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welllpthisishappening · 5 years ago

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All Was Golden in the Sky (17/27)

Magic is dying.

Emma knows it. She can feel it, the emptiness rattling around in her, like it’s trying to make sure she disappears as well. What she doesn’t know is what to do about it, because, suddenly, there is a man in Storybrooke claiming she’s the Savior and a seeress certain a prophecy promises the same and the last thing she expects is for her minimal amount of lingering power to pull her away.

To New York City.

And another oddly familiar man with blue eyes and a smile that sinks under her skin and makes magic bloom in the air around her. Things are about to get interesting.

—

Rating: Mature AN: Hey, thanks for reading, it’s real nice.

|| Also on Ao3 if that’s your jam ||

She misses the jacket.

It’s a ridiculous thing to miss, and far from the only thing, but Emma’s mind keeps drifting back to the jacket and the cut and how strange it is to keep thinking about the length of a goddamn leather jacket.

Because, all things considered, they’ve got much bigger things to deal with.

They’ve barely been back in Misthaven for two weeks and every day seems to bring some brand-new and increasingly difficult challenge because they’ve barely been back for two weeks but they were gone for years and people were left behind and King Arthur is, apparently, the biggest dick in a variety of different realms.

The first news of an attack came, approximately, four hours after they left the throne room.

Which, really, did not seem like enough time at all, but Emma figures the universe is just testing them all now and she can’t figure out how any of them are staying upright at this point.

They all must be averaging four hours of sleep a night.

Killian’s averaging, like, two.

She catches him, sometimes, staring out the window or the ceiling, wide eyes and slightly labored breathing, fingers tracing over her side like he’s trying to brand every inch of her.

With him.

Or something less dramatic.

But Emma gets nightmares too, clinging to sheets and Killian in equal measure until she has to apologize for the nail-shaped marks she leaves in his skin.

He never seems to mind.

And it’s not just Arthur. The problems come from every angle, a non-stop stream of political messes that have quickly turned to political fires. DunBroch has sent missives, demands to know what your intentions are now that you’ve returned, and Emma can’t really remember Ella and Thomas, but they’d sent an actual envoy who wanted an audience with her highness, an announcement that made Ruby cackle and Regina groan and there’d been a stack of signed papers in the man’s hands when he left.

There were whispers out of Arendelle, Elsa leaving almost as soon as they returned, and Emma doesn’t even want to think about what Midas has done because she doesn’t want to think about that field and none of the people they’d left behind seem all that inclined to celebrate their return.

Because there aren’t borders anymore, so much as there are burned down tree lines and empty fields, houses with broken windows and empty beds, signs of a fight that was lost long ago and Emma’s magic will not stop. It is, she imagines, because she keeps teleporting them places, a flash of smoke and feet that land with practiced ease now, bouncing between the throne room in Misthaven and the council chambers in Camelot, David’s voice getting more and more exasperated each time they leave without an agreement.

“You disappeared,” Arthur says, voice even and almost cool, as if cursing themselves is more than enough reason to launch a full-scale invasion. “And then even more people were gone. I’m afraid that left Misthaven ripe for the--” “--Oh my God, do not finish that sentence,” Emma grumbles. David can’t quite mask his laugh, lips tugged behind his teeth and eyes staring into the small bit of marble under his feet.

Arthur’s castle, it appears, is entirely made of marble.

She can hear Killian’s sharp inhale behind her, never more than a few feet away. Not that Emma is, particularly, opposed to that.

Because it hasn’t even been two weeks since they’ve returned to Misthaven and things aren’t right and Arthur must have practiced that look of self-satisfied superiority at some point.

Emma may break every mirror in his stupid, marble castle.

And then shorten the length of Killian’s jacket.

It’s not right.

They’re not right.

They’re walking on eggshells and tiptoeing around each other – because he knows she knows, a weird, convoluted sentence that’s probably a fairly good descriptor for their lives now and his fingers keep fluttering at his side, reaching for something that isn’t there anymore.

He hates his new sword.

She knows it. She knows he knows she knows it.

Arthur is talking again.

“I’m afraid being a ruler does, in fact, require said ruler to rule his kingdom.” Emma can hear David’s eye roll. “We have explained that,” he growls. “And, you know, not to belabor our point here, but not only are you invading a kingdom you were allied to--” “--No, no, no,” Arthur cuts in quickly, waving a quick hand through the air. Emma’s fingers curl around Killian’s hook. “That treaty is null and void when you disappear, your highness.” "That’s not how diplomacy works!” “David,” Emma chastises, but she tends to agree and if she’s been thinking about the length of leather jackets for nearly two weeks, then she’s been thinking about that scene on the farm outside of the town for just as long. The smoke still stings her nose every now and then, a rush of guilt and hint of pain, as if the loss had seared itself into her soul as well, making her whole body tremble and--

“You’ve got to breathe, love,” Killian mumbles. He turns slightly, not pulling his left arm away from her, but making it easier to rest his hand on her shoulder and maybe this is why Arthur is such a monumental dick.

It’s easy to reject treaties from a group of anxious royals all dealing with various and specific forms of post traumatic stress disorder.

Emma nods, jerky and less-than-impressive, particularly when she’s supposed to be some kind of ambassador, but one side of Killian’s mouth tugs up anyway. She wonders if she can get Regina to just...burn down a castle of marble. She wonders what the melting point of marble is.

Arthur’s expression hasn’t changed. “Shall we rehash, your highness? It only seems to be upsetting you.” “Fucking hell,” David grumbles, drawing another less-than-appropriate laugh out of Emma. She lets her head fall forward, a quick movement that she hopes is Killian’s lips ghosting over the top of her hair.

He definitely squeezes her shoulder.

They are honestly all disaster royals.

David takes a deep breath, running his hand over his face. Emma can see the exact moment he shifts, moving out of several negative emotions and diving directly into the deep end of determined and it, at least, makes Arthur’s eyebrows jump slightly.

“Ok,” David starts. “We were gone. We aren’t gone anymore. Obviously.” “He should have practiced this more,” Killian whispers in Emma’s ear. She has to bite her lip.

“You want to rehash, your majesty?” David continues, and that question is almost dripping with sarcasm. Emma figures that’s fair. She lifts her head up. “Fine, we can rehash. We’ve been lied to. From the very start. All of us. Tricked by George and the Dark One and lulled into a prophecy that was misleading from the very beginning--” “--That can’t possibly be--” “Oh no, no,” David cuts in, a quick head shake. “No interruptions right now. The prophecy wasn’t wrong, but the explanation was. It twisted everything and made it impossible to do anything except our goddamn best, which is exactly what we did, Arthur. And we’re not looking for sympathy or pity or anything except for you to stop being a goddamn, fucking bastard and get out of our kingdom.”

Arthur’s eyebrows get higher.

That’s the only response.

Emma has no idea where to look. Her eyes flit from face to face and ostentatious marble tile to even more ridiculous marble wall decor, but, eventually, her gaze lands on Killian’s and that’s nice. That’s, almost, normal.

None of this is normal.

Gods, she misses real coffee too.

“Had me right up until the end,” Killian murmurs, and Emma can’t help her laugh. It’s soft and, maybe, a little skeptical, like she’s not entirely sure if that’s the sound she’s supposed to be making. He definitely kisses her hair that time.

She smiles, reaching up to tug lightly on the lapels of a jacket, she hopes, she could, maybe get used to. Again. Because it’s not new. None of this is, but it feels impossibly unfamiliar and just, generically, impossible and Emma really thought they were done with all the allusions to Camelot after she slayed the goddamn dragon.

She really has no idea what happened to Rumplestilskin.

“Oh shut up,” David groans, Killian scoffing and pulling Emma back to his side. Arthur’s face is going to get stuck like that.

It’d serve him right.

“What exactly is it you hope to get from this, your majesty?” Emma asks, fully anticipating the way Killian’s hand tightens around her shoulders and David’s lips quirk and Arthur is frozen.

She lets her smile widen.

“Anything? Because I quite figure it out. Why keep doing this when--” She twists her head, fluttering her fingers and the ball of light that appears there bounces in a rhythm that she’s actually almost impressed by. Emma doesn’t look at Killian. She doesn’t have to.

He’s totally smiling.

Until.

“It’s exactly because of that,” Arthur says, low and still frustratingly even, as if the conversation hasn’t caused him any emotional distress at all. There’s something, though. Something that wasn’t there a moment before. And it’s not fear. Or pity. Or anything except--

“You’re defending yourself,” Emma breathes, understanding rushing through her and making her magic surge. Killian’s hand turns into a vice.

She can’t quite hide her hiss of pain, another sound Emma regrets as as soon as she makes it. And she doesn’t know enough words to describe the look that lands on Killian’s face when he’s realized what he’s done, something almost akin to shattering settling on his features, making Emma’s chest ache and her magic sputter and David coughs pointedly.

Like that will make this more diplomatic.

“What could you be protecting yourself from?” David presses. His hand lands on his sword hilt, a belt Emma doesn’t think he’s taken off since they got back.

Arthur actually has the gall to look surprised. “What? No, no, no, it’s not a what, your highness. It’s a who.” “We’re not a threat to you, Arthur,” Emma sneers. Her magic is back. Loud. And disorienting. It makes her vision go blurry and her breath hitch, parted lips and, what she hopes, is the world’s most potent glare on her face.

“I don’t think that’s true.” “That’s ridiculous! It’s--I mean, it’s shit, isn’t?” She gapes at David, his lips twisted into a near-agreement and almost-condemnation because they are so bad at this and Emma didn’t expect it to be so difficult to figure out how to put the pieces of their lives back together.

She’s really annoyed by her mind’s continued use of puzzle metaphors.

“We defeated the darkness,” Emma continues, taking a step forward. Or, at least, trying. Killian doesn’t let go of her shoulder, a quick flinch and rock forward and that’s been happening too.

He doesn’t like her not being there.

Arthur clicks his tongue, another expression Emma resents. He slumps slightly in his throne, more than a few jewels in the back and his own sword strapped to his side. It’s not Excalibur. There is no Excalibur.

Not anymore.

Gods, that’s so strange.

“So you claim,” Arthur says, eyes going thin and gaze turning penetrating. “But the prince is right. No matter what George had been doing or working for, he did bring you all together. Magic. Power. And--” He nods in Killian’s direction, the muscles in his throat shifting when he swallows. “That.” Emma has no explanation for what her body does. It doesn’t feel particularly human or comfortable, like a rather large slab of wood had been pressed to her and forced her to realign her spine.

Or she’s been placed between two marble slabs.

Everything feels heavy, like the air itself is reacting and it only takes Emma a moment to realize...it might be. Her magic flares, a burst of light from the tips of her fingers and another orb lingering around the shoulder Killian’s still got his fingers on and she tries to count.

“Three in, five out, three in, five out,” Emma mumbles, a bit of her light reflecting off the sword David’s half-drawn.

“Try six out, love.” She can’t actually bring herself to glare at Killian – not when the bags under his eyes are so obvious and the jacket doesn’t look right and they’ve got to find him another sword, but Emma looks and his smile is forced.

Like he’s in pain too.

“God, that’s so long,” Emma mutters. “Who could exhale for that long?” “It might work.” “I really think that’s impossible.” Killian’s smile shifts, still not perfect, but definitely getting there and Emma does, in fact, breathe a bit easier when his hook falls to her hip. She turns back to Arthur. “What did you mean? Exactly?” “Was that not obvious?” “Let’s not go in circles, your majesty,” Emma hisses. “You’re right. And so was David. We were gone. And we’re not going to shirk blame for any of the things we’ve done. We are here to accept them and fix them and help rebuild this kingdom. We’re not looking to take over anything. That’s--fuck, that is honestly the last thing we want. We don’t need anymore responsibility than we already have.” “Not helping,” David murmurs.

