Kirk Baxter is an Australian film editor. His editing, with Angus Wall, of the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (directed by David Fincher-2008) was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing, the BAFTA Award for Best Editing, and the American Cinema Editors Eddie Award.[1]
Baxter was raised in Sydney, Australia and commenced his career as an editor there. He had been noted primarily for his work editing commercials, and co-founded a commercial editing firm named Final Cut.[2] In 2004 he joined Wall's firm Rock Paper Scissors, which also does a good deal of commercial work.[3] Baxter then worked with Wall and Fincher as an "additional editor" on the film Zodiac (2007); when Wall was chosen to edit The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, he proposed to Fincher that Baxter be the co-editor.[4]
Both Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are studied as early examples of the possibilities of "all-digital" shooting of feature films with digital cameras.[5][6][7] One important aspect of using digital cameras is that the director can view a scene immediately after it is recorded; as Fincher commented in an interview, "Dailies almost always end up being disappointing, like the veil is pierced and you look at it for the first time and think, 'Oh my god, this is what I really have to work with.' But when you can see what you have as it's gathered, it can be a much less neurotic process."[8] Intensive use of digital cameras changes the "workflow" of film editing. More generally, digital filmmaking creates new possibilities for film editing compared to the "cutting" of reels of physical film; among these possibilities are subtle changes in the timing of an actor's performance, and combining of two different takes of a given scene within a single frame.[9] The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has the additional novel element that the facial performances in many of the film's scenes were recorded independently of the body performances, and were combined to create the final film. Brad Pitt's face performances for Button were used in all the scenes, but for many of the scenes a second actor's performance was used for the rest of Button's body.[10]
Baxter was nominated (with Wall) and subsequently won the 2011 Oscar for Film Editing - for The Social Network.
The director of each film is indicated in parenthesis.
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