In Netflix's Beef, a young couple witnesses an alarming fight between their boss and his wife, triggering strategic moves of favors and coercion in an elite country club world owned by a Korean billionaire owner. Newly-engaged Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Charles Melton) are both lower-level staff at the club but become entangled in the unraveling marriage of their GM Joshua Martín (Oscar Isaac) and his wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (Carey Mulligan). The club's billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), struggles to manage her own scandal involving her second husband, Doctor Kim (Song Kang-ho).
EDITING
Laura Zempel, ACE, returned from Season 1 to edit four episodes in the latest season (1, 4, 5, 8).
"As the returning editor from Season 1, I was very excited to cut both the pilot and the finale," she shares. "After working on Season 1 with our show runner, Lee Sung Jin - who goes by “Sonny” - and producing director Jake Schreier, I came into this season having a very good understanding of their taste and specificity when it comes to balancing the tight-rope of tonal shifts that happen within their work. So much of Sonny’s writing lives in the subtext of his scripts, and we have to make sure everything that is unsaid between our characters comes across clearly to our audience."
Season 2 of Beef was block shot, and the editorial team had to track all the characters and their motivations throughout the entire season.
"Thankfully, my co-editor, Lauren Connelly and I were in constant communication with each other," says Zempel. "We were lucky enough to work in-person, so we were checking in with each other daily to show each other scenes and make sure the through line of the season was clear across our different episodes."
The show was cut using Avid Media Composer systems at Moviola and Tricoast Digital in Burbank.
"Because Sonny likes to watch every performance from every take, we rely heavily on Avid’s ScriptSync function," says Zempel. "It’s time consuming for our assistant editors, but luckily we had wonderful assistants in Abby Boyle, Lilly Wild and Josh Stein. ScriptSync is a huge help when we are in the room with Sonny because we can quickly show him every take from every angle and make sure that we are using the best performance possible."
Zempel points to the cold open in Season 2's first episode as a highlight.
"Coming off of the explosive road-rage sequence that happens in the first two minutes of Season 1, Sonny and I talked about how we had to keep the 'beef' feeling just as exciting this season," she explains. "It was a tall order because it takes about 12 minutes until we reveal the inciting incident of Ashely recording the fight between Josh and Lindsay, so we knew we had to keep the tension escalating every second. In order to achieve this, I had to build the simmering resentment with Josh and Lindsay with overlapping dialogue, and intercut our young lovebirds, Ashley and Austin, so the audience would feel as if they were two parallel trains that would collide at any moment. In order to heighten the tension, Sonny wanted to have a singular piece of music that covered the full 12-minute section, and we worked very closely with our composer, Finneas O’Connell."
O’Connell would come to the edit bay to watch versions of the edit and then send music. The picture would then be adjusted so that every beat change within the music landed perfectly with the couples.
"The writing in this sequence does such a great job of giving exposition into our characters while throwing the audience right into their current situation," shares Zempel. "It’s an ambitious sequence, and the way it came together makes it one of my favorite sequences I’ve ever edited."
SOUNDTRACK
Christopher Gomez, MPSE, is the show's supervising sound editor, responsible for discussing with the showrunner, director and picture editors the overall sonic vision of a project.
"We outline ideas and needs, such as sonic landscape, potential ADR and themes of a show," he explains. "I then work with a team of sound editors to pass along those discussions and oversee the sound elements all the way through to our final sound mix."
In the case of Beef, a directive was to always make sure the show was grounded in reality.
"We wanted the viewer to always feel immersed in the locations that we were in," Gomez explains. "We also needed to maintain a level of 'pristine and polished' sound that would reflect the look and feel of this season."
The team relied on tools that included Avid Pro Tools Ultimate, Izotope RX 12 and EdiCue. Gomez points to a oner shot in Episode 208 as a sonic highlight. In it, Austin, Ashley and Lindsey must fight their way through various Korean bodyguards in Trochos Clinic.
"This entire shot, all the way through to Austin bursting through the glass door and onto the streets of Seoul, was such an intricate dance of sound and music," he recalls. "The idea was always that our three leads had to stumble their way to beating everyone up and escaping, so every punch, effort, scream and impact needed to be carefully woven together so that, even though everything looked really cool, we never lost sight of the comedy that none of them knew what they were doing and it was one lucky turn of events after the other for them. And of course, it all culminates in the big gunshot to Dr. Kim and the eventual 'exhale' when Austin goes crashing through the glass door, and they finally escape onto the streets of Seoul."