Emma flips him off. They are a picture of mature, royal, responsibility. “I really could not care less,” Emma promises. “You attacked us, Arthur. Everyone did. We--ok, you’re scared of our magic? Fine. What do I need to do to fix that?” He doesn’t answer immediately, which is only kind of annoying, but Emma expects just about everything to be annoying at this point and--

“What about him?” That is not the answer Emma thinks she’s going to get. Because it’s not an answer. It’s a question. And one directed at Killian.

He stiffens next to her, tongue darting between his lips when he rocks his weight between his heels. “What about me?”

“You’re quite the enigma aren’t you, Captain?” Arthur drawls, the calm forced now. A muscle in his temple keeps jumping. “We’ve heard the rumors. Of you. What you’ve done. And then, well of course, what you couldn’t own up to doing. Are they true?” “You’ll have to be more specific, I’m afraid.” “You know. Camelot is landlocked. Not often we hear things from other realms separated by a sea, but--every now and then, there’s some news and a few murmurs and the man was very talkative once he got a few ales in him. And a slightly heavier pocket.” Killian tilts his head, and Emma isn’t sure if the thump she hears is her heart or his. The jacket, suddenly, looks a little more menacing, fluttering at his ankles when he takes a step forward, the light of her magic bouncing off the curve of his hook and his fingers drifting towards his sword.

Arthur presses his lips together.

“A name, your majesty.” “No, no, no, I also know how diplomacy works, pirate,” Arthur says. “And I know I’ve got leverage now. The question is, do you? And was the man speaking the truth?” “Babe,” Emma mutters. Killian freezes. “What is he talking about?”

“I don’t know.” She makes a contrary noise in the back of her throat, more wrong that they probably should have discussed before, but there hasn’t been time and Emma just wants some time. She wants quiet. And peace.

She wants her heart to calm the fuck down.

Killian glances at her, a smirk and a flash in his eyes because he probably can’t hear her heart, but it would almost make sense at this point. Her magic, on the other hand. “That bad, huh?” “Worse,” Emma promises.

He chuckles, a loud exhale when he pulls his hand away from his sword. “He thinks I’ve still got magic,” Killian says, and Arthur nearly falls out of his throne.

That would have been funny. It probably shouldn’t be.

David’s eyes bug, lips parting with a pop and he’s got his sword out. Diplomacy, it seems, has been cast to the wayside. “What?” he balks. “How--how would he even know? I thought you said no one knew.” “Rumplestilskin did,” Killian shrugs. “And he didn’t leave this realm right after I did. I was in New York for years too.” “Abandoning your kingdom,” Arthur adds, scoffing when Emma mumbles seriously, shut the fuck up under her breath.

It is not really under her breath.

“He didn’t want people to know he’d lost his magic, but…” Killian trails off, another head tilt and look cast Emma’s direction. “I’m sure for the right price or the right deal, it would have been worth it. To know what I’d done. Or where Emma was.” “And did this man know that?” David looks at Arthur when he asks, all fury and magic and the throne wobbles precariously on its perch.

Arthur shakes his head. “I don't have to answer that.” “How long ago was this?” Emma asks, something tugging at the back of her mind. It’s not an idea, not really, isn’t more than a passing thought or half a consideration, but Killian had to get a magic bean somehow and--”What did he look like?” “At least a year ago.” “That’s only half the answer.” “Yes, it is.” Emma groans, throwing her head back with the force of the noise. Arthur’s throne stops moving. So does he. He tries, makes several gallant attempts to twist and turn, but there are invisible bounds around him and she’s definitely getting better at that.

She didn’t even have to move her hand.

“Oh, that was good, Swan,” Killian says, almost sounding genuine. There’s still a bit of perspiration at his temple though, a tiny pinch between his brows. He’s not telling her something. “Brag to Regina about that later because--”

“Is that a threat, Savior?” Arthur asks.

Emma rolls her eyes. “Are you serious?” “I wouldn’t ask otherwise.” “Well, that’s stupid,” Emma says bluntly, David snickering next to her and she can almost feel Killian’s pride push out of him. “Get your knights out of our kingdom, Arthur. It’s not yours. It never was.” “Or what?” “Damnit,” David breathes.

Emma smile stretches the muscles in her face, wholly uncomfortable until there’s a press of metal into the small of her back. She leans into it. “We just want to come home, Arthur. That’s all. We aren’t trying to conquer anything. There’s not magic. There’s no warning. It’s just us and--” “I want to know the Dark One is gone,” Arthur cuts in sharply. It catches Emma off guard, which is far less impressive than the other magic she’d just done, because this makes her current magic sputter and waver and it’s more than enough time for Arthur to break free of his bonds. His feet slam onto the marble when he jumps up, all chain mail and an actual cloak and the door behind him swings open to let in several heavily armored knights.

Emma sighs.

“That’s just unnecessary,” Killian mumbles.

She doesn’t think. She twists and turns, presses up on her toes and brushes a kiss to his cheek, more stubble and exhaustion she can practically taste. “I love you.” He doesn’t exhale. Not quite. There are knights moving towards them too quickly for that, swords drawn and pointed directly at his chest. David is grumbling curses, bobbing on the balls of his feet with magic percolating around him and Emma can hardly see past the glare around her.

It’s her. She’s the glare. Of the magical, variety.

And they probably should have been better prepared for this.

But part of her was hopeful and maybe even a little optimistic that they could just fall back into something and normal and--

“So much for signing that treaty now,” Emma mutters. She pushes her hands towards the floor, the surge of power moving from her head to her heels. It’s as if she’s being jumpstarted, the force of it almost enjoyable, if not a little distracting because it really is difficult to see when she’s glowing as much as she is.

She does hear Arthur’s throne tip over though, so that’s kind of satisfying.

And it all goes a little pear-shaped after that.

The knights advance, Arthur shouting commands like he’s actually going to get off the dais and use his stupid sword. David twists his blade in his hands, bending his knees slightly. “Oh, Gods, remind me to make fun of him for that later,” Killian mutters, mirroring Emma’s moves and turning so his back is pressed against hers.

Covering her six, as it were.

Or, whatever.

She needs to stop mixing up idioms from different realms.

“I can hear you,” David calls, metal clanging on metal. He grunts, far more exercise than they’d anticipated on what may be their fifteenth trip to Camelot at this point.

Emma is genuinely surprised this is the first time it’s broken down like this.

She can feel Killian shifting against her, the push of his shoulder blades into her and the edges of that stupid, ridiculous, far too long coat brushing against the back of her calves. She may lean back. She may be exceptionally greedy.

And only a little worried.

About a never-ending myriad of things, but mostly him and them and she wants. That’s it, really. She wants. Them and collective pronouns and for it all to be over already, for the rest of everything to begin and she wouldn’t be opposed to more than a few dates.

Possibly on a pirate ship.

“That was the point,” Killian says, a smile obvious in the words. He has to lunge to parry a blow from one of the knights, laughter ringing out like this is fun but Emma’s eyes flicker to Arthur when he, finally, moves, sword raised and fear obvious in his gaze.

He’s terrified.

Everyone might be terrified. Of them.

And their magic.

And what Killian had done.

Even without the specifics. Or the rumors of an inebriated, suddenly rich man who found his way to Camelot and started talking.

She lifts her hand on instinct and the possibility of what could be, that same bit of hope and unusual optimism, a burst of power from her palm and it’s just enough to leave Arthur staggering mid-step.

“We’re not a threat, Arthur,” Emma says again, only marginally confident he’ll believe her. He doesn’t. She knows it as soon as she closes her mouth. “To you, or anyone. This entire realm. We just--” “Prove he doesn’t have magic! That he’s not what that pirate said he was.” “I’m sorry, what?” Arthur pales, another exaggerated swallow. Emma’s head snaps towards Killian, every inch of her still vibrating with magic and questions, but the knights, apparently, don’t need to wait for orders and his arm flies through the air, the sound of his hook smashing the visor of the man in front of him echoing off the walls.

Arthur is going to be transparent soon.

“Fine,” Killian sighs, shaking his hair away from his eyes and his sleeve away from his hook and Emma barely has time to gasp before he does it. He sheaths his sword, a soft whoosh and quick roll of his shoulders and he hardly makes a noise when the point of his hook pierces the skin of his forearm.

Emma does. Loudly. So does David.

Killian will probably make fun of them for that.

“See,” he says, staring straight at Arthur and his suddenly very wobbly knees. He lifts his arm, drops of blood sliding down skin and threatening to stain the shirt underneath it. “Wouldn’t really work if I was still the Dark One, would it?”

Arthur doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t even blink.

Killian does all three.

“So, you can report back to your little contingent, your majesty because, let’s be honest with ourselves here, you’re leading the charge of the other kingdoms aren’t you?”

That gets Arthur to, at least, blink.

Emma needs to stop gasping. “Oh, shit,” she mutters, working a soft laugh out of Killian. “You think so?” “It’s an educated guess, at least.” “But--” David argues. “That’s...oh, Gods, that makes so much sense. Was it---was there some kind of agreement, Arthur?” Nothing. Silence. Stretching on for what feels like forever and then an extra day because Arthur really is an enormous dick, but then there’s the clack of boots and a sword scraping across marble when a knight pulls it off the floor and Emma’s reactions are getting very good.

So are Killian’s.

His arm is barely more than a blur, but there’s a look on his face that makes Emma’s pulse still for a moment, quiet fury and absolute hatred and he’s half a step in front of her before she realizes what’s happened.

“Don’t come near her again,” he bites out.

The sword clatters back to the ground.

“You know,” David drawls, “maybe we weren’t the ones who were such garbage at diplomacy. It seems kind of stupid, Arthur. This plan of yours. What was it, then? We disappear, half of Misthaven is gone, and you...what? Decide that you’re the best option for overlord of the realm?” “The once and future king,” Emma intones. Killian’s arm is still bleeding.

“Sounds better in the book.” Arthur makes a face of confusion. “What in all hells are you talking about?” “Just one hell, really,” Killian amends. “And not even that. The Underworld. If you want to get technical.” “Are you kidding me?” Emma asks, but he just shrugs and smirks and the look is right again. It’s hers again.

“It’s important to be accurate when dealing with diplomacy, Swan.” “Oh my God.” He flashes her another grin, a quick twist of eyebrows that make her mind race and her pulse race and her magic is even more visible, a pulse of light and glimmer of energy that makes the air around them noticeably warmer.

Emma huffs, but she’s not so much frustrated as she is--every other human emotion. She reaches her hand up slowly, light lingering between her fingers to brush away the hair matted to Killian’s forehead.

He closes his eyes.

“Take your knights out of our kingdom, Arthur,” she says, not bothering to look at the king or where, exactly, he’s standing. She hopes he fell over. “Tell the other kingdoms too. We’re not doing anything except coming home.” “And, maybe trading a bit,” David adds.

“Seriously?” He hums when she glares at him. “Diplomacy or whatever.” “Aye, whatever sounds about right, doesn’t it?” Killian mutters. He hasn’t opened his eyes, head falling forward just enough that his forehead rests against Emma’s.

She hopes he isn’t still bleeding.

“Arthur,” she continues, a quick kiss to the scar on Killian’s cheek before she turns slightly. “Do we have an agreement? Accord? What do you think works better?” Killian inhales, head falling even more so he can nuzzle slightly at her neck and that’s probably breaking every rule, but Emma...doesn’t care. Really. “They both sound fairly royal, Swan.” “I like accord better.” “More official,” David muses, Killian making a noise of agreement.

“Fine, fine,” Emma says quickly. “I want your word right now, Arthur. Take the knights out of Misthaven. No more attacks. No more burning farms and destroying homes. It’s not going to make anyone want your rule anymore. They’ll just think you’re the world’s biggest dick.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re mixing colloquialisms again, love,” Killian laughs. Emma relishes it.

She scoffs, letting her fingers find their way back to the front of his jacket so she can tug lightly on the leather that does and doesn’t make sense. Like everything. She’s going to teleport them straight back to her room, get him out of that jacket, make sure he isn’t bleeding anymore and then kiss him until he can’t remember the word colloquialism.

“You can’t just return here and expect everything to be the way that it was,” Arthur says, sounding like he’s warning them of something.

