Editor Monika Chyżyńska joins CALIBRATION before the cameras roll
Most editors meet a film after it has been shot. On CALIBRATION, that process began much earlier.
CREWPOST PRODUCTION
9/22/2026
CALIBRATION: Editing the Space Between What We See and What We Know
CREATING UNEASE WITHOUT ANNOUNCING IT
There is another challenge.
CALIBRATION needs to make the audience feel that something is wrong long before it necessarily tells them why.
But the film deliberately avoids conventional thriller punctuation. No editorial shouting. No obvious signals instructing the audience to become suspicious.
Instead, Monika is interested in something quieter: disrupting patterns the viewer has already learned.
“A reaction comes later than we expect, a scene ends somewhere strange, or we don't show something that normally would have been shown,” she says.
“Those little things can make you feel that something is off without telling you what it is.”
It is manipulation at its most invisible - appropriate for a film concerned with precisely that territory.
FINDING THE FILM AFTER THE CAMERA STOPS
Despite becoming involved before production, Monika is careful not to predetermine the edit. Understanding the director's intention matters. Deciding exactly how the footage must ultimately fit together does not.
“I want to understand the intention without having a fixed solution in my head,” she says.
Because actors introduce something unexpected. A glance changes a relationship. A pause becomes more important than the dialogue surrounding it. Sound creates an association nobody anticipated on the page. Those accidents may ultimately become part of the film's language.
That willingness to discover rather than impose is central to Monika's approach to editing generally.
She recently completed her first feature documentary, My Themersons, constructed largely from archival material. The experience reinforced her fascination with the ability of editing to alter meaning without altering the source itself.
“The same image can feel completely different depending on what you put before it or after it.”
For CALIBRATION, sound will be equally important. A sound can precede an image, survive a cut, or create a connection between moments that appear visually unrelated. The audience may never consciously notice what happened. They simply feel differently.
“UNSETTLING. INTIMATE. ELUSIVE.”
The creative shorthand between Serani and Monika began with the film's moodboard - an extensive exploration of its characters, emotional states, and visual world. But both know the real film will reveal itself only when production ends, and the footage enters the edit suite.
Monika expects experimentation. With structure. With image. With sound.
And potentially with AI as another exploratory tool - not as a substitute for creative judgement, but as a means of testing possibilities that an independent production might otherwise lack the resources or time to explore.
“I don't want it to make creative decisions for us,” she says, “but I think it could be interesting to see what it allows us to try.”
Ultimately, the objective is not to make the editing visible. It is almost the opposite.
Monika describes great editing as the moment when an audience suddenly realises its feelings about what it is watching have changed - without being able to identify precisely when that change occurred.
Asked to describe the film she and Serani are building in only three words, her answer is immediate:
“Unsettling, intimate, elusive.”
For CALIBRATION, that may also be the blueprint for the edit
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Editor Monika Chyżyńska joins CALIBRATION before the cameras roll — helping shape a film in which silence, perception and the timing of information are as important as what appears on screen.
Most editors meet a film after it has been shot. On CALIBRATION, that process began much earlier.
Editor Monika Chyżyńska joined director Serani Hunyi while the screenplay was still being refined, beginning a conversation not about cuts or coverage, but about something more fundamental: what should the audience know, and when should they know it?
For a psychological film built around unstable perception, memory, and incomplete information, those questions are already part of the edit.
“Even without footage, you start thinking about where the audience should be at a certain point in the story, what they should understand, and what should maybe stay unclear.”
That distinction sits at the heart of CALIBRATION.
The film is not interested in explaining its characters to the audience. Instead, it asks us to observe them - sometimes intimately, sometimes from a distance - and gradually reconsider what we believe we understand.
For Monika, this means rhythm isn't simply a question of whether a film moves quickly or slowly.
It is about expectation.
“We talked a lot about how long we want the audience to stay with a question before giving them an answer. Sometimes you can understand something straight away, sometimes it's better to realise it a little later, and sometimes it's more interesting not to give a clear answer at all.”
THE POWER OF NOT CUTTING
CALIBRATION is being designed around restraint.
Silences remain. Reactions matter. Frames are allowed to become uncomfortable.
In that environment, editing is as much about resisting the impulse to cut as knowing where to make one.
A pause lasting two seconds longer can alter the psychological meaning of a scene. A reaction arriving slightly later than expected can create unease without the audience consciously understanding why.
“Every cut should have a reason,” Monika says. “And sometimes the right decision is simply to leave something alone.”
It is an approach closely aligned with Serani's visual intentions for the film: controlled frames, restrained performances, and an audience trusted to notice what isn't being explained.
Monika describes the characters as people who are not always easy to read.
“A lot is happening underneath what we actually see and hear,” she says. “I prefer that to having a character's psychology explained to me.”
WHO KNOWS WHAT — AND WHEN?
Perhaps the most powerful editorial tool in CALIBRATION will be information itself.
The audience's relationship with Freya changes across the film, but that shift does not necessarily require changing the character.
Change what the audience knows, and the same image can mean something entirely different.
“If we know something before Freya does, we look at her differently,” Monika explains. “If we find something out with her, we're much closer to her experience. And sometimes we can know less than she does, which creates a completely different feeling.”
That becomes particularly significant in a story where memory, perception and objective reality do not always occupy the same space.
An image does not necessarily have a fixed meaning.
Something witnessed early in the film may acquire an entirely different significance once the audience has more information.
For Monika, that instability is one of the project's most interesting editorial possibilities:
“I like the idea that an image can mean one thing when we first see it and something completely different later.”
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CALIBRATION is produced by Serani Studio (Prague), in association with Bottomline AI (France)
