Season 3 of the Showtime series Yellowjackets began streaming in February. The show centers around a team of talented high school girl soccer players who survive of a plane crash deep in the remote northern wilderness. The show is equal parts survival epic, psychological horror story and coming-of-age drama, and in Season 3, the team has made it through the brutal winter, but is now facing distrust in leadership and other tensions that could jeopardize their rescue chances.
The show’s stars include Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, Lauren Ambrose, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Samantha Hanratty, among others, with Hilary Swank guest starring too. Jeff Israel is one of the series' four editors, and says showrunners Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson push the team to think outside the box and swing for the fences.
Photo: Jeff Israel
"It's meaningful to tell these kinds of stories - the ones that push boundaries," says Israel. "It's very punk rock in a way that I love."
Israel has worked on all three Yellowjackets seasons and feels it's gotten easier to navigate the show's many tonal shifts.
"One of my favorite things about Yellowjackets is how seamlessly it crosses genres," he shares. "The order of the scenes often transition from psychological thriller to horror to comedy. All four of us editing the show - Kevin Ross, Daniel Williams and Genevieve Butler - have been on since Season 1. Since we are remote, we have a group Slack. Often someone will ask if anyone knows of a shot they may need, and sometimes there can be overlap across episodes, like with Episodes 306 and 307. It's very beneficial to have that established relationship with each other and the showrunners."
Having worked on all three seasons is a "blessing," says Israel, making him familiar with characters, material and storylines when dealing with callback sequences.
"I will often go back into the original dailies for scenes from previous seasons to pull from for callbacks," he reveals. "For example, in Episode 202, I suggested we use footage of adult Travis that I had cut out of Episode 103. In the Season 3 finale, 'Full Circle,' I went back to a scene I had edited in Episode 106 for Lottie's baptism sequence to intercut her teen self's vision of an altar, which we came to discover was where she ultimately died. Sometimes we even put little flash-frame Easter eggs of moments yet to come, like in Episode 202, when adult Lottie had a vision of Laura Lee. I added a flash from Episode 207 of teen Lottie's bloodied face after Shauna's attack."
Israel points to Episode 202 as one of his editorial highlights.
"The Yellowjackets eating Jackie in 202 is definitely one of the most creatively exhilarating scenes I've ever cut in anything. I intercut the starving teen YJ's with a fantastical, dreamlike bacchanal feast underscored with Radiohead's 'Climbing Up the Walls.'"
The editing team cuts using Avid Media Composer and Pacpost Live when working with producers/directors.
"My favorite tool is the Izotope RX Voice De-Noise plug-in," he notes. "In Season 2 we had multiple scenes where you heard the snow machines. The Izotope plug-in does an amazing job of removing background noise. It's an essential tool for all of my jobs now."
MUSIC
Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker have been the composers and songwriters on the show for all three seasons.
“Score-wise, the sweet spot for Yellowjackets is to balance destabilizing horror with transcendent beauty,” note the duo. “The show navigates hair-pin curves in terms of tone, storytelling and relationships, so we think a lot about when and where we want to help slow things down so that the audience really zeroes in on a particular plot point, and when we want to move things along, particularly when there’s action, or a hunt.”
Theodore Shapiro scored the show’s pilot, with Caroline Shaw handling main vocal duties.
Photo: Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker
“Once we got a sense where the story was going - in particular that it was like a poison piñada, or a bomb that explodes in every direction - we knew we needed to follow its lead and go wild, sonically,” Wedren and Waronker. “This was also the direction of our fearless producers ‘JAB’ (Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson) - to go as far out as possible and hopefully do something uncharted, which is a rare and precious mandate for a TV show.”
Wedren and Waronker were both singers themselves, with roots in ‘90s alternative/art rock, so they do most of the singing, in addition to the material that Shapiro recorded with Shaw.
“It all began blending together and mutating quite quickly and naturally, to the point that we have a hard time telling who’s who, vocally, and what sounds are coming from where.”
Gear-wise, the team use whatever’s at hand, passing around a microphone and making mouth noises, then treating it with various mangling effects, or leaving it pristine and raw if that’s what the scene calls for. For Season 3, they began incorporating modular synths to establish the sound of the forest floor, the cave, and menacing, psychedelic frog and tree sounds.
“Getting to make the music for Yellowjackets is truly a blast like no other,” they share. “We’re very grateful.”