How ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Edited Practical FX With Grandiosity

As a horror-comedy that’s loaded with practical effects, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seemingly would be a tricky movie to edit. Toeing the tonal line while also maintaining the grandiosity of Tim Burton’s original is no small feat, but editor Jay Prychidny (Scream VI, Wednesday) makes it look easy in his hilarious, very Beetlejuice final cut.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an absolute blast from start to finish, taking us back to Burton’s original in exciting ways. The movie is oozing with energy and certainly feels as if everyone both in front of and behind the camera (as well as safely in an editing suite) were having an absolute blast. If you’ve ever wondered how a movie on this scale is cut together, Prychidny was kind enough to share his experience with No Film School below.

Check it out for all things practical effects workflows to some useful insight on how to gain momentum as a blockbuster editor. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: the following quotes from Jay Prychidny are edited for length and clarity.

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Jay Prychidny’s Journey From Beginner to Burton 

“Ever since I was a kid, I was always just in love with movies. I was just kind of obsessed with them. They were really an escape for me, going into these worlds of creativity.The original Beetlejuice—I saw it when I was seven years old when it came out—and it really captivated me. It was really just an amazing, imaginative, creative world, and I’d never really seen anything like that. So it really just really fired my imagination, and it was my favorite movie for probably about two years.

I was just one of those kids. I focused on film and made films all through high school, and then I went to university for film in Toronto, and then it was at university where I realized I was kind of most interested in editing, and so I focused on that. And then as soon as I got out of university, I just started editing—working on ultra super low budget, whatever, where you edit something for a few months and they pay you 300 bucks.

I worked from doing those no-budget indie things to working at a TV station to working in lifestyle reality tv, working in kids scripted TV before jumping to adult scripted TV to film. So it slowly just rising the ranks in terms of the level and quality of projects I was working on.

After I got it in university, I was still living at home, so it kind gave me the luxury for a couple of years to try to figure it out while working on no budget stuff. It was a few years out of university until I could support myself as an editor. But that was a real benefit of living at home for a few years after school. I could just look for editing jobs, and then I had enough editing credits that I didn’t need to assist. I mean, other than being my own assistant, obviously, which is what you are when you’re working on something with no money.

Every route has its own challenges. Even if you’re starting as an editor, it still has its own challenges, like, well, you’ve edited only this. Why do you think you can edit at a TV station? Or you’ve only done lifestyle? What makes you think you can edit scripted?

There’s always those barriers. But yeah, I mean, I do think it was a benefit that I started just as an editor, and so people just saw me as an editor. That is definitely another type of barrier once you’re seen as an assistant to make that jump. But I think with everything in the industry, it’s about working with people who like you and believe in you and want to support you, because the only way you make those jumps is by having people who like you and trust you and believe in you and will help your career in the way you want it to go.”

Editing Workflows: The Differences of Practical FX & CGI

“It was really cool. Because so many of the effects were done on set that meant when shooting ended, we really had so much of the film in place already. That’s a really exciting thing.

I mean, we had a few sequences that had CGI, or we also had some stop motion sequences as well, so that came later. But for the most part, I don’t know, 80% of the visual effects were all ready when shooting was done, at least in some form, like a rough temp form. You could really see the whole film, and I think that really made a difference because you don’t have to imagine a lot of it, and a lot of it was just really using a lot of old school editing techniques. It reminded me so much of the films you’d make as a kid only on an elevated level. Using all those little editing tricks you do as a kid. It was so much fun.

I had four assistants working with me and the visual effects editor, and then when production ended, we went down to three assistants and the visual effects editor, but we really were able to just create a lot of the film amongst our team. The way Tim [Burton] works as well, he’s looking at cuts kind of all the way through production, so he’s already giving his notes and feedback and approving things.

So during filming, we’re already selecting a lot of the visual effects plates and getting temp versions of those made. In that way I wouldn’t say it’s more work—It’s kind of just a different kind of work. You’re more so working with the footage they shot on set as opposed to kind of creating shots later in.”