“That’s kind of the point.” “What?” “Sodding idiot,” Killian mutters, fingers seemingly moving of their own accord. David cannot sound disappointed enough. “Ok, yes, thank you,” he sighs. “But, also--well, you are a complete and utter ass, Arthur. And we are--” “--Done with diplomacy?” Emma suggests.

“Well, yeah.” “What pushed you in that direction, do you think, your highness?” Killian asks, rife with sarcasm. David shakes his head. “The insane king, the knights who, honestly, seem to be acting out of turn or--”

“--You,” David cuts in, and Arthur makes a noise between a gasp and a groan. “And not wanting to see what you’d do if those same knights, who--honestly, control your men Arthur...but, well, you might not have magic anymore, but I can only imagine what you’d do if someone threatened Emma. Or vice versa.” “That’s awfully melodramatic, don’t you think?” David shakes his head. “Nope. Threaten the knight guy one more time with your legitimately terrifying threatening face.” “Legitimately terrifying threatening face,” Emma echoes slowly.

“You got a better name for it?” “I mean--I don’t think it’s terrifying.” “Oh, no,” David groans. “You’re attracted to the face aren’t you?” Emma blushes, entirely mistimed and likely doing damage to their ability to draft a reasonable treaty that will benefit both kingdoms and ensure Camelot stops trying to actively screw them over, but she can feel Killian’s eyes on the side of her head and--

“I mean…”

Killian laughs, the sound settling in between tension-filled muscles and bones that are heavy with a lack of consistent REM sleep and Emma’s almost thankful for the curse because now she knows what REM sleep is and how important it is to a restful night.

“I love you too,” Killian says, spinning Emma back towards him so he can brush the back of his knuckles over her jaw and let his fingers fall through the ends of her hair. “Missed that part before. When I was making the attractive faces.” “You’re doing that smug thing again.” “And plan on doing it as long as you do, love.” Emma rolls her eyes, but she’s charmed and almost calm and still decidedly magical. “Pirate,” she accuses. It’s not really an insult.

He smirks at her.

“Alright, well,” David starts, dragging out the words until his discomfort is practically vibrating out of him. “So, uh...we want to, you know, keep the kingdom from being burned down or you guys want to keep staring longingly at each other?” “Do you not think we’re capable of doing both?” Emma asks.

And that laugh, oh, that one. It’s loud and easy and it flies out of Killian, lands directly in the middle of Emma and warms her from the inside out, a glow and a want and the start of everything she’s been waiting for.

Her mind is still hanging onto that feeling, though. She wonders. And has questions. And she’s going to get answers.

Probably after the kissing.

And definitely after she makes sure his arm is alright.

“Call back your knights,” Emma says, doing her best to sound official. “Tell DunBroch that we are interested in a peaceful resolution to this. Get used to the fact that Misthaven has magic. But magic that we are--” She glances at David, the ends of his mouth already tugging up into a smile and he gives her a quick nod. “We are more than willing to help with that magic,” Emma continues, “whenever we can, however we can. This is...this isn’t George’s kingdom anymore. No secrets. No murmurs. No rumors of darkness.”

“The darkness is gone. And now there’s the chance to start over. To fix it and try again, to make it better than it was before.”

Arthur stares at her for a moment, Emma’s heart sputtering erratically behind her ribs. She reaches her hand back on instinct.

And the metal she touches is cool against her fingers.

“What if I don’t agree?” Arthur asks, drawing several pointed curses out of all three of them. Most of Killian’s are not in English.

“What more could you want?” he demands. “We’ve given you everything you’ve asked for and--” “You’re worried about the Darkness?” Emma interrupts, Arthur nodding quickly. “There is no Darkness anymore. Because I killed it. I--” Her voice shakes, tears clouding her vision and grip going tight enough that her knuckles crack. “It’s gone, Arthur. But let me tell you something, you’re harping on something that doesn’t exist anymore and you’ve overlooked one very important thing.” “Which is?”

“Me. You keep doing this, destroying families and coming after our kingdom, I won’t think. I'll do what I have to do to save them. All of them. Because the Darkness was bad, but guess who destroyed the Darkness?”

She holds her hand out, David’s fingers curling around her wrist and her nails dig into her palm where its wrapped around Killian’s hook, eyes falling closed as the magic roars in her ears.

They don’t land in her room.

That’s probably for the best with David with them.

Until.

As per usual.

The book flies at them, a flap of pages the only warning before Emma’s hands are moving and she’s got less control, in that moment, than she did when she was seven and freezing.

The book disappears.

“Oh damn,” she mumbles, Killian crowding into her space with his sword brandished in front of them. “Shit, don’t tell Regina about that one. That wasn’t as impressive.” He must smile because Emma is fairly certain she can feel it through her hair when he ducks his head to kiss her temple, but she doesn’t have much time to focus on that because Will is groaning and Belle is apologizing, presumably for throwing a book at them and--

“What are you two doing in here?” David asks, glancing around the room that is, quite obviously, the library. On the direct opposite side of the castle from Emma’s room.

She clicks her tongue. “Seriously, that did not work the way I wanted it to at all.”

“Do you want the real answer or the answer we’d rather give you?” Will asks. He’s got his feet propped up on the edge of the table in front of him, balancing on the back two legs of the chair he’s sitting in.

Emma waves her hands again. So he doesn’t fall over.

Top notch Savior, doing top notch saving-type things.

Will grins. “Thanks. For that, I’ll give you the real answer, even though it’s embarrassing--” “--We’re hiding from Regina,” Belle cuts in, Emma’s eyes widening and she’s glad she did the chair thing. Will rolls his whole head when he groans. “She is currently, upstairs, throwing fire balls at inanimate objects because that person from--does Rapunzel’s kingdom actually have a name? I just keep thinking of the movies.”

“Seriously, you can’t keep ruining the punchlines to these jokes if you’re just going to present facts to the sovereigns--”

The door swings open again, more footsteps and more groans and there is not enough room for all of them in this rather limited amount of space.

“Goddamn, idiotic, pedantic...jerks,” Mary Margaret grumbles, Ruby half a step behind her and barely containing her laugh. Her smile, however, is a different story, wide and only a little mocking and a hint wolfish and David reaches to draw his sword.

“What are you possibly trying to accomplish with that?” Emma asks. “And, honestly, babe, you can put yours away too.”

“Is that a euphemism?” Will asks, and Ruby immediately starts to cackle.

Mary Margaret doesn’t seem to notice any of them. “Grew up in a goddamn forest, light a stupid candle, idiots.” “M”s,” Emma wavers, pushing lightly on the hilt of Killian’s sword. He kisses her again before he, finally, sheathes it. It makes that noise again. “What are you saying right now? And why are you guys in here too?” “Oh, this is our meeting place,” Ruby says, as if it’s obvious.

“For?” “Whining,” Will answers. “Grousing. What’s another word for this, babe?” Belle twists her lips, tilting her head back and forth in thought. “Bemoaning. Lamenting. Bellyaching, but that one is more slang than anything else.”

“Shouldn’t count then,” Killian mutters. “Yeah, well, you haven’t been here, so…” “Although we’re not opposed to you being here,” Mary Margaret adds, a quick return to the conversation that comes with only minimal sighing. “And sorry, for all the--” She waves her hands dramatically, shaking her hair off her shoulders. “We got a call from some of the dwarves, you know the ones who live over by the DunBroch border and they thought they were being attacked, but it was--” “--A rather large infestation of rabbits,” Ruby mumbles.

Emma’s eyes bug without her explicit permission. “Oh my God.” “Yeah, those were basically our thoughts too.” “But,” Mary Margaret adds, “then the whole thing dissolved into a criticism of our ruling tendencies, my inability to provide electricity and some rather pointed suggestions that we were doing a fairly bad job of...what was the world they used, Rubes?”

“Transitioning.”

“Oh, yeah, I hated that, honestly.”

Emma’s sigh falls out of her, all disappointment and wobbly knees and the certainty that she’s missing something. Big. “There’s got to be some kind of balance, right?”

She isn’t really waiting for an answer, was more asking the question rhetorically, but the rather resounding silence she gets is, admittedly, a little disappointing. She sighs again. “What I’m saying is...I mean, at the risk of giving Arthur any credit at all--” “--Oh, yeah, yeah, what happened with Arthur?” Ruby asks, a smile when Emma rolls her eyes at the interruption. “You weren’t trying to get to this room were you?” “Shut up.” “Ah, that might be an answer.” “I think we almost saved the whole thing, really,” David says, only sort of sounding like he’s lying. Ruby lifts her eyebrows.

“Killian,” Mary Margaret says, crouching lightly to push up the sleeve of his jacket. There’s red staining the fabric of his shirt. “Were you bleeding?” “The past tense there is important,” he mutters. Will may gag. “And I’m fine. It’s..it’s fine.” “Once more with feeling, Captain,” Belle says, one eyebrow arched and her lips twisted into complete disbelief.

“Arthur is terrified of Emma. We’re all saved.” “That only sounded kind of bitter,” Emma mumbles, but she never actually let go of his hook and the ring around her neck has fallen over the front of her dress. “Anyway, what I’m saying is that, Arthur is a dick, but we’re fairly positive we can get him to call off the attacks and he did bring up a good point.” David hums in confusion. “When? Before or after the knights attacked us?”

That gets a response – mostly just shouts of varying volume and slightly bugged eyes, and Killian’s tongue moves back between his lips, pressing to the corner of his mouth with an almost obvious impatience.

“Can I make my point, please?” Emma cries, close to pleading. Killian rests his head on top of hers, a deep breath that shudders through him and they’re a mess of wholly uncomfortable limbs, but it’s also kind of grounding and they never did much understand the concept of personal space.

It’s probably a magic thing.

“Your highness,” he mutters. She resists the urge to elbow him. That’s less romantic than the magic thing.

“We’re all fucked aren’t we?” “This is not your best work, Em,” Ruby admits, dropping onto the edge of Belle’s seat.

“You’re being impatient, that’s why. I’m--ok, well, we didn’t know who we were, but we were still us then, right?” “When we were cursed?” Mary Margaret asks.

Emma nods. “Yeah, exactly. What I’m saying is those people were us. Same personalities, for the most part, and I mean--we lived those lives. Those memories happened, even if the stuff before we got to Storybrooke was skewed. I hate to say it, but Arthur, and maybe even these dwarves are right. We’ve been trying to just settle back into what we were before the curse, but that was all George too and--” “--There’s got to be a balance, for us to be both, all at the same time,” David whispers, repeating her words and interrupting her speech and, for the first time, Emma doesn’t mind.

Much.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “We lived that. We miss electricity. And good coffee. Gods, we miss good coffee.” There are a few quiet laughs and murmured agreements, another kiss to her temple as Killian’s hand, somehow, finds its way to her hip. So he can squeeze it lightly. “We’ve got people we totally screwed who are going to hate us. But I wasn’t lying before. This is a chance for us. To do better. To...to start over, with the magic and the--”

“--Oh say True Love, say it,” Will laughs.

Emma clicks her tongue. His smile widens. “You’re no help at all. And I--if I ask you if you’re doing alright, based mostly on your defense techniques are you going to give me some snarky comment in response.” “Yes, absolutely.” “And,” Belle adds, shifting so she has to sling her arm around Ruby’s shoulders to make sure they don’t both fall on the floor, “that was mostly instinct. Regina did offer to get us weapons.” “Ten thousand doubloons she didn’t want to chance offending the books with steel,” Killian says, some of the anxious energy in the air disappearing.

It makes it easier to breathe.

Emma still wants to know about the pirate in Camelot. And what he knew.

