Editor Nicole Thorn talks with Assistant Editor Annie Zhang.
Q. What is Girl Crush about?
NT: Girl Crush is a musical romantic comedy that follows the humorous journey of self-discovery of Jessie, an aspiring songwriter who hasn’t been able to write any music after a recent breakup. That is, until her musical idol, Brianna, starts working at the same part-time job.
All 15 episodes of Girl Crush are available now to watch on TikTok @girlcrushseries.
Q. How did you get involved in the project?
NT: Girl Crush co-producer Sayuri Kawamura (co-produced with Hew Sandison), who I’d worked with before when I cut Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt), had posted a Facebook callout for volunteers to help clear out the theatre that they would be using for the shoot. It was an old theatre in Haymarket that had been used for some parties and it was a mess with leftover junk and rubbish. So I volunteered and when I was there I asked Sayuri if they needed any help on the shoot (as I wanted to get more on set experience) and she said I could be their production assistant. I had also previously worked with Girl Crush creator Ally Morgan on a web pilot called How to Be Queer and after the shoot Ally asked if I was available to cut the series. So I went from volunteer to production assistant to Editor.
Q. What were your first thoughts after reading the script?
NT: I loved the script - it was funny and sweet and had a real energy about it. I couldn’t wait to be on set to see them filming. When I saw it was 37 pages though, I thought - “how in the world is this going to fit into 15 x 1 min episodes”, which was the initial time limit for each episode. So, reading it as the production assistant, there was a little bit of relief that I wasn't cutting it, also because it seemed like it could be a complicated edit and a bit out of my comfort zone because it was a musical and it jumped in and out of reality a lot…and getting that 37 pages into 15 minutes!! In the end, I had to tackle all of that anyway when I became the Editor.
Q. Have you ever edited for TikTok before? What do you find interesting and challenging about editing for TikTok?
NT: I admittedly hadn’t used TikTok before this project. So the first thing I did was download it and watch a few other TikTok series to get an idea of the format.
One of the biggest challenges of creating content for TikTok is not knowing how people are going to come across it - any episode could just pop into someone’s feed and it can be pretty scattered. So each episode has to jump straight into it, grab the viewer's attention and make people want to find the series to watch more of it. Which means the first few seconds of each ep became so critical - we were constantly interrogating the edit, asking ourselves “is this the most impactful way of entering the episode?”. I struggled with this a little bit, because in longer form, there’s time for set-up you can do for scenes and moments to bring the audience along with you and also to build up the comedic payoffs later. But on TikTok, there’s not as much time for that - we have to crash through the doors and trust that the audience will follow us through.
This was compounded by the fact that we were aiming for 1 min episodes. I remember after my first assemblies, one episode was coming in at 1 min 47 sec, almost double what it had to be! At one stage, we actually did a really brutal version of all the episodes so that we hit the 1 min mark, but it was awful - we just lost too much, all the heart was gone. We realised sticking to that limit wasn’t going to work and we just let the edit find its natural length. In the end, the longest episode is only 1 min 33 sec and when we sent it off to Screen Australia for feedback, they didn’t have any issues with the length, which was fantastic.
That was still the most challenging part of editing the series though, just getting that time down and trying to keep it all really punchy and engaging.
Having said that though, there’s a lot of creative freedom and versatility you have with content for TikTok. And that was pretty exciting. The parts of the script I was most worried about being out of my comfort zone ended up being some of the most fun to cut. I had a lot of fun trying new things.
Q. What was your process for editing each episode? Did you just cut them sequentially since you had all the footage?
NT: I started with episode three, because Ally had mentioned she wasn’t sure how to make the comedy in it work, being over two locations in between fantasy and reality, so I wanted to dig into that first to make sure I could get it working. Then I went through them sequentially. I did several passes of all the episodes and had an assembly for each ready before starting to have review sessions with Ally and the director, Olivia Aleksoski.
Because the episodes were so short, and I had been on set, I didn’t re-read the script before starting to assemble things. I wanted to get straight into it to see what was working and what wasn’t. But the script was definitely helpful to refer back to as I went on because there was so much going on (the musical numbers, fantasy sequences, etc) and I wanted to make sure I was getting Ally’s intentions on the page correct in the edit.
And then in these sessions with Ally and Olivia, we just kept pushing the edit together, trying lots of different iterations, taking out or compressing lines, finding ways of tightening the ep, all the usual stuff of whittling down, refining the edit. I was also able to pitch my own ideas, which Ally and Olivia were always super receptive of. We all had other jobs on, which meant meeting in the evening and editing into the night, but it was an incredibly positive environment.
I also did line-by-lines for each episode, but I ended up doing them once I had done the initial assembly and a few passes. I think it was just helpful for me to return to the rushes through the line-by-lines after a bit of time and I would often find myself coming up with new ideas, seeing everything from a different perspective.
Q. Girl Crush is a musical. Were the songs all written and recorded before you started editing? How did you find cutting to music?
NT: To start Ally wrote all the songs acoustically on her piano or guitar and then sent them to our composer Madeline Mallis to do all the music production. So I had draft versions of every musical number from the beginning. These draft versions were what we used for playback on set.
There’s also an audio comedy cue that’s used quite often throughout the series - I’ll just call it “HFS” - and I had two temp versions of it, a long one and a short one. Unlike the songs, we weren’t locked into the timing of the HFS because the final versions of them were recorded later to fit the edit. Outside of the musical number songs, all other music scoring was added after picture lock.
I had the good fortune of having a lot of footage to work with too because Olivia and the DOP Carina Burke shot the shit out of each song - they would sing through the whole song in all different set-ups, with a lot of original coverage and slo-mo thrown in as well. I had so many choices on every line: did I want the characters to be dancing, singing the line to camera or to each other, making a face or doing a pose? On the timeline, I would have all the options stacked on the tracks, synced up to the music, and I’d work my way through them quite methodically.
Q. What was it like working with the series creator Ally Morgan?
NT: Ally is just so, so talented - she writes, she sings, she plays music, she acts. She created Girl Crush, wrote the script, plays Jessie and sings a few of the musical numbers. Ally definitely had a strong creative intent and vision for the series, but she didn't have an ego about her work. She was really collaborative and open to ideas. Ally also has an incredible sense of visual comedy. The way she portrays Jessie is so endearingly relatable and funny that you just want to root for her succeeding.
Q. What’s next for you?
NT: Another social media comedy series! And finishing up on my 4th season working as Animatic Editor on Gabby’s Dollhouse (currently on Netflix).