Editing With Less Versus More 

“It’s interesting, because Tim doesn’t shoot a lot of footage, so that’s its own challenge sometimes—trying to figure out how to make a scene work based on what you have.

And of course, we’d look at cuts and if there was really something that we were missing, then he’d go back and shoot those, or just whatever additional transitions or parts of a scene we’d want to add in later. We’d discussed that all the way along when he was shooting. But in general, he just kind of shoots what he wants. And so that’s its own creative challenge in a way to make something work really well and really strongly when you don’t have a lot of footage.

I mean, compared to Scream VI, that’s the other end of the spectrum. That was so much footage—they shot it from so many different angles. They’d get so many different versions of shots and types of performances and all this stuff, which really gives you a lot of freedom in the edit to almost do what you want. You can create almost anything you want in terms of tone or style, so it really allows you a lot of enormous creative freedom, whereas this is kind of the opposite, which is its own challenge in its own way.

[My preference on the two] varies on the project. I mean, if we were in a situation where, because oftentimes you get notes either from producers or from the studio that might want something completely different out of a scene. And when you have lots of footage, you have a lot more tools to execute whatever people want. If you don’t have a lot of footage, sometimes you get stuck.

But the great thing with working with Tim is that he’s a Final Cut director, and you really are just making the film that he wants. There aren’t a lot of other people you have to please.

So yeah, it kind of just depends on the project.”

How to Preserve the Comedy of Great Dailies 

“Normally I’m watching footage and seeing everything that they’ve done wrong or they didn’t get. This was one of the rare projects where I actually found the dailies funny, which is its own kind of challenge in a way, because when you don’t find it funny—which is what I’m used to—you’re really trying to figure out ways to make something funny. You need to try to highlight the comedy and bring out the jokes, and try to structure the moments properly so they have the appropriate joke structure and editing. And the rhythms of editing are really kind of integral to that, because if you don’t get the rhythm of a joke right, then the audience doesn’t laugh. It needs that set-up, tension, and punchline.

So this was different, where I was trying to preserve what I found so wonderful in the dailies when I was watching them, because it can easily go the other way. It’s like when you’re watching the dailies, you find something hilarious and then you cut it in and it’s no longer funny. It’s just one of those weird things that happens with editing a lot of times.

So I’d really, really try to hold on to my initial reactions to the dailies and what I really loved about them. I tracked to make sure that when I cut in a moment it is properly built to and sculpted around so it’s still funny. It still has that wonderful charm that it had for me when I saw it in a raw form.”

Crafting Beetleguise-level Grandiosity in the Edit 

“You’d almost expect kind of a vast CGI establishing shots of the Underworld. And it’s not really like that. I mean, it’s a very practical movie. That’s definitely something I feel like I do try to bring to a lot of projects I work on, even if they’re not working on a large physical scale, to work on a large emotional scale, because that’s something I really enjoy. And often the way that that’s done is through music, and finding opportunities to use music in a really strong bombastic way. That really has a huge effect on the emotions. And so there’s a lot of sequences in this movie that are very music forward. There’s “Tragedy” by the Bee Gees when Dolores is assembling herself, and the Soul Train sequence, and the end Wedding sequence.

We almost thought of those as almost musical in a musical, these kind of big showcase numbers and making them very music forward. And the bike ride is almost another example of that as well, just to make the movie operate in different modes, and to have these modes that are more just working on an emotional level as opposed to a plot or other kind of level.

For the “MacArthur Park” wedding sequence song at the end, I mean, that recording is so old and the quality of it is not very good. So we did end up orchestrating that whole thing with new instruments to give it an epic feeling, to really push the climax of the whole film—it needed to feel like a real showstopper.

So that was something we eventually did, was to throw out the kind of instrumental of the original music and redo it. And we used AI to kind of strip out the vocals of the song, so we preserved the vocals, then put it to a new orchestration.”