“What do you think the conversion of doubloons to dollars is?” Mary Margaret asks. “Like ballpark it for me.” “I’ll have to get back to you on that, your highness.” “Yeah, that’s too much math for now.” Emma laughs, an ease to it that’s nearly comforting. More so when she curls herself into Killian’s side, cheek pressed against leather. “This isn’t going to be easy, but--” “--It’s a chance to start over,” David finishes. “For the better.” “Exactly. And maybe someone can tell me what happened to Rumplestilskin.” Will blinks. “Do you not know?” “No,” Killian says, soft, but with a fierceness that’s more memory and more past mistakes and--

“I punched him,” Belle answers. “Several times. And then, um...after--well, you know after--” She shakes her head, not bothering to brush away the tears on her cheeks. “It was bad and Ruby was trying to take care of Emma and, well...you know, he tried to run, probably go find some of the people he brought with him or Isaac. Where is Isaac?” “We have too many enemies,” Ruby says.

David glares at her. “In a cell without a key. Keep going Belle.”

“Right, right,” she stammers. “Well, we had some time, after. And so we got him up and there was still magic on him. He couldn’t really move and he was--he realized he’d lost, I think, rather quickly and it was pretty easy after that. There were police eventually. A huge thing like that, there had to be some kind of explanation and we didn’t really give it to them, but we told them that we saw him outside Grand Central around that time...raving and shouting and that was pretty much true and uh--” Belle clicks her teeth, grimacing slightly. “--We got a call that he was going to be indicted on criminal mischief, which seems really low, but…”

She doesn’t finish. And Emma can barely keep her footing when Killian moves, but then there are more limbs in their pretzel and he’s mumbling against Belle’s hair, quiet thanks and even softer promises and she sniffles very loudly.

“We left before they could ask us to testify or anything stupid official like that.” “Stupid official, huh?” Killian asks.

“Yeah, exactly that.”

“So, we’ll take, like, several million doubloons,” Will grins “However that converts.” Killian laughs, pulling back with Emma still pinned against his side. “There are taverns here, you know.” “Are you trying to get me a job?” “At least make you productive.” “Ah, that’s probably fair. Don’t try and get Belle out of this library though. She’s totally geeking out about some of these maps.” “I told you that in confidence,” Belle cries, but Will shrugs and Emma starts to let herself hope again. Maybe this will be alright. Maybe this will be the new normal.

“Yeah, well, stop blowing my jokes up and then we’ll talk.”

Regina finds them eventually – “It wasn’t really that bad, you didn’t have to run down here.” “You set the curtains on fire, Regina.” – more discussions of Camelot and treaties and maybe meeting with some of the non-magical folk who didn’t make either trip to the Land Without Magic. And it’s good. Great, even. Productive and positive and some other word with a similar start, but Emma’s whole body feels like it’s sagging by the time she crawls into bed.

She doesn’t want to fall asleep, but Killian is still going over maps and boundary lines and David had several ideas about possible trade routes and her eyes must close, because they snap open when the door does, moonlight streaming through her window and his coat is a soft thud on the back of the chair when he shrugs out of it.

“Go back to sleep, love,” Killian says, moving towards the bed and his lips quirk when she tries to shake her head. “You’re impossible, you know that?” “Yeah, but I think you’re kind of into it.” “That’s very true.” “Oh, very, huh?” “Incredibly? Intensely? Incessantly?” “Those last two don’t seem very positive,” Emma points out, propping her head on her hand. She shifts back, giving him a few inches on the far too large bed and it only takes a moment for him to get out of his boots and next to her, barely any space between them. Emma should, really, start thinking more, but it’s been a day and nearly two weeks and several years and she flips on her back with something that may be instinct, letting Killian curl against her with his head on her stomach and her fingers in his hair.

His breath is warm against her skin when he exhales.

“I would have done it,” he says eventually, voice snapping through the silence of the room. Emma doesn’t stop her fingers. She knows what he’s talking about. “Arthur, I mean. And his knights. Whatever--any of it. I would have--” He moves his arm, wrapping it around her middle, like he’s trying to keep her there or make sure he stays there, the specifics not important. “I wouldn’t have even given it a second thought.” “That’s probably not supposed to be romantic, huh?” Killian barks out a noise that is likely supposed to be a laugh, a kiss pressed to the top of Emma’s thigh because she’d never actually pulled the blankets up. “No, probably not.” “Weird.” “Aye, the weirdest.” “You want to tell me the truth now?” He tilts his head up, blue eyes and a stare that Emma has always been sure can read her mind and know her thoughts and neither one of those things should be particularly romantic either. And yet here they are.

There are goosebumps on the back of his neck.

“About?” “Oh, don’t play coy, Lieutenant, it’s not cute,” Emma mutters. “A pirate in Camelot? Talking about your magic. What would you have needed with another pirate?” Killian hisses in a breath, a look that isn’t quite nervous, but might be a hint apprehensive, as if he’s worried about Emma’s reaction. “You knew him, actually,” he whispers. “He’d only remember your reputation. You made sure of that.” It takes her, approximately, five and a half seconds to realize.

“Teach? Edward Teach?” “One and the same.” “A pirate? Seriously?” “Seriously,” Killian repeats. “Rather notorious one, in fact. I believe he left the occupation of ruining young boys’ lives a few years after I got my commission. Liam and I had heard tell of him, although I didn’t realize who he was at first. Changed his name, you see.” “You’re dragging this out on purpose.” “I’m trying to keep my audience rapt.” “Did you miss the part where I’m pretty into your face? Because I feel like that’s enough to get me to keep listening.” “Simply content to stare then, ma’am?” He does something ridiculous with his eyebrows when he says it, the tip of his tongue wholly distracting pressed to the inside of his cheek. Emma can actually feel herself blush. She kind of wishes she’d pulled the blankets up.

She feels more than a little exposed.

“What did you need Edward Teach for?” Killian swallows. “Because,” he says slowly, dragging the words against the curve of Emma’s hip and the top of her thigh and it’s another attempt at distraction that would probably work if she weren’t so goddamn stubborn. “Edward Teach became Blackbeard and Blackbeard stole a magic bean from a giant.” Emma tenses. Her whole body goes taut, far too many thoughts and even more feelings, a spark of magic and flush of how ridiculously attracted she is to his face and the feel of him next to her and she wants, wants, wants. She--

“There’s more to this,” Emma mutters, another quasi accusation.

“Aye, there is. But it’s not important.” “Nope, try again.” “Swan.” “Killian.” He sighs, not put-upon, but mostly disappointed, hooded eyes when he glances up at her. Emma lifts her brows. And exhales for six seconds straight. “I, uh---I couldn’t find anything to get to you, Swan. I knew where you were and--” “--How?” “Hmmm?” “How did you know?” Emma asks. “You said you found out. Before. But...how?” “A mermaid.” Emma blinks. She opens her mouth. And blinks again. There are noises coming out of her, but they’re not quite words and Killian’s expression is equal parts obnoxious and a little repentant. “That’s an entirely different and far too long story,” he says. “But, the short of it is that mermaids can travel between realms. That’s--the magic is incredible, Swan. I was always trying to get back, even if the Darkness didn’t want me to, but then--well, I found out what Rumplestiltskin was going to do and--” He shrugs, far too self deprecating and maybe a little self loathing and Emma can’t kiss him. That’s disappointing. “I wasn’t sure where you’d gone, Swan. Didn't know how to get there, but...Ariel, well she could. Without a curse or a bean or a bloody magic hat. She found you. Or, well, the idea of you. She found a town near the coast with more magic than she’d seen in one place in years. And I knew. That was you. But I couldn’t get there with her.” “No gills, huh?” Emma jokes. It doesn’t land. She didn’t expect it to. Killian shakes his head. “Not quite. So we started looking for other options and, eventually, that led us to Blackbeard.” “And you...what? Took the bean from him? Was there--I mean, did you...magic?” “No.” Emma has no right to be annoyed. She knows. She knows he hasn’t been sleeping and there are mermaids involved in this now, more magic and memories she wasn’t a part of and she wants to fix it. She wants to--

“Holy shit,” she breathes, Killian kissing the first patch of skin his lips land on. Her whole body shakes underneath him.

The room is spinning.

“Killian, how did you get a magic bean from Edward Teach?” “It was relatively easy, actually,” he says, and she’d almost believe that if it weren’t for the muscle in his jaw that jumps on every other letter. “Teach was always a greedy bastard. And he thought the bean was dead anyway, no chance of revival, but--” “--How?” He smiles at her. His eyes are glossy. “More than willing to make a trade. And I--the Darkness didn’t want it, wanted me to rip his throat out or, even better, his heart. Get him to give me his ship for a whole goddamn fleet, but I...I couldn’t. Not if I was going to find you, Swan. I was--it had to at least be a little honorable.” “How?”

The word barely squeaks its way out of her, because, really, she already knows the answer.

“He wanted a trade,” Killian says, smile barely that. “And I had the perfect thing to barter. The Jolly Roger.”

She’s not crying. That’s surprising. She’s too busy trying to keep breathing though, vision going spotty and Killian staring at her like he’s waiting for the cracks to form and the darkness to creep back in and she knows that too, knows that the sleepless nights and hours spent staring at the ceiling have been because of just that, fears of what’s been and could be and--

“You traded your ship for me?” He nods slowly. “Aye.” And it all happens in a blur. Emma tugs on his shirt and settles further into the pillows under her, the heavy feel of him on top of her a welcome weight, particularly when she arches her back and she can’t move her head quickly enough.

She can’t kiss him quickly enough.

She twists her neck, trying to prove something, bruising and needy and exhilarating because this is new and not and Killian groans into her mouth when Emma hooks her leg around his. She swipes her tongue across his lip, another sound that brands itself on her memory and Emma isn’t sure if the room is actually spinning or that’s just her soul, but it’s good and wonderful and everything and he pulls back slightly, staring with something almost resembling awe.

As if she’s the one who traded her ship for him.

He smiles.

And it’s not wholly different from the thousands of smiles she’s seen before, a quirk of his lips and the way his cheeks shift, soft crinkles around his eyes, but, somehow, it’s completely new and entirely better, something almost settling about it, like they’re falling back together or finding each other again and it’s every single time in one expression.

Killian’s thumb brushes over her cheek, fingers pushing into her hair and then the smile is gone, replaced with want and that same need and it makes Emma’s heart jump, a swell of feeling and magic in equal measure.

He may mumble I love you before his lips find hers again.

She may mumble always in return.

And it feels like it lasts forever, but couldn’t possibly be enough time, a moment Emma wants to stretch on because if this is what forever feels like, then she’ll embrace it with open arms. So, really, she’s not sure what compels her to say the next few words, just knows that she has to and she didn’t trade her ship for a magic bean, but she’ll be damned if he did.

Because they’ve got to be both. The past and the present and curses several times over, a pirate and a princess who never really wanted either title.

So.

“We’re getting it back,” Emma mutters, against Killian’s mouth and she can’t help whatever her hips do when he hums in response. “Your ship. That’s...we’re getting it back.”

