Story is everything.
I believe in the power of storytelling. It helps us understand ourselves and has the power to change minds, to reconnect our fractured world and show us how similar our humanity makes us, which is something we need now more than ever.
As an editor, it’s my job to find the film or the show. Once I have all of the dailies, the script is dead, what we have now is the footage and what we have to find in it is the truth and the story we want to tell together. I love this process and the one that follows as I begin to collaborate with directors and producers to discover the shades of the story that they want to highlight or dig out. It’s a process of invention and discovery that I thrive on.
I love editing - the process of bringing the footage to life and discerning how to best put the pieces together in a way that makes the sequence something greater than the sum of its parts, creating something really striking and cool that also serves the story and its themes and emotional through line. Whether that’s the joy of cutting action and dance scenes, creating a visceral physical sequence or a deeply emotional one, which I think is actually quite similar to a fight or dance sequence. It’s an emotional dance as one character says something to another and we see the words crash onto their face.
I have an innate, instinctual talent for timing and a deep sensitivity to performance that I bring to this process - these are qualities that can’t be taught. I say that as a reminder that though you may find editors with more experience than I have, that doesn’t mean they have the same talent. I believe I am in that sweet spot right now of having edited enough to not only know how to make the dailies sing, but to know how to do deep fix-it work, to recreate a sequence to solve all manner of problems but I still have that deep hunger to make great work and show the world what I can do. Some people may want to hire the “sure thing” - that dude whose cut hundreds of shows or movies, but I believe hiring someone like me is going to take you a lot farther.
I am super empathetic and sentimental, which informs my performance selections and ability to edit along the fine lines of emotional stories. I’ve loved movies and television all my life, I’m deeply connected to the forms and all the ways we can play within those forms. I have a great sense of rhythm which is imperative to editing as a craft, but also enhances my music editing. My well-managed anxiety is one of my super powers – I think of things that might go wrong ahead of time and already have solutions and I always stay ahead of the game when it comes to deadlines.