Courtesy Digital Content Producer

Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter used Final Cut Pro to edit “The Social Network,” and one of the things they really like about the software is the ability to do multiple timelines.

“You don’t get to 500 million + friends without making a few enemies…”

Listen to the interview with Wall and Baxter

Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter have collaborated with director David Fincher several times before on movies such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Zodiac,” but it’s a safe bet neither has seen such momentum and critic/audience praise as the work they did on editing “The Social Network.” The film has been nominated for an Oscar for editing, and both are happy to have contributed to creating a quite remarkable film.

David Fincher’s film tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the college student who created Facebook.

While the story is not authorized, Zuckerberg has screened the movie with his employees, and no one is criticizing too much, leading many to believe it’s a fairly accurate presentation within the framework of a fiction movie.

But more importantly, the story works as a metaphor for how we all want to be “Liked” and how much of our lives are lived online. Wall and Baxter used Final Cut Pro to edit “The Social Network,” and one of the things they really like about the software is the ability to do multiple timelines.

“One of the best features of Final Cut Pro is the ability to tear off timelines,” Wall explains. “It’s very easy to customize your workflow and do multiple timelines of edited pieces. For example the opening scene of ‘The Social Network’ is an eight-page scene, and David shot about 60 takes of the six-minute scene. We ended up breaking the takes into smaller pieces of five or six sections, and once we are at that level, we start to work through and decide what sections from the multiple master takes work the best.

Final Cut Pro allows us to track all that quite efficiently.

David Fincher does tend to do more takes than other directors, so it helps to have a method to break it down.”

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, in the movie were played by (spoiler alert) not twins at all but one actor, Armie Hammer.

But even that is not entirely true, because a second actor, Josh Pence, actually was the other twin in the movie, but Hammer’s face was digitally superimposed over Pence’s face. So Hammer’s performance was a dual role for two characters.

“Editing those dual performances was very similar to any other type of performance. You just would pick the best takes from the many that were shot,” Baxter reveals. “One thing that helped was setting up the split screen for the early edits. Getting that in the timeline was important to get into the mode of seeing the performance of the two twin characters in the movie.”

Wall and Baxter use FCP pretty much as is with minimal plug-ins.

“We use it pretty stock as is,” Wall explains. “We tend to use only a few plug-ins here and there. Knoll Flare from Red Giant we’ve used on occasion for previous movies. We actually use Apple’s Motion at lot to stabilize shots. Fincher uses stabilization a great deal, so it’s very handy to round-trip that through Motion to smooth things out.”

Listen to the entire audio interview with Wall and Baxter above. I ask them about handling dozens of takes, working with Fincher, their favorite scenes from the movie, incorporating the music of Trent Reznor and if they are nervous about Oscar night.

UPDATE: Congrats on winning an Oscar from the Academy tonight! – DCFCPUG