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A Multiverse Made by Many Hands: The Innovative ‘Swarm Editing’ Behind ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is intentionally overwhelming on every level — visually, sonically, and structurally. It combines storylines as varied as an IRS audit, a romance between women with hot dogs for fingers, a nihilistic supervillain’s quest to destroy the universe in response to parental abuse, and some rocks being rocks.

The bombardment of different universes, the seriously silly connections between them, and the compelling action sequences all help the film create a blend of tones and elements that makes The Daniels’ film overwhelming without being exhausting. And thanks to editor Paul Rogers weaving together method and madness, the emotional journey and relationships that are core to Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) never get lost in the narrative cacophony.

Read More: ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’: How Son Lux’s Maximalist Score Fit Daniels’ Multiverse Adventure

“The visual flourishes and the kind of aesthetic experimental stuff that we were doing was the candy that we got to eat. Like, that was the fun stuff we got to do,” Rogers told IndieWire. “The stuff that we banged our heads against the wall was, ‘Are these characters likable? Who are you empathizing with? Can you track the emotional journey that Evelyn’s going on while also tracking this insane supervillain daughter across multiverses?’ And then throw in Jamie Lee Curtis’ character and the love story in another universe between her and Evelyn — it gets to be a lot. And they all held each other up. So if one wasn’t working, the whole movie didn’t work. That was a lot of what we thought about.”

Evelyn becomes the strongest, fastest, best version of herself by embracing the strengths of the people she loves most, so perhaps it’s fitting that the editing philosophy on “Everything Everywhere All At Once” was communal. Rogers describes his process as intensely, radically collaborative, utilizing a workflow known as “swarm editing” with post company Parallax. That practice enabled Rogers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to work together, along with the entire editing and post team, to turn the film into the very best version of itself.

“Everything Everywhere All At Once”

Allyson Riggs

“The way it tends to be structured with us at Parallax is there’s a kind of a central editor who everything funnels through,” Rogers said. “That person is looking at the big picture and is able to say to other people who are editing, ‘OK, take this idea and run with it,’ and you don’t have to be weighed down by the rest of the movie, or what comes before and what comes after.”

The central editor can also give out assignments to the rest of the team that can shake an ingenious move loose. “Like, go find every match cut you can, regardless of context,” Rogers said. “So if there’s a cool match on action from this to this scene, but in the script, they’re 20 pages apart, that doesn’t matter. I just want to see you visually experiment. And you can give someone else a dialogue scene and tell them to cut it as a comedy, then cut it as a drama, then cut it as a thriller, and then cut it as a horror movie. Let’s see what comes out of that.”

This kind of approach is one that very much matches the Daniels’ ethos of empowering every artist who touches their projects to be playful and have a kind of summer camp fun. Rogers stepped into the camp counselor role to organize the edit but relied on his collaborators getting into the fun of looking at the story in unconventional ways to make scenes really sing.

“I do think part of our creative process sometimes is just like making a huge mess and then cleaning it up,” Scheinert told IndieWire. Neither Rogers nor the Daniels invented a collaborative editing workflow, but it’s something that they wholeheartedly embraced. “It allows you to bring in people at different experience levels who might not have the technical knowledge or experience with big picture narrative structure, but have [the right] sensibility,” Rogers said. “Just personally, it’s how I love to work, and that carries over into more traditional workflows, like a narrative feature.”

“Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Allyson Riggs/A24

Rogers’ and the Daniels’ push for ideas to come from anywhere took them well beyond the traditional version of Adobe Premiere, too. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was edited using a beta version of Adobe Productions, a framework that maps onto Premiere and allows for increasing asset-sharing and management of complex workflows. “I just wanted a pipeline or like a direct line to troubleshoot if we needed it. Then Adobe said, ‘Hey, it sounds like you guys might use this kind of secret thing that we’re working on,’ so we got to use [Productions] before it was out, and we had like one-on-one kind of tech support for it,” Rogers said. “This film would not have been possible without this kind of technology.”

