Cutting "hours of miscellaneous piano tinkering" into a cohesive 60-second spot may sound daunting, but for editor Stephen Jess of The Whitehouse, New York, "it was a lot of fun."
The spot was "Birds," one of two recently launched PBS commercials that Jess edited for helmer Francois Girard of Independent Media, Santa Monica, via Fallon, Minneapolis. In it, Canadian composer Walter Boudreau struggles with a case of songwriter’s block—until a group of pigeons, arranged like musical notes on telephone lines outside his window, provides inspiration.
Though it was his first time working with feature filmmaker Girard, Jess found it easy to communicate with the Red Violin director. "It’s interesting because if you look at Francois’ body of work, particularly in feature films, you’ll see that it is based on music," says Jess. "Music plays a very large part in how I like to work as well.
"Before I sit down and try to put something together, I need to have the music in some sort of a place, where at least emotionally I feel like I have the right tone," he continues. "I find it to be the bedrock. It’s very difficult to come in after the fact and try to put a piece of music to something that you’ve already cut."
Since "Birds" was an ad about music, Jess’ interest in audio served him particularly well. "There was a lot of opportunity to play around with the different notes on the piano, and to also bring in other sounds, like the racket of pigeons’ wings cutting through the silence," Jess relates. "That was really intriguing for me."
Jess’ other Girard-directed PBS spot, "Orchestra," features a classical sextet, whose passionate performance culminates in the cellist destroying his instrument like a crazed rock star. "For that one, the music was more specific," he recalls. "Everything was strictly choreographed. There were moments that Francois wanted to happen at particular points in the track, and the music had all been composed for that. To his credit, everything came together very quickly and smoothly."
On both projects, Jess enjoyed collaborative relationships—with Girard, who calls him a "brilliant editor," and with the creatives at Fallon. "He’s easy to develop a good, open relationship with in a hurry," says Mike Gibbs, the Fallon copywriter on the PBS work. "I think that’s probably the most critical thing when you’re working with an editor for the first time—feeling like you can exchange ideas freely and quickly."
Gibbs was also impressed by Jess’s technical skill: "Stephen is keyed into how a machine works and how to use it best. He’s almost like a mad professor."
As with most of his projects, Jess cut together his own versions of the spots, which he showed to Girard. "I always like to throw something out there," says Jess. "When a director comes in to see me the first time, I like to put my gut instinct on the table and say, ‘Here’s what I think,’ and then see what the reaction is.
"It was interesting because I always surprised Francois," he continues. "He’d say, ‘I didn’t think that would be used that way, but it works great,’ or, ‘it doesn’t work that way. It’s terrible.’ And he’d surprise me as well."
As a teenager, Jess spent summers sound editing at a radio station in his native Belfast, Ireland. "It wasn’t until I went to university in South Wales that I was introduced to film," he recalls. "This whole new world opened up for me, and I was fascinated by it."
Most of all, Jess says, "I wanted to play with the technology. While others were interested in directing, I was always the one on the team that wanted to get in at the end of the project, put it all together and make sense of it."
new network
After working at The Mill, London, Jess moved stateside in 1996, joining the New York office of bicoastal editing shop Lost Planet. There, he collaborated with such well-known spotmakers as Rupert Sanders of Omaha Pictures, Santa Monica, Dante Ariola, who is now with bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander, and Gregor Nicholas of bicoastal/international @radical.media.
Jess considers the Nicholas-directed "Broadway Poem," for Visa via BBDO New York, a career highlight. The ad, which originally touted Visa’s sponsorship of the Tony Awards, is a stirring, black-and-white montage of Broadway performers, tourists and Times Square characters. ("Broadway Poem" was re-cut as "Broadway Tribute" by Sabrina Huffman of bicoastal Crew Cuts as a post-9/11 tribute to New York; the revised ad is one of this year’s Emmy nominees for best primetime commercial.)
"I think Gregor captured something very special about New York and Times Square in that film," Jess says. "It was really wonderful to work with him."
Jess joined The Whitehouse late last year as one of its first editors in the recently opened New York office of the editing facility, which also has shops in London, Chicago and Santa Monica. "They told me of their plans to open up an office in New York," he recalls, "and I thought it was a thrilling opportunity, to be involved in something new. And I knew of some of [The Whitehouse] editors in London from when I worked at The Mill."
In addition to existing relationships, Jess was impressed by The Whitehouse’s many offices. Modern technology, he points out, makes it easy to communicate with the editors in the various offices of The Whitehouse. "PBS was a great example of that," he notes. "There were three editors from The Whitehouse involved. They were shooting in Toronto and Prague, there were edits going on simultaneously in Los Angeles, New York and London, yet everything was fed into the New York office and the whole project got finished here with limited amounts of traveling."
Currently, Jess is hard at work on several spots, including another collaboration with Girard and Fallon, this time for BMW. He’s never worked on a longer form project and, for now, he wants to keep it that way. "One of the reasons why I love commercials so much is, it is a very concentrated medium," Jess says. "I think the storytelling has to be very precise, very condensed. The combination of the visuals and the music, in that concentrated short format, is very exciting for me."