#cs ff #captain swan #captain swan ff #all was golden in the sky #that stupid witch fic #i am very stressed out

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sastudiosnyc · 5 years ago

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3 important video analytics for creating better videos

Today I'm going to be showing you the three most important video analytics that you should be looking at in order to create better videos and increase audience retention on social media. There are a few video analytics that are incredibly important when it comes to understanding if your audience is paying attention. I'm going to show you how to use these analytics to figure out what's working, and what's not working. What you need to change in order to get your audience to actually watch your videos and engage. We're going to be focusing on the three main analytics that I think are really the most important. And I am not talking about vanity metrics which are more about how many views you got or how many impressions. A couple of months ago we posted a video on LinkedIn and Facebook that went pretty viral. Now, what that means is, it got a couple hundred thousand views in the first few hours. I want to use this as an example of a video, not because it got so many views, but because it got such high engagement, which means that it really struck a nerve and got people to comment, talk, share, like etc. Those things are valuable in terms of understanding what our audience wants to see and how to then take that and make more videos like that. We then went through all of our previous video analytics and tried to understand where our audience was paying attention the most and where they were dropping off. What triggered their responses and got them to engage. We then we built an entire video based on those analytics. Always pay attention to what's working and what's not working, and make changes as needed. The resulting videos will be a lot more effective than if you just guessed and put stuff out there. Let's look at the analytics that we looked at in order to determine what we could be doing better to have people watch and engage with our videos. Audience Retention The first analytic you need to be looking at, is audience retention. This is the most important analytic to start with, because it's going to tell you a lot about your audience and what they want to see and what they don't want to see. Facebook does a great job breaking down all the different types of analytics that you might be interested in. Like how many minutes in total your video is viewed...which is just nice to know. One minute views - how many people actually stuck around and watched it for a minute. You'll also notice three second views, which are always going to have the highest number, just because that's considered a view on Facebook. So, if anyone watched your video for just three seconds, it counts as a view. Facebook also tells you the average video watch time. That's how long, on average, somebody watched your video. But what I want you to focus on is audience retention. Audience retention is going to tell you, how long is your audience watching for and at what point are they abandoning the video. Now, this is going to show you where in your video are the most engaging parts or the least engaging parts. And you're going to analyze them to figure out what you can do better for next time. If you can hook people at the beginning of the video, they're much more likely to stick around for the rest of the video. Use some psychological hacks to increase audience retention. A good rule of thumb that I like to suggest to people is to have a pattern interrupt every five to eight seconds. This can be text, an icon etc, or it could just be cutting to a different shot and zooming in a little bit. If you're doing the talking head type of video, then instead of just having the one static shot, cut the scene and zoom into your face a little bit. Something that triggers people's attention to reactivate every five to eight seconds, because the attention span of most humans is about eight seconds. If you do not capture your audience's attention in the first five seconds, then you've lost most of the people who are watching your video. Do not waste your time, starting off with your logo, don't introduce yourself. Don't put a lot of beautiful shots or a drone shot or establish the setting, just dive literally right into the video so that people know exactly what this video is going to be about. That way you come out of the gate running and people know okay... I want to watch this video they know exactly what it's about and there's no build up. If you can capture their attention in the first 3 to 5 seconds, you're much better off in the long run, and people will be more likely to stick around. Also what I noticed was that when we started adding title bars to our videos, there was a serious decrease in the number of people that dropped off at the beginning of the video. That's because right away, they were able to see what we were talking about before we even opened our mouths, because the title really gave it away. It meant that people were a little bit more intrigued than if they had to wait three seconds to hear what I was going to be talking about. Engagement The second most important analytic that you should pay attention to for your videos, is engagement. The engagement of a video is just as important as the audience retention. If you can get your audience to engage with your video, then you've already taken a significant step towards developing a relationship with them. The way that you calculate engagement rate, is by adding up all of the likes, comments, and shares that you've got, and dividing it by how many people your video reached. Most people on Facebook are silent engagers, so you'll see people actually click to watch your video, but they didn't actively engage and they didn't comment, like or share. Now something that I've noticed about engagement and a basic rule of thumb is that if you don't ask people to engage, they won't. Getting people to pay attention is one thing, getting people to actually click Share, Like, comment is a totally different one. If you're going to ask people to engage with you, you will need to engage with them first. And you also need to actually tell them what you want them to do. Now, you can ask 100 people to like the video and they might not. But if you are building relationships and going to their videos and commenting and not even asking them to come to your video, but focusing on giving value to somebody else, you'll find that people are a lot more willing to engage. Video Average Per Search Watch What does this actually mean? This means how much of the entire video is actually being watched by your audience. Now it's important to realize that the longer your video is, the smaller the percentage of the Video Average Per Search watch is going to be. This is an important analytic to have, because it's kind of going to give you an indication at the beginning of where your information should be going. A lot of times we think that the climax is supposed to happen at the end of the video, and we build up to the punch line. But if nobody's sticking around for the punch line, the video has kind of lost momentum. So it's really important to look at your analytics in terms of how much of your video is actually being watched. Here's the punch line, I can pretty much assure that my audience will get the same value from the first 20 seconds as they will from watching the whole thing. And that's important because at the end of the day if your audience doesn't remember you or if you haven't triggered any sort of emotional response in them, you've lost them. It's about you, maximizing the amount of time that they are watching and making sure that you're getting the most out of that. For example, if people are only watching 3% of your video or 5% of your video, consider shortening it significantly so you can start increasing that percentage. Those are the three main analytics that we use to really study our data and understand how to make better videos. Like I said, in our video that kind of went viral on LinkedIn, we used all of the tactics that we've talked about in order to make it the most engaging. Once we figured out that it was really about hooking people in, and then continuously getting them to stay by reactivating their attention every five to eight seconds with pattern interrupts, and also making sure that the video was the optimal length, we were able to see the video go much further than we imagined. It's important to realize that, it's not about the vanity metrics, it's not about going viral, it's looking at what you can learn from the videos that do go viral. Let me know in the comments below what you took away from this article, and I'll see you next week. Read the full article

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cinephiled-com · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on Cinephiled

New Post has been published on http://www.cinephiled.com/interview-robin-campillo-explores-work-act-paris-powerful-french-film-bpm/

Interview: Robin Campillo Explores the Work of ACT UP Paris in the Powerful French Film ‘BPM’

In Paris in the early 1990s, a passionate group of activists goes to battle for those stricken with HIV/AIDS, taking on sluggish government agencies and major pharmaceutical companies with bold, invasive actions. The organization is ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — and its members embrace their task as a literal life-or-death mission. Director Robin Campillo (They Came Back, Eastern Boys), who joined ACT UP Paris himself as a young gay man, tells a riveting story in this film, BPM (Beats Per Minute), of how the ragtag organization helped bring about big changes.

In the Paris college classroom where the members of ACT UP PARIS meet to argue debate strategy and plan its protests, a newcomer named Nathan (Arnaud Valois) is attracted to one of the group’s most outspoken members, Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). Eager to push the limits in disruptive public confrontations, Sean grows testy and impatient with the more moderate approaches advocated by the group’s leaders, Thibault (Antoine Reinartz) and Sophie (Adèle Haenel). There is an urgency driving his radicalism — his health is more fragile than many of the other gay and straight activists. As the group scrambles from boisterous street demonstrations and boardroom face-offs to dance floors pulsing with light and rhythm, Nathan and Sean’s relationship deepens. As Sean gets sicker, their passion sparks against the shadow of mortality, and the community of activists plots its most dramatic protest yet. I sat down with Robin Campillo and actors Arnaud Valois and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart to discuss this moving film.

Danny Miller: I knew nothing about ACT UP Paris but I did know one of the founders of ACT UP Chicago, Dan Sotomayor, who died in 1992 when this film takes place. I’m sorry I didn’t get involved with the group at the time since I now really see the value of that kind of confrontational political action. Robin, having been a member of the organization, was this something you’ve long wanted to make a film about?

Robin Campillo: Yes. I have always wanted to do a film that touched on the AIDS epidemic but it took me some time to find the heart of what I wanted to say. I wrote some earlier scripts that I put away and more recently found myself thinking of this time in my life in the early 90s when I got involved with ACT UP. It was so not my personality to become militant in any way, but I was so angry and upset at the inaction at the time. I’ve always felt that the most popular political position is indifference. That remains a major problem in our society and it’s something that’s very difficult to fight against.

Do you think it’s because so many HIV-positive people were dying all around you that many people who never saw themselves as radical in any way became these courageous activists?

Yes, absolutely. Mobilization is always very hard to do, but you’re right, it’s because so many people were dying — we felt we had no choice. It’s very rare to have this political window where you can actually start to change things. ACT UP started here in the United States and we were very inspired by the American model. I was an editor for a TV news show and was editing a lot of stories about ACT UP. I heard the president of ACT UP Paris in one of these reports and was very impressed. And then, to be honest, one night I had this sex date planned very close to the place were ACT UP was meeting then, but the guy stood me up. I was upset about that and decided to go to the ACT UP meeting instead — which completely changed my life!

Wow, that’s the best story about being stood up that I ever heard!

(Laughs.) Many people in France at that time (and everywhere) were very afraid and intolerant of gay people, especially because of AIDS. So we decided to use that as a weapon. We would burst into all these events at different organizations and it was very powerful. Amongst ourselves we’d laugh at the effects we had on people — if they were afraid of us, we were going to make them even more afraid in order to make groups take action to help all the people who were getting sick.

I know this film is fictional, but I’m assuming if any character was based on you, it must be Nathan?

Yes, to some extent. Like me, Nathan is a newcomer, he’s shy, and he never thought he would end up an activist. And when Nathan is taking about his past in the film, it’s basically me. I actually wrote that text about 10 years ago for an AIDS conference, and I was very happy to put those words into Nathan’s mouth.

Arnaud Valois: And that was the only scene in the entire film where Robin said, “You have to say it word for word, stick to the text!” The only one.

Robin Campillo: It’s true. Of course, Nathan is much calmer than I was at the time. I really like my characters to have lots of contradictions, I’m not into archetypes that don’t really exist in the real world. I don’t make films because I completely know the characters, I make them because I want to discover the characters along with the audience. The first draft of the character that I write is never going to be the final character, I leave a lot to my actors.

That’s great — and what a lot of responsibility it gives to you, Arnaud and Nahuel. You’re both amazing in the film. Did you also feel a big responsibility to learn as much as you could about those times and the AIDS crisis?

Arnaud Valois: We read a book called ACT UP by Didier Lestrade, the first president of ACT UP Paris, we watched a lot of archival footage of the protests and some documentaries, but you know, Robin told us he did not want us to become experts on the subject — he wanted us to be like our characters, young and a bit naïve, and just go with the flow.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart: I also watched this amazing documentary called Silverlake Life: The View from Here, from 1993 that was made by two HIV-positive guys who were filming each other and then one of them dies first and then the other. It was such a strong film — real-life first-person stuff about how the sickness really goes. For me, that was the perfect film to watch to understand what my character was going through, I didn’t watch any fiction films of the subject. Then, of course, it was just a matter of trust. I think a good director is someone who sees in you something that you may not be seeing. When you have that kind of trust, the energy just starts flowing, I didn’t just feel like I was playing a character, I felt like something bigger was happening.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but as an audience member, I had the feeling that the same kind of bonding that was happening within the ACT UP Paris group in the film was actually happening with the actors on the set.

It exactly was! Even though we were so different, each person in the cast was just so completely different from one another.

Robin Campillo: And that was the case in ACT UP, too. I wanted to recreate that energy and diversity, and that space and electricity that can happen between people. There’s such possibility when that happens.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart: Some movies about real events think that they have the answers, that each character has the solution. Nobody gets lost in those films. But that’s not what this film is about at all.

After being in this film, do you feel like you’re more of an activist than you were before?

Arnaud Valois: More aware, that’s for sure, and more concerned.

There are so many analogies you can make to today when you watch this film, even apart from the AIDS crisis. I feel like we’re all being called on to become confrontational activists. Maybe we need an ACT UP Trump movement.

Robin Campillo: Sometimes it takes traumatic events to change a person. I remember reading this science fiction book when I was a kid that was about these aliens coming to Earth and some of the people on Earth really worked hard to learn the aliens’ language but then they discover that the act of speaking their language makes them actually become the aliens. That’s kind of how I felt in my life when I found ACT UP — I became someone different, a foreigner, a stranger to myself. And there was no possibility of going back to how it was before.

You could almost say it’s the other way around — that you were alien before and then you found your real self.

Maybe. But one of the things I love about cinema is that I think it can do that, too. A film can change you and make you feel like a stranger to yourself.

Does ACT UP Paris have an honored position in France these days? Or is the group dismissed as a bunch of troublemakers?

It was certainly not respected at the time by many people. It’s funny, though — to hear the discussions among people at Cannes when we brought the film there, you’d think that everyone loved ACT UP and that everyone was somehow involved with the group. All French people were in ACT UP like all French people were in the Resistance during World War II. No one collaborated with the Germans, right? It’s nice to make these claims now in retrospect but it’s just not true. Most were not on our side back then — we were just a bunch of fags and dykes and way too dodgy to be accepted at the time.

I love that this film does not rely on any of the stereotypes that many American films that touch on the AIDS epidemic do.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart: Yeah, it’s a very unusual film compared to typical American cinema. Who are the main characters? You can go through half the film and not know. Who are the heroes? Who’s dying? Who’s in love with who?

