.

Right. We do have the ability and you saw on the very end shot - a big camera move and that pushes in to a photo. But we do try to keep that lock off shot of the video call to be the video call and we let the other shots kind of tell the more cinematic part of the story.

I’ve noticed, ‘cause I’ve tracked this through enough of my interviews, very often the people who are nominated are either cutting the pilot or the finale. Those are obviously critical episodes to a series. Tell me a little bit about the pressure or the importance of cutting a finale.

Especially a series finale of a beloved show like this that has such big fan base. You feel the pressure. You wanna make sure you’re doing it right.

You wanna make sure that you’re wrapping up stories that are fulfilling and dealing with characters that people have such a connection with.

So it is quite a lot of pressure to make sure that you’re true to the series, you’re true to the characters, and that you’re making something that’s impactful and that people are gonna love for a show that they’ve invested so much of their lives into enjoying.

You wanna make sure that you’re delivering on it and making the best story that you can tell that communicates that love back to the audience.

I was thinking about that with recent news of Bob Newhart dying, and of course the finale of the Bob Newhart show is one of the classic all time killer endings in television.

Yeah, with Suzanne Pleshette. It’s just unbelievable. Really, really great.

So that’s a lot of weight on your shoulders! I’m glad you were able to survive that and deliver this great Emmy-nominated episode. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Steve! It was a pleasure chatting with you.