What happens behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace? Away from the prying eyes of the press, are the members of the British royal family just like everyone else? And what transpires when this strangely old-fashioned institution collides with the gushing uncertainties of popular culture?

Enter the half-real/half-imagined world of director Stephen Frears' docudrama The Queen, a film lauded for its sensitive exploration of the events following the death of Princess Diana in a Paris car crash in 1997. The Queen side-steps potential accusations of tasteless voyeurism with a human-scale drama about the British monarch's struggle to comprehend and respond to the outpouring of public grief in the week following Diana's death.

Anchored by performances from Helen Mirren, who portrays Queen Elizabeth with a startling likeness, and Michael Sheen, who plays an enthusiastic new Prime Minister Tony Blair, The Queen was edited by Lucia Zucchetti, who used an Avid Film Composer XL system to cut the film.

Varied Film Looks
The intelligent use of archive material was one of the major reasons Zucchetti was drawn to the project. "There was so much media coverage that week that the possibilities could take us in many different directions. The prospect of merging it elegantly with our own shots was both exciting and frightening. Luckily, we had Adam Curtis [director of the political documentary The Power of Nightmares] as the archive consultant. He provided wonderful input in pre-selecting the archive material and was the real archive brain," she says.

In addition to archival footage and broadcast video from the 1980s and '90s, The Queen incorporates two different film formats for the maximum creative impact: 35mm and Super 16. Frears and Cinematographer Affonso Beato relied on these two formats to help reflect the film's major theme: the tension between the old world of tradition and protocol and the new world of emotion and informality.

"We decided to film the scenes of the royal family with 35mm and the Downing Street scenes with Tony Blair with handheld Super 16. It fits the film: 35mm is more composed, more static and has more grandeur, while Super 16 has more energy and texture. We wanted a big contrast between these two worlds, from a still, stately world to a modern, frenetic world," says Beato.

Constructing Reality
Visual effects are not something readily associated with the traditional storytelling qualities of The Queen, and yet they played a significant role in advancing the plot. For example, many scenes have a television on in the background, playing the archive news footage. "You could look at the television as another character in the drama," says Zucchetti.

To capture these scenes, the filmmakers started shooting at 25fps instead of the usual 24fps to avoid seeing lines on the monitors. The original intention was to play all the news footage in the television while the actors were performing, but the filmmakers soon realized they needed to rework all of the monitor shots to give them precise control over exactly what was showing on the television at any given moment. So visual effects work was done to fit the correct television footage seamlessly into the on-screen monitors. During the offline process, this was accomplished, in part, through the use of the Film Composer system's Picture-in-Picture feature.

Zucchetti's two assistants used a Film Composer XL system and a Media Composer XL system. All of the editing stations were connected to an Avid Unity LANshare shared-storage system. Zucchetti found the experience of sharing real-time edits with her two assistants to be a significant productivity enhancer.

She explains, "When I started out on low-budget films, we would have one editing system. It meant that when my assistant used it to do something for me like importing footage, I would have to step away. We ended up working strange hours to allow both of us access to the material. On The Queen, sharing was an important element in the visual effects editing. Because visual effects are so time consuming, I could delegate those related tasks to my assistant. Once she had prepared them, she would fit them in to the latest cut and I would be able to use the new refined shots for the pre-screenings. Now I know she can do things for me while I get on with the cutting. Sharing is so wonderful. I would never go back to working without shared storage."