The length of the film alone (2 hours and 20 minutes) would make American producers go nuts. Robin, did you get any pressure to shorten the film?

Robin Campillo: Not by my producers, but the programmer of Cannes called me and said they really loved the film but it was just too long so could I possibly cut it?

How did you respond?

I said, “Yes, I’ll try my best” and then we told him we cut seven minutes but in truth we only cut one! (Laughs.) They never noticed.

I wouldn’t have minded if it were an hour longer. I would have liked a whole film on Sophie, or the mother, or Thibault — any of those characters.

I love to think that when you see characters that they have an entire world of their own that we’re not seeing — that we don’t know them enough. Characters exist more like that in novels but in cinema, for some reason, characters are often ridiculously narrowed. Why do we have to do that?

I’m sure you’re aware of the horrific attacks against the LGBTQ community here since Trump took office. I assume it’s a much better situation in France right now?

I mean, Macron is not openly attacking LGBT groups, but he doesn’t really care, it’s not a subject he ever discusses. He really doesn’t know very much at all.

youtube

BPM (Bests Per Minute) opens today in Los Angeles and will be playing in select cities nationwide.

#ACT UP #AIDS #Arnaud Valois #BPM (Beats Per Minute)#Nahuel Pérez Biscayart #Robin Campillo #Interviews #What's Hot

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kakivino · 5 years ago

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Great Wines of Italy 2018 Bangkok

Another December, another round of wine scrum. There I was, again, negotiating a capacity crowd of stemware-wielding, purplish teeth-baring oenophiles for my vinous spoils.

To be exact, a staggering 191 premium wines from 98 producers. James Suckling’s Great Wines of Italy 2018 Asia tour was back and bigger than ever.

The bustle of Bangkok was nothing compared with frantic scenes in Hong Kong or Beijing, observed visiting winemakers. That said, no sooner had the door opened things got into full swing.

More wines, less time

Something tells us perhaps the shortened programme — there goes our one-hour head start before people clock out from work — has something to do with cost management. Omission of some big-name labels suggests as much. Then again, it remained a small price to pay for the admission price we paid, in a country where wine spells luxury.

But I digressed. Naturally, the early birds flocked to wherever 100-pointer juice flowed, drained and vanished in record time, leaving a trail of empty Ornellaias or Tignanellos exhibited posthumously to disgruntled latecomers.

However, the sheer number of exciting picks meant there was no time for regret. Something else would come along.

Suffice to say, I was extremely content to have followed the heart rather than the points. Though I barely scratched the surface, my experience was all the more rewarding for when winemakers reciprocated aficionados’ enthusiasm with full attention and spirited exchanges in between pours.

Here’s my far-from-exhaustive fabulous dozen from the walk-around tasting:

Riecine ’14 Toscana Rosso Riecine Visibly limpid, hauntingly weightless. Beautiful mesh of red fruit, violet, white pepper and blood orange, laced with racy acidity and minerality. Smart, trim, nothing in excess. Picture a whispery tête-à-tête with Rooney Mara. Incredibly cerebral, soulful sangiovese in purezza. Some whole bunch, extended skin maceration, élevage in concrete.

Riecine ’15 Toscana Rosso La Gioia More quintessential Chianti Classico: richer, fuller by comparison. Expressive sour cherry and red fruit emerges front and centre, as sweet spice, sandalwood and leather chime in harmoniously. Judicious oak and supple tannins add substance to style with plenty of verve. A classy 100% sangiovese which lives up to its name: true joy in a glass.

The reason these translucent beauties shun the Gran Selezione pedestal, according to the engaging winemaker Alessandro Campatelli, is colour-obsessed red tape no less. To think that the Consorzio would’ve learned a thing or two from past blunders...

Pieropan ’15 Soave Classico Calvarino Heady aromas of pear, apple, grapefruit and spring flowers wow the senses with real piquancy and thrust. Dripping with pristine orchard fruit, chalky minerals and brisk acidity on the sapid palate. Leesy and complex, it closes long with a peculiarly saline, nutty twang. Decidedly scintillating. 70% garganega and 30% trebbiano di soave on volcanic soil, aged sur lie in concrete vats.

Pieropan ’15 Soave Classico La Rocca Harvested late and oaked, this radiant white bears richer concentration and definition, with a tropical (papaya!) twist. Honeyed and minerally, bright acidity lifts the tactile palate as it powers to a flavoursome finish. A peach of a wine, this offers fascinating contrast side by side with Calvarino yet there’s very little to separate them. 100% garganega on chalky clay, aged sur lie in large old casks.

Pietradolce ’14 Etna Rosso Vigna Barbagalli Lady Etna is enigmatic: floral, briary, smoky, with tar and menthol in the bouquet. Concentrated wild berry and slick oak inform the smoldering, youthfully austere palate. Distinctively earthy with pu’er-like finish. Mind the silken yet potent tannins. Has the stuffing, both gravitas and grace not unlike nebbiolo. From century-old, pre-phylloxera vines at contrada Rampante.

Alta Mora ’14 Etna Rosso Guardiola Likewise earthy disposition to this fragrant single contrada. Mineral vein underscores dark fruit, wet clay, tar, florals, pomegranate and Mediterranean herb, all framed by dense noble tannins. Tightly-knit and sleek rather than sinewy, with excellent complexity, line and length. More animated and savoury than Barbagalli. Nebbiolo again pops into mind yet with a personality all its own. A winner from 150-year old vines.

Nittardi ’15 Chianti Classico Casanuova di Nittardi Pure sangiovese from acidity-retaining altitudes at Castellina. Just old tonneaux and some time in concrete. Bright cherry is joined by violet, dark berries and a whiff of good ol’ barnyard. Sappy palate grips and extends with a dusty, spicy kick. Riveting. One-time owner, Renaissance rockstar Michelangelo Buonarroti — hence the artsy label tribute — makes for an excellent conversation piece.

Proprietor Léon Femfert revealed that Rhys, one half of the mischievous Matthews on The Wine Show — and an Emmy-winning actor — downed a glass filled to the brim, presumably in desperate need of inspiration for his label doodling showdown with co-host Goode. Guess what, it did the trick.

Castello di Volpaia ’15 Chianti Classico Gran Selezione Coltassala Red fruit, incense, florals and vanilla leap out of the glass. The extravagant perfume a result of sandy soil at Radda altitudes and 24-month worth of new French oak. Deep sweet cherry luxuriates in milk chocolate in the mouth, rendered a voluptuous spin by said wood. Fresh acidity and firm ripe tannins provide impeccable balance. Freshly-minted Gran Selezione, kind of self-explanatory if you find it a touch modern.

San Polino ’13 Brunello di Montalcino Helichrysum Spellbinding aromatics. Ample acidity and a wall of mouth-coating tannins shape the chiseled architecture which frames black cherry, raspberry, blue flowers, new leather, tobacco and baking spice. Brooding and tight, there is no doubting the latent potential i.e. depth, intensity and vigour. Long ferment, large Slavonian cask aging equal classic brunello par excellence.

It was the Fanti rep Luca Vitiello who pointed me in San Polino direction when I requested his recommendation. Nice lad. Speaking of which, his lithe, fresh-fruited Fanti ’13 Brunello di Montalcino is disarmingly charming, delivering succulent berries and watermelon with lip-smacking immediacy, not that it won’t benefit from some bottle age.

Argentiera ’15 Bolgheri Superiore Ornellaia next-table might have stolen the limelight, but this snazzy overachiever stole the show. Blueberry, blackcurrant, cedar, wood spice and graphite meld seamlesssly with super polished tannins and opulent oak to compose a symphony of decadence. Apparently well-endowed yet supple in its caress. The proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove.

Jermann ’16 Vintage Tunina Venezia Giulia An intriguing blend of chardonnay, sauvignon with autochthonous ribolla gialla, malvasia istriana and picolit. Intense nose and full-bodied palate are handsomely laden with gooseberry, apricot, white blossom and lemon drop in citrusy overtone. Steely acidity balances juicy weight with aplomb, as pithy aftertaste lingers on. Not for nothing does it consistently rank as one of Italy’s top whites.

A winemakers’ vintage

To say barolo is conspicuous by its absence would be an understatement. With 2014s’ bad rap weighing on my mind, this wettest of vintages in recent memory seemed to have put a damper on barolo’s hot streak at first taste. A weaker field and palate fatigue arguably didn’t help.

But hindsight is a beautiful thing, in all probability, so could be some of these ugly ducklings. What this winemakers’ vintage might lack in flesh and bones, it more than makes up for in finesse and sultry appeal, eager to please with minimal cellaring. 2014 might turn out to be nothing more than just a speed bump.

Between the inebriation and camaraderie, the wine-drenched evening was a lot to take in. Evidently, Bangkok embraced vino italiano with gusto — some had one too many, those jovial strangers who egged me on to give the irrepressible Frescobaldi ambassador, Erika Ribaldi a peck on the cheek, to which I respectfully obliged.

Good-natured fun apart, the tasting is always about finding that something which tickles your fancy. I’m constantly told, and often repeat, that to get to the bottom of Italian wines, non basta una vita. — KY

*** This is a sponsored post *** The sixth Asia’s largest Italian wine showcase will return to Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel on Nov 27. Visit jamessuckling.com/event for tickets or more info. James Suckling is one of the world’s foremost wine critics, having tasted more than 200,000 wines over three decades. A resident of Hong Kong, he lives most of the time on Cathay Pacific flying to the most popular wine regions in the world and tasting the best wines. James organises regularly large premium wine events in Hong Kong, Thailand, the US and Europe. Visit them at jamessuckling.com.

#wine #wine event #wine tasting #great wines of italy #bangkok #james suckling #italian wine

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lorrainecparker · 7 years ago

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ART OF THE CUT with Billy Fox, ACE on “Only the Brave”

Billy Fox, ACE, last spoke to Art of the Cut after he cut Straight Outta Compton. Fox’s other feature film work includes Hustle and Flow, Low Riders, Footloose and Black Snake Moan. His TV work is also notable, including the critically acclaimed and Emmy-nominated work on Band of Brothers and Emmy-winning editing on Law and Order.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. The entire interview was transcribed within 15 minutes of completing the Skype call. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

HULLFISH: I went to go see the movie last night. It really flies by for a movie that’s two fifteen in length.

FOX: Goes by very quickly. The scenes are all kind of shortish which creates a kind of momentum.

HULLFISH: Do you remember how many scenes it is?

FOX: I wanna say it’s 150.

HULLFISH: You’ve done a bunch of movies with strong music in them — pop, rock, rap — and this movie is not a music movie, but there are some nice strong musical montages to rock tracks.

FOX: I find the shots that I basically want to use and I string them together without music, but at a certain point I attach the music to it and start tweaking based on the music. And adjusting the editing of the music, depending on how recognizable the song is. When I was doing my editor’s cut I was playing with a lot of temp music, and at some point Joe (director, Joe Kosinsky) and I felt, “Let’s lose ALL of the music.” We want to make sure the scenes are playing without music. And if they play well without music, then ideally, they’ll get better with music. We came to the realization, particularly at the end, that so much of it played better dry. It plays more emotionally when it’s dry. Music can sometimes be a support system. You feel more comfortable with music sometimes, and the fact that you would normally have music at this given point and you don’t makes you even more uncomfortable.

HULLFISH: Can you think of a specific scene that you played dry?

FOX: We did an experiment with the producers where we ran the whole movie dry. Obviously the scene in the bar had music because it’s part of the scene. It played really well and it allowed you to focus on the movie itself. It was very interesting.

HULLFISH: If you add music, the music sometimes gives things away.

The Granite Mountain Hoteshots overlook a fire in Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

FOX: That’s a big deal for me. Certainly the choice of music track is important, but even more important is where the music STARTS. I have a constant struggle dealing with composers who want the music to start too early. Basically, I feel that the scene needs to establish that it NEEDS music. Sometimes a composer will give you that extra music at the top, and the composer’s intent isn’t necessarily for it to start where he starts it, but so that you can bring it in early if you feel like you need it. But when you’re on the dub stage, sometimes mixers will bring up the music as soon as it’s available.

