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Co-editors Jeffrey Ford, ACE, and Matthew Schmidt joined forces to cut the last two Captain America movies and have previously worked on other Marvel superhero films.

But Civil War represents the biggest such film they have tackled in terms of its ensemble cast and winding narrative involving political and personal machinations, which force an emotional and potentially deadly split down the middle of the worlds most famous team of superheroes, the Avengers.

But the hurdles Ford and Schmidt faced also included reams of technical and logistical challenges.

All the while, Ford and Schmidt had to attend to the primary narrative goal of directors Anthony and Joe Russo to tell a tale about the intimate, twisting relationships between Steve RogersCaptain America (Chris Evans), his original best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and his partner in the Avengers, Tony StarkIron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.).

There were all sorts of challenges to tie all that together, and make sure that Jeff and I didnt have to worry about anything that was going on outside our editing bay.

So in order to understand what an animated sequence or character is going to look like, you cant really get a sense of that without extensive previs.

We can shoot live-action elements, but they dont really have a narrative function, or a visceral function, or an aesthetic or compositional function, until the animated elements have been added.

So it is important to have a way to look at it with the directors and producers and everyone else involved with it.

It was like watching a cartoon version of the film, but with the correct proxemics, with all the sets having been measured, the lens distances having been measured, and so on.

Matthew Schmidt Editor