My love for editing started before I even knew it. When my dad bought a Hi-8 camera for documenting family holidays, I made stop motion movies with various toys, people and household items. Instead of taking single frames, which was not a function on the camera, I would double-hit the big red record button as fast as I could, before making some adjustments to the scene and repeating the process. Later, I would start editing home movies by connecting the camera to our VHS recorder, carefully searching for the right moment to start playing one tape and press RECORD on the fly. It was all very inaccurate, instinctive, and so much fun.
Fast forward (pun intended) to film school, where I made an experimental film about a man and a glass of water floating in a void. Selecting still frames from the live action recording, I built a stuttering, staccato animation purely in the edit.
Again (this is the end of the 90’s) I was copying from one tape to another, but this time with a professional tape editor, which allowed me to be as accurate as I wanted. I fondly remember the satisfaction of seeking out the exact frames to freeze, deciding how long to hold them; the experimentation, the trial and error, the logging of countless timecodes in a notebook; my hand on the dial controlling the tapes, and how 8 hours blew past like it was 5 minutes.
I became hooked on the art of editing. I intuitively understood that of all the crafts that constitute filmmaking, editing is what comes closest to actually creating the film. It is at the heart of what makes cinema distinct from the other six art forms (or seven if you include cooking -which I do).
Somehow though, I did not drop everything for an editing career at this point. My goal had long been to be a film author; I wanted to write and direct my own films. I also found that I have a knack for composing shots with the camera and would film my own and friend’s projects as well as editing them.
Perhaps I was so in reverence of the power of cinema that I wanted to do take on every aspect of it, from writing to shooting, to cutting, to color grading, to sound design, to compositing and animation, to even acting. After many years, I came to the conclusion that I needed to focus on one thing above the others, and though taking this decision was a difficult step, the easy part was knowing what to decide on.
Time and time again, whenever a project arrived to the post-production stage, it felt like coming home: where I can finally do what I was meant to do: analyse, select, remove, build, juxtapose, refine, rewrite... bring the film into existence.
Whereas in the past I would decribe myself as an audioviual creator, I am now a full-time freelance editor who brings a wealth of experience to the table, not only in cutting but in many aspects of filmmaking; an intuitive, (though never complete!) understanding of the moving image and its unique and endless abilities of telling stories, eliciting emotions, altering minds and crawling under skins.
If you have a story to tell, let's have a coffee (virtual or not) and find out how I can put my vision in service to yours.