HULLFISH: In an early firefighting scene, you leave the action for a while to show two druggies doing drugs on a couch. What was the thought process of that choice to bring that scene in at that time?… one of the druggies ends up being a central character in the movie — Miles Teller’s character, Donut.

FOX: It’s interesting because that was a scene that moved around a little bit. There were versions of the cut where the fire came to its conclusion before we went to the drug scene. But in testing, people felt that the movie got better when Miles Teller was on the screen and we felt that was a logical place to open up that fire. We didn’t move a lot of scenes around.

HULLFISH: That happens a lot with movies where the audience, or just you as an editor, realize that you need to get to a certain person or event earlier in the film. It’s not a question of shortening the whole film, but tightening between specific story beats.

FOX: In Straight Outta Compton, that whole concert sequence, which is about 40 minutes long… before that, there were other concerts, varying venues and little vignettes. Even the writers knew that where they were placed in the script was not really where they would probably end up. Those moved around continually. But in Only the Brave, not so much… a little bit of movement.

HULLFISH: I’ve had conversations — pro and con — about pre-lapping dialogue. You definitely did it several times in this movie.

FOX: Pre-lapping inside of a scene or between scenes?

Helicopter Hueys arrive to pick up crew at Chiricahua Mtn.

HULLFISH: Both, but I really mean between scenes — hearing someone speak from the next scene before you cut to the picture of that scene.

FOX: I like it. I think you have to be careful. What you have to be careful of is killing the moment of the outgoing scene. You have to give it enough breath. But if used well and the timing is right and if not overdone, it pulls you in. I know that there are editors that don’t like it. I think it would be easy to not do it, I just think it connects things up. In the old days, before digital projection and digital editing, it used to make it really complicated for reel changes but now it doesn’t really matter.

Screenshot from Adobe Premiere Pro of the “Only the Brave” timeline. (right-click on the image to open it at full resolution in another browser window.)

HULLFISH: Another show that’s using Premiere is Mindhunter. Do you want to talk about how Premiere worked for you?

FOX: I’m always watching out for better systems. In between projects, I’m always looking for what can make my next show better. And sometimes it’s as simple as just the speakers or the video monitors or my control surface. I’m always tweaking stuff. Of course, the NLE is something I’m always looking at. I’m always looking at systems that are better. I have pictures of me using a LaserEdit, CMX6000, LightWorks, Final Cut, Avid and Adobe Premiere The list keeps going. I’m always moving along.

I was keeping my eye on Premiere, like I was keeping my eye on Final Cut. For years and years I was watching and it wasn’t quite ready. And eventually it got to a point where I had to take a serious look at it. Adobe and I finally had a nice long chat and I said, “I think you have a very interesting system, but I don’t know why I want to use it. I have to be able to sell the decision to other people. I have to sell it to the head of post-production. I have to sell it to the director.” We talked for two hours and we never even turned on a system. Van Bedient of Adobe demonstrated a number of features that he thought were very cool. So then I talked to Joe about it and he was very into it.

Crew 7 in the burnt forest including Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller), Jesse Steed (James Badge Dale),Chris MacKenzie (Taylor Kitsch),Grant McKee (Sam Quinn),Andrew Ashcraft (Alex Russell), Clayton Whitted (Scott Haze), Garret Zuppiger (Brandon Bunch), Travis Carter (Scott Foxx), Anthony Rose (Jake Picking), Robert Caldwell (Dylan Kenin), Travis Turbyfill (Geoff Stults) in Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

Then I had a long chat with a team of about six people from Adobe: the product manager and marketing and myself. And I said, “I’m thinking of using your system. But I’m not interested in you just handing me a piece of software. I need your support. I need your support on a daily basis. I need bodies available to us.” And they gave us all of that. And I also said, “I have to have shared projects.” I had dealt with Final Cut without shared projects for many years and I know how to do it and you can do it and it’s fine. It’s just frustrating. It’s kind of a pain. I came up with this philosophy that I don’t buy a car without reverse. And as far as I’m concerned your editing system has to have shared projects. They said, “Well, funny you should mentioned that. We are developing shared projects.” They said we wouldn’t have it for the editors cut, which is fine, because I’m pretty independent at that point, but they said they would have shared projects for me by the director’s cut. It came right down to it and they delivered. The first version we had for the first couple of days had a couple of things we didn’t like and they fixed it immediately and it worked great.

If you compare it to the shared projects in Avid, it’s not as robust as Avid’s but that was version 1. Now at version 3, it is pretty great. It’s pretty amazing. Like any editing system, there are things you want to scream at, but largely it was fantastic. We had a great time with it. My assistant had never worked on Adobe Premiere before. He adapted very quickly and he loved it. For me it was straight-forwardish because it’s cousins to Final Cut. Once I got the philosophy locked in then I thought it was fantastic.

HULLFISH: What are you missing on Avid that you loved in Premiere?

FOX: A lot of different stuff. But probably the biggest one is that Avid is the world of constant stopping. Everything you do in Avid, you’re constantly stopping. In Final Cut – and Premiere’s even better – you’re in a world of constant rolling. You’re trimming while your cut is going. You have this momentum, and certainly you save time just because of that. I figure the time it saves me is roughly 40 minutes a day. More important than the time is the momentum. I’m adjusting this, I’m trimming this, and it just keeps on playing. So that’s probably the biggest. I’d have to think about it. There are things I really like about Avid. I think its trimming functions are very powerful. Premiere’s are actually very good, so it’s debatable which is really better. Avid is a really solid, powerful, beloved tool.

HULLFISH: I’d be interested in your take on Resolve, because it’s also very similar to Final Cut.

FOX: I know, because, as I said, I keep my eye on systems. I’ve been very impressed with it. Paul Saccone showed it to me and boy does he do a great demo. I wanna continue to learn. I’ve played with it just a little, but I know very little about it other than the demo. It seems great. I love some of the stuff. I spend so much time in audio,so Fairlight would be great. So I want to see how Fairlight interfaces. One of Resolve’s strongest things, of course, is its color correction. I love color correction and I very much like to do it. I love that process.

But on an editorial level and a sound level and even a visual effects level, I never have time for color correction. And what really intrigues me about Resolve is its collaboration and having multiple people in the same sequence at the same time. That would really be great for me to be cutting in my room, then an assistant’s in another room doing color correction and another is working on audio. That’s really powerful. Competition is good.

“Supe” Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) and Amanda Marsh (Jennifer Connelly)

HULLFISH: Amen. Jennifer Connely’s character gets into a huge fight with Josh Brolin’s character at the horse stables of their house and the whole scene is played in a wide silhouette. It’s the kind of thing a lot of people would play — because of the intense emotion — on close ups. I loved it. Tell me about that decision.

FOX: I don’t think there’s any coverage on that and there are only two takes. Both takes are really good, but the one that’s in there? The lightning in that shot is real! I was in Santa Fe, where they shot, for about a week, and the lightning was just beautiful.

HULLFISH: There’s a follow shot of a truck that has some amazing lightning in the movie too.

FOX: Oh yeah. Most of that is real. A couple are VFX. Our visual effects editor was with us, John Carr, who was on After Effects, and he was working with ILM. So he would send plates and he would do temp versions. It was a great working relationship. Having After Effects and having ILM and being able to do Dynamic Linking, which was particularly powerful, and not have to comp the files or do anything crazy.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk a little about all those fire VFX. It looked like the plate provided you with a good sense of the shot and then the fire was layered on top.

FOX: The very end with the big, big fire where the fire was getting closer and closer and coming at them? There was a lot of natural fire there. Surprisingly a lot. But there was tremendously more in the VFX. In the scene in Yarnell where Donut is stranded behind the dozer, there were a medium number of real fires going on around him. But the interesting thing is that you can’t just take a bush and add fire to it, because part of what fire is all about is the wind. The wind just goes racing through the valleys. You can’t add fire to a natural stationary bush, because the bush should be absolutely going nuts. So they had to replace all of the bushes. All of those are CG bushes. So we’d have to decide for each shot how fast the wind was going. So first they’d have to get the movement of the bush to match the wind speed, then they’d add fire on top of that.

HULLFISH: So on something like a drone or helicopter shot of a landscape that has no fire in it, does it at least help that you have the movement and the geography of the drone plate? And all you had to do was imagine where the fire would be?

FOX: A lot of times I thought there would be fire out on the horizon or further away from camera, and I didn’t know that we’d actually be traveling WITH the fire.

I wanna backtrack a bit. When I finished the editor’s cut and Joe and I started working, I threw something out as a suggestion. The bulk of the visual effects were in that final reel, so I suggested that we start with the last reel of the movie. Let’s cut the big fire. What that does is it gives ILM a start. Get’s them started maybe a month or two early. More importantly, that’s the peak of the movie. Let’s get that done. It kind of takes the pressure off. And it worked out great. It didn’t change a lot from that original first cut that Joe and I did.

HULLFISH: That’s fascinating that you cut the last reel first. Did that inform the editing of the previous — what? six reels? seven?

FOX: Seven. Yes. It definitely informed the earlier reels. It’s also really nice to know that you don’t have this giant monster waiting for you. I like to do that actually. Get the big thing out of the way. Also, you’re starting to learn the techniques of the movie and what the language is. Every show I do, there’s a language. There’s also getting to know a character better.

Working on this, I used the same template that I used when I worked on Band of Brothers. Which is, in this case, the war and the battle, or in this case the fire, are ultimately boring. But what’s more important is the characters and the connection and the camaraderie between the individuals. On Band of Brothers, there were scenes that I had to go back and re-edit, because I now know that character better. I now understand what makes them tick.

HULLFISH: So that’s really interesting for this movie because since you’ve edited reel seven already and — for example — the character of Donut is a totally different person in reel seven than in reel one, and knowing him like you do in reel seven would give you a different perspective on that character… The subtext becomes different.

Josh Brolin and Director Joseph Kosinski on the set of Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

FOX: Yeah. Correct. I’ve always wanted to sit with a director and go over the script and talk it through. “Let’s look at this scene. What’s the importance of it. What’s really happening.” I have my own interpretation, but they’ve been living with it for so long. So I’m coming in a week or two or three before they start shooting. They’ve been living with it for a year. They know the characters. I don’t. So I’m always playing catch up.

HULLFISH: Another complicated scene to cut must have been the bar scene with all of those people and the band and the stuff going on… the music.

FOX: Like any music scene where you’ve got a song going on. You got the song going on and if you make a trim, what do you do with the music? You want the music to end at a certain place, or you want to make a transition to where you’ve got Jeff Bridges back on camera when he’s performing. So sometimes you want to cut something, but you can’t because then you won’t be able to come back at the right time. It was a very difficult scene to cut. I almost spent more time on that scene than anything. It was hard.

HULLFISH: There’s a lot of people in the scene. There’s the geography of the bar and there’s the music going on the whole time.

FOX: You’re flying around the room. You’re telling different stories. You know there’s that scene in there with Taylor Kitsch’s character ‘Mac’ and the two girls? I thought, “I wonder if this scenes gonna last?” So we discussed it at a certain point, but there’s not a lot of girls in this movie, so we were like, “No, no, no. We’ve got to keep that.” Amanda’s character: Eric’s wife was such an important character and so pivotal to the movie’s success.

HULLFISH: You were talking about matching back the mix sound to the iso tracks. That’s kind of a pain in Avid.

FOX: My assistant sets it up in a way that’s the same way that I do it on Avid. You matchframe. Your source comes back to the mix and it pops out to six tracks. It’s definitely not as elegant as how FCP-X does it.

This is the first show that I’ve done in 5.1. Adobe has a little work to do on their 5.1. I think Avid is a little more advanced. FCP-X is a little more advanced as well. At the present time, in Premiere, I run 24 tracks.

