Murderball editor Geoffrey Richman wows the film geeks at the Apple Store with his Mac's desktop (Photo: STV)

The lovely folks at indieWIRE hosted the latest installment of their independent film speaker series at Soho's Apple Store on Friday. Unlike last month's speaker Hal Hartley, award-winning Murderball editor Geoffrey Richman made no quotable pronouncements about the bleak state of filmmaking in New York or dramatic threats to leave the city forever.

Instead, Richman stuck to the basics and detailed how he and his partners shaped countless hours of quadriplegic rugby documentary footage into one of the year's best films.

"It was literally hundreds of edits just to get up to the end of Act One," Richman told the crowd on hand between demonstrations on Apple's Final Cut Pro editing software. "In the end, it comes down to something like just where you fade up or where that title falls. Even if everything else sucks, it's 99 more cuts like that until you get a finished movie."

Many of those in attendance raised their hands when Richman asked who was in the editing business, so much of the discussion wound up appropriately wonky. Still, any film enthusiast could have been enthralled to hear Richman's insights into how he and directors Henry Joel Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro commissioned software that allowed them to exchange edits and tweaks over the Web, or how the three of them spent months developing a logical narrative around Murderball's three main characters.

"One of the biggest structural problems was how to fit Keith into the film," Richman said. "He was the new quad. You know, with Joe (Soares) and Mark (Zupan), you don't have any sense of what they went through in terms of how they recovered. Fitting Keith in didn't work with this USA/Canada rivalry. That's why we took three months just working out the narrative of the film."