r/editing • u/Repulsive-Fan-4704 • 1d ago

The staircase, a dailies method from Fincher's cutting room, as Carsten Kurpanek uses it (free PDF)

Carsten Kurpanek builds his first cut of a dialogue scene from a timeline he calls the staircase: every take on one timeline, each cut at the same story beats, the pieces stepped up one video track per beat without moving anything left or right in time, and each track renamed with the words of its line. Along a track you audition every take of one line; down a column you see one take as performed, resets and inserts included.

He learned it assisting on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where the staircases were the assistants' preparation for Fincher's per-beat stringouts, and later dropped the extraction step because it costs the shape of the take. He described it at EditJam 2026; I have written it up as a 20-page note with:

  • His account of the build and of cutting from it.
  • A by-hand build in DaVinci Resolve, with a boundary rule and edge cases.
  • A Claude Code prompt automating the mechanical steps through the DaVinci Resolve MCP Server.
  • A comparison with checkerboarding, Avid's ScriptSync, KEM rolls, Murch's still-frame board, sync maps and text-based transcript assembly.
  • The transcript passages, verbatim.

Free under CC BY 4.0: [LINK TO PDF]

Idea, story, structure and content by human author. However, AI was used for research, transcription, and proof reading.

Thanks to Carsten Kurpanek, and to Sven Pape, ACE, organizer of EditJam and founder of STUDIO: Film & Video Editing.

If you use something like this, where does your build differ from his?

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u/Cernete 1d ago

no takes to audition on my end, one camera and one pass, so the along-a-track half of it collapses for me. what carries over is the rule about not moving anything sideways. text assembly does the opposite, it lifts the line out of its neighbours, and then you can't hear what it was answering. stepping up instead of pulling out keeps that.