‘boards Magazine Presents: The Cutting Edge
May 16|2004

Alison Eastwood , the editor of boards magazine led a panel composed of Kirk Baxter, Senior Editor at Final Cut; and Damon Webster, Director of Broadcast Production at Saatchi & Saatchi which was quite interesting.

It dealt with the dynamics of the agency-director-editor relationship.

Funny things I learnt:

The whole “comfy” studio couch settings that exists at production houses is something that some editors and directors don’t really like. It makes people lose concentration on the job and get a tad too comfortable, sometimes making the editors’ work distracting. Hard chairs and no cookies were suggested instead.

A good question that was asked by the agency side was “why the hell have a 35 second director’s cut? To that the director agreed. If you don’t play by the 900 frames in one spot rule you shouldn’t show it.

Cost consultants: This much talked about nightmare is not just a Canadiana event. Damon said that he always had one C. consultant crawling up his butt and making the work lousier. In turn Kirk critiqued the agency model for taking away profits from them. Damon replied that it is the agency’s job to get the job done at the lowest dollar.

Editors: They rose from the ashes. Damon made the point that editors are now paid the big bucks to cut. Before they weren’t even a choice of the production, they were just givens that cut tape by hand. Now there is big talk about “who’s going to cut it?”.

The process: Editor and director both argued that their best work was made when the agency let them lose to do whatever they wanted. To prove this they showed a really great spot for Adidas’ impossible campaign. They also criticized the way some agencies lose the agenda because of the many number of people who work on one project. The answer by the agency side? “Tough”.

And finally, Junior school: An interesting theme that was also brought was for the idea of sending junior art directors to a film camp to learn everything that can be done in the editing, post, and colour correction process. They argued that if juniors knew the power of the editing suite the quality of advertising would rise. Good point.