The technology might be advanced, but Rogers and the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” team used it to more or less recreate the feeling of a bunch of college students editing something together in a dorm. From the various experiments, editors who participate in a swarm can find unexpected moments of connection and see what’s working regardless of how it’s used, and assemble the story into a bigger picture.

Read More: ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’: There’s Joy in Dozens of Looks

On “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Rogers found that experimenting with the remapping tool, which allows editors to adjust the speed of a clip using keyframes (designating start and end points), brought out a rhythm and emotionality to even some of the ordinary dialogue scenes. “[The Daniels] shot a lot of the movie over-cranked, where you’re able to jump into slow motion whenever you need to,” Rogers said. “So what we realized was there are times where even in a non-action scene or in an action scene you can prolog a reaction, a look, or you can speed up a hand gesture or something to increase the musicality.”

The sense of intention in the motion of the characters helps adjust the many tones the film blends together. Slowed-down or sped-up action dictates the rhythm of the film’s fight sequences, giving us the first indication of just how badass Alpha Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is. It adds to moments of comedy, as in Harry Shum’s flails of despair at the loss of his good buddy, Raccacoonie. It also carries the viewer through Evelyn’s emotional experience of discombobulation and, eventually, her mastery of the multiverse. There’s a time dilation and outsized sound effect to Evelyn walking up a set of stairs and rather than distracting the viewer, it makes the action climax of the film all the more intelligible.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Allyson Riggs/A24

That sense of intentional, heightened emphasis is what gives the film’s big emotional beats their importance. The editing shows us that, within all the noise and chaos and fun, the confrontation between Evelyn and Joy isn’t just part of the visual language — it’s the reason the movie looks and feels the way it does.

An important part of the editing process was regularly screening the film while working on it. “We screened it almost every two weeks. This was lockdown, so we were on Zoom, so it would be six of our friends [watching a cut],” Rogers said. “It was nice because it was an excuse to see our friends during a terrifying time, you know? And that came from Matthew Hannam, who cut ‘Swiss Army Man,’ who’s a really incredible editor. He instituted that policy of, ‘We’re gonna screen this every two weeks, wherever we’re at.’ And it’s a scary thing, you know, as the editor to do. Because you’re like, ‘It’s not ready yet. It’s not good yet.’ But it’s so helpful and it’s exciting and scary, and you know even before the credits roll what’s working and not working.”

There was even an advantage to watching the screenings over Zoom, where Rogers and the Daniels had their friends keep their cameras on as they watched. “If we did a screening in person, we’re all sitting facing the screen, and then I can see people’s shoulders moving or whether they look at their phone. But in a Zoom screening, I was staring at people’s faces. I could watch their attention drift. I could see if they were laughing. I could see people getting emotional.”

Rogers also credits the longer, open editing process to changing his mind about how he should approach his craft. Before “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “I worked a lot of my career with that [mindset] of like, ‘I’m the first one in, I’m the last one out, and I work longer and harder than everybody. And the more exhausted I am, the more proud I am.'” But in collaborating with The Daniels, assistant editors Zekun Mao and Aashish D’Mello, consulting editor Luke Lynch (ho helped polish many of the action sequences), and Rogers’ team at Parallax, Rogers found that mindset was completely unrelated to a successful edit.

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p id=”caption-attachment-1234791811″>”Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Courtesy Everett Collection

Giving each other the grace and space to take care of other facets of their lives while in lockdown, with someone always pushing the editor forward, allowed for even more inspired moments. “That ethos of, like, ‘Let’s work long hours, let’s not see our family, let’s drive ourselves into the ground’? It doesn’t improve the work at all. It doesn’t benefit the work.”

What does improve the work for Rogers is the sense of play and enthusiasm that comes from working collaboratively. “The great thing about the swarm is that if I’m sitting [and editing with someone] and somebody’s cousin’s friend’s grandma walks by and has a good idea, I’ll get out of my chair and give them the keyboard,” Rogers said. “You have to just embrace the ideas themselves as what’s valuable. And those ideas can come from anywhere.” And sometimes those ideas come from everywhere, all at once.