I spend a lot of time with my sound. I would say 49 percent of my time. And dealing with music and dealing with SFX. My process is that I start out by dealing with pure dialogue and picture, nothing but dialogue and picture. At a certain point — almost to clear my head a little bit — I go into sound effects world. I just build a bed. Something simple. It lets me look at the scene, but I’m actually working on something else. I come back into dialogue and I go into trimming and at a certain point I go back to sound effects and start getting more specific. More hard effects. I’m continually playing this constant game of going from editing picture and editing story to sound and music and they’re getting better and better and they’re going back and forth

HULLFISH: And the sound and picture are informing each other.

FOX: They are definitely informing each other. Both sound and picture is completely checkerboarded, so that I can easily slice underneath. My dialogue is always tight, tight, tightly cleaned. So you can play dialogue only and it sounds great. I base the mix on the dialogue. I have my dialogue living about minus ten db, and then I mix music and effects to meet that. I love using a control surface for audio. I use this Avid mixer on Avid and on Final Cut and on Premiere, and it’s the best. It just makes all the difference in the world. And I use a Tangent Devices Ripple for color correction with Premiere. I don’t have a lot of time for color correction, but the way that the Ripple works with Premiere, with 20 seconds of work, I’m done and I move on. It’s just very elegant.

HULLFISH: And having grades that match from shot to shot makes the edits appear to be cleaner, right?

FOX: Yeah. It was nice, because I didn’t have to carry a color correction stem, which I hate. And when it came time to do the DI, Joe had spent so much time dealing with the color correction that he knew what he wanted. The colorist, Mike Soa, a great colorist,. Joe said, “Here. Take the output of Premiere, and this is what I want. We’ll make it better, but for the most part, this is the look. These are the tones. All those decisions were made.

HULLFISH: I’m assuming you weren’t cutting with camera original media.

FOX: We transcoded to ProRes. For dailies, we used NextLab from FotoKem, They took all of our raw files and made editorial files and made our output files and our distribution files. NextLab is a really great box. If you haven’t gotten a demo on it, you should really check it out. Worked fabulous.

It’s how we always worked, but I’ve always been frustrated by it because ultimately when you start getting effects back from ILM, they’ve been handed the LOG plates, the uncorrected plates, When you get in the visual effect, it doesn’t have the same color correction as the footage. Joe has corrected our dailies, so that look doesn’t exist anywhere. So you’re chasing a color correction and it’s a very time consuming pain in the butt.

So on our next project, the editing system will have the LOG files only. No color correction. We will add the LUT and the CDL (color decision list) not in the timeline, but through metadata, so when you’re color correcting, your color correcting through the LUT and through the CDL. So when you get the VFX in from ILM, you just put it in the timeline with the same LUT. We were receiving 20 or 30 shots every couple of days, so that was a lot of work to have to do manually.

HULLFISH: There’s a scene in the movie during the bar scene where Donut goes out to talk on the street and in the middle of that conversation, you cut back inside the bar for a moment — kind of through a window. (We are conducting the interview on Skype and I can see Billy makes a face.) What was that face for?

Director Joseph Kosinski on the set of Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

FOX: I always had a problem with that. I know it’s done all the time in other movies. But what do you do with the music? What do you do with the sound? I’m too close to it. For me, it just doesn’t feel real.

HULLFISH: So the purpose of the shots back into the bar was to see that there’s parallel action inside the bar with Jennifer Connelly that we need to understand when we come back later?

FOX: Yes. It was setting up that when Miles and Josh come back into the bar, Jennifer would be dancing with Steinbreck. It also helps you see that she’s worrying about her husband. It also helps to set up the scene in the car right after. It just keeps her alive. I completely get the need for it. For me it bumps a little.

HULLFISH: I’m not trying to point out a bump, but as a fellow editor, it was a place where I just thought that there must have been a discussion between you and the director or whether that was scripted. And if it was scripted, sometimes you have some latitude to decide exactly where in the scene it goes — though it has to be in a pretty linear story order.

FOX: That was scripted. Originally there were actually two shots back to the bar and we simplified it a bit.

HULLFISH: I don’t want to do any spoilers, so I won’t mention the reason or situation, but there’s some really powerful cross cutting when Donut is listening to his crew over the radio, that must’ve been very difficult and complicated: When to cut to him. When to cut back to the crew.

FOX: For example, when he hears the news of the crew going into the tents, he drops his head and I had that drop of the head in another place. There was some discussion of where exactly to put it. Hearing it through his eyes. The strange thing is that we have the real audio recordings from that real event. You can go on the internet and actually hear that radio call yourself. You can hear the dispatch guy saying, “We’ve got a plane coming around…it’s looking for you…” We built that whole thing based on the real deal.

At the BBQ at the Hotshots’ HQ, “Supe” Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin)

HULLFISH: You also have to deal with making the decision of the sound through the radio and the sound live from the people on the other side of the radio.

FOX: At a certain point, we couldn’t cut back any more. So from a certain point it all had to be on Donut. I looked at a lot of different coverage of Miles and it was most powerful to stay on him and not do a lot of cuts. Especially the last bit. I think the whole thing is 30 or 40 seconds and there might be one cut. From the original cut it changed a little, but it didn’t change a lot.

HULLFISH: Anything specifically that you want to talk about from a technical standpoint?

FOX: There were a couple of things. We used OpenDrive. Have you ever used that?

HULLFISH: No.

FOX: OpenDrive is an SSD RAID solution. My understanding is that it was developed through David Fincher’s company. I cut a lot of films right here in my house, so we put the OpenDrive in the guest room. It’s in a rack. All these solid state drives. 24 terabytes and it’s loud and it needs a lot of air-conditioning, so we had to bring in a special air-conditioner. It’s really fast. I’m not sure that in our particular case that we needed that kind of speed. We were just pushing around 2K files. Adobe just finished a movie called Six Below and they were editing in 6K Raw.

HULLFISH: That’s Vashi Nedomansky, right?

FOX: Yeah. He taught me Premiere right here. He came in on three separate Saturdays and we had a great time. It was fun. OpenDrive was really a cool device. You should look into it. It was a good solution. And NextLab was particularly great. They built special edit rooms for us over at Margarita Mix in Santa Monica. We edited here at my house while they were shooting, then we moved to Margarita mix for the director’s cut and on. Very nice facility five minutes from my house.

Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller) in Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

HULLFISH: Talk to me a little about your relationship with the director. You talked a little how you wanted to be able to sit down and discuss scene objectives but that never really happened.

FOX: I didn’t know Joe. My agent got me the interview. Oblivion is one of my wife’s and my favorite movies. We watch it all the time. We love the film. So I had an interview with Joe, and we hit it off. Joe is a very very mellow and incredibly bright guy. He likes that we don’t talk a lot about it because he wants me to just interpret it however I want to interpret it. I looked at the material in a different way. I came at it from a different angle. He likes to have a fresh eye on it. Fresh Perspective.

When you have an interview with somebody, discussing the film is only part of it. You may like that person and that person may like you, but you really don’t know their sensibilities until you start working together. In Joe’s case, we locked in pretty good. We’d both see something on the screen and I could see his head turn. And I’d just say, “Yeah. See it. Got it.” We wouldn’t even have to write down a note. Life would be good if I just kept working with Joe. Sometimes directors can be complicated. Mostly I’ve worked with really nice, bright, mellow guys.

HULLFISH: What was your method of collaborating during the director’s cut?

FOX: We didn’t look at individual scenes. We pretty much would go over a reel. We would look at a large chunk of the film. I would take notes and then he would just take off. His office was next door and he’d just go there and do other stuff. Sometimes while I worked, he would go re-examine dailies. And he would come in with a list of takes he wanted to try. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. Mostly it would. But I would work on my own for a while, then call him and say, “Ready for you. Come on back.” That was kind of the groove.

HULLFISH: Tell me your approach to a scene.

FOX: For me it’s important to have a point of view. I can’t cut a scene without having an understanding of what the scene is about. What’s the key objective? – even though it may be my interpreted key objective. What do we want to communicate or what do we want to say here? I can’t just cut something even if I have the script in front of me and there’s the dialogue. It has to be grounded in something.

As much as I absolutely love editing, the one thing I don’t love is building a first cut. For me I don’t spend too much time killing myself trying to find the right take. I look at a couple takes and if I can find one with no real mistakes and it’s good, I just do it, because at this point all I’m trying to do is build a scene with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s there. It’s the whole body.

At that moment, whenever I edit that last chunk in, everything changes. I start molding. And I start working with the footage and I start listening to the dialogue and working with the energies. Where people are looking. Everything has to be very carefully motivated.

Once it’s feeling better’ish, I go back into dailies again. I start re-looking at raw footage and they take on a whole new color. I start seeing real subtleties. Little performances. Little things that I didn’t really see before. Now I see them because I’m now into the dynamics of the scene.

There was a day where I would spend a tremendous amount of time doing what I call a performance cut. I would string out every single line from every take and every setup. I don’t do that anymore. Very time consuming to do it. And I just feel that this process works better. I just mold it into the refined takes.

What I also do is I create a thing called my Golden Moments cut, which is not really performance-based. It’s a templated sequence I have which has leader. Everything is based on leader. Everything works with leader for me because it’s all timing and it’s all musical. And the leader sets up the rhythm. So everything I do, every little sequence or reel has its leader at the top because it sets me up, but I’ll do a Golden Moments where I have these little two second slates that say, one two three four, scattered onto the sequence. Then I go back and I start looking at the dailies. And I look for great moments. I see a great little thing and I see that it’s supposed to be at the end so I’ll move it all the way down to number 9. Or this is for the beginning so I’ll move it to number one. I find all these little little teeny tiny things that I would love to get into this cut. Maybe there’s 20 things in there or 30 things.

Now I try and see what I can put into the cut. And the thing I find fascinating is that these are all GREAT moments, but when I try to fit them into the cut, I’ll find that it’s stronger just to be on the person. And of the 30 really good moments that I’ve put in my Golden Moments, I’m lucky if I put in five. I couldn’t find a home for them. “Oh my God! That’s such an amazing shot!” Great. Let’s find a home for it.” And then the director sees why it’s not in. Sometimes you can see it in another editor’s work where they forced in all of the great little moments. I think the key thing that makes a really good editor is not what you edit in, but it’s what you leave out.

HULLFISH: I would worry about showing that Golden Selects reel to the director because they probably want to see all those shots in.

FOX: Oh, and they do. And I let them try. “Come on. Let’s do it together. Let’s try this one. Let’s try to put it in.” And they see, “Oh, right. You’d have to cut away from this shot and it’s so much stronger to just stay on that person.” So it’s a process. It’s a process of fine tuning. I work on it. I go off and do some sound. I can feel it’s getting closer and it’s getting closer. And the thing that’s the greatest is that you take one edit, one little thing and you trim it by one frame and the whole scene just goes (BOOM). It’s no longer a series of shots, it’s a window of reality. I keep drilling on it until I get to that place.

HULLFISH: That takes some faith in your skills that you can just knock out an initial cut that may not be great, but to understand that it’s a process and that eventually you will get it there. But not to be so discouraged by the first pass… to have patience and to understand that the first cut is only part of the process. Sometimes if you let an assistant cut a scene, they kind of freak out about those early decisions. But you have to realize that that first cut is only one small step in a larger process.

FOX: Exactly. It’s part of the magic When you do your job well, it’s the invisible art. It just looks natural. It looks like nothing.

HULLFISH: So many people think that that invisibility happens the first time you put a scene together.

FOX: Wouldn’t that be nice. I am incredibly neurotic in that — even down to cutting a oner — I start to think, “This is the scene I won’t be able to figure out.” But even at the rough cut stage when I see that it’s not pretty at all, there’s something in there, where I say to myself, “This scene will work. I know I can get it there. This will be great.”

HULLFISH: I saw a quote from the fantastic Carol Littleton saying the same thing. That she’s never sure that she’s going to be able to get some scene done… but of course she does. Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate your generosity and wisdom. Have a great time with your project.

FOX: Thank you. Bye bye.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.

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