Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip
Director: Walt Becker
When the filmmakers on Alvin 4 needed a little bit of help with some of the performance numbers, they called me and said the list of film editors experienced with music, dance, and talking chipmunks was a very short list! I was more than happy to come on and help out for a few weeks with a couple of the performance numbers.
Uptown Funk
The performance of Uptown Funk on a crowded New Orleans street was a blast to edit. I wanted to mirror the color and vibrancy of the city in the editing style. We actually experimented with a couple of versions that were incredibly stylized, including 20 Theodores fanning out in a tribute to the Moulin Rouge Green Fairy. Ultimately, we decided that was a different movie and we stayed a little more conventional. But the cutting style is still fast and fun.
Line Dance and Bar Fight
The performance and line dancers for “Shake Your South Side” were really great to edit, but the bar fight that follows was just over the top fun. For the barroom brawl section, I temped in score from Midnight Run, one of my favorite films. It worked so well it ended up staying in for the final. And when we juxtaposed the two extreme close up shots of Alvin and Suggs for the standoff before their fight, well, there was really only one piece of music that captured both the fun and parody of the sequence. It as well stayed in for the final.
