The five nominees for this year’s primetime Emmy Award for best commercial represent a broad spectrum of styles—strong visual effects, humor, action and simple visuals. It should be noted that each spot was cut by a top editor who contributed greatly to the earning of the nomination honor. Just as the spots varied in style, so did the obstacles facing the editors, as each cutter explains below.
"The Osbournes"
The challenge that faced Sherri Margulies, partner/ editor at Crew Cuts, New York (the shop also has offices in Santa Monica and San Francisco), in cutting the Pepsi Twist spot "The Osbournes"—for BBDO New York, and director Bryan Buckley of bicoastal/ international Hungry Man—was to incorporate humor and visual effects without losing the impact of either. "With humor, timing is everything and it was made more complicated by all the effects that had to be done," says Grant Gill, VP/ executive producer at BBDO. "Sherri did a fabulous job with the timing on this, really making the spot the best it could possibly be."
The spot, starring Jack, Kelly and Ozzy Osbourne, Donny and Marie Osmond, and Florence Henderson, was a real hoot for Margulies, who cut the first Emmy-winning spot in 1997, HBO’s "Chimps" directed by Joe Pytka of PYTKA, Venice, Calif., also through BBDO.
"When you get to work with a group of really talented people who are really in sync, it’s a fun process," she says. "On top of that, I was really addicted to The Osbournes show, I grew up on The Brady Bunch, and at one point I think I was in love with Donny Osmond."
The spot came together quickly, Margulies says, although paring it down to a :30 was a challenge. "Because there were so many levels to the humor, I had to be careful not to overstep one joke by trying to cram another one in," she explains. "Bryan went out and essentially shot The Osbournes, the MTV show. My job was just to let as many awkward moments play out as I could. You have to factor in Ozzy’s stuttering for two seconds of every eight. It was a better :45—you need time to play." In fact, the spot aired on the ’03 Super Bowl telecast and MTV as a :45, then later as a :30.
Margulies, who joined Crew Cuts as a receptionist shortly after graduating from Boston University in ’88, learned editing on the job, and says her system is to first cut a spot to whatever length it feels right. "I like to come up with what, just looking at the film, I think is the best way to do something," relates Margulies. "But then I do what the agency is looking for if it is something different. I think it’s also nice to execute the director’s vision. Sometimes all three of those are the same thing."
Margulies likes having the director involved and likes working with Buckley who, as a New York-based director, is often available. Last year she cut a short film with Buckley, We’ll Get It Done, to support the New York bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, but most of her work is in commercials, including the recent Pepsi spot "Directions," featuring Beyoncé Knowles, and directed by Pytka for BBDO.
"Sheens"
Crew Cuts, BBDO, and Hungry Man also teamed up for the Visa Check Card spot "Sheens," cut by partner/ editor Chuck Willis, and directed by Allen Coulter of Hungry Man. "For me, it was a dream," notes Willis. "Because I’m so story-oriented and comedy-oriented, it was perfect. I loved doing it." The spot features actor Charlie Sheen attempting to buy videos with a check. The approval process takes so long that he ages into his father, Martin Sheen.
Willis says Coulter, who has directed longform series such as Sex and the City and The Sopranos, approached the spot much like a movie. "All the setups were shot very long and very complete," he says. "My first cut was three minutes long, just to tell the story. I’ll always cut the full story, whatever they give me. I like to whittle down—I’m a whittler. The hard part with something like "Sheens" is getting it down to a sixty- or thirty-second spot, and still have it embody the elements of the longer piece we all loved."
The spot was Willis’ first with Coulter, but he has since cut the Visa Check Card spot "Yao Ming," and two PSAs for the United Firefighters Fund. "Allen has very strong opinions," Willis says, "but he is a wonderful person to work with, very collaborative. It was a fun and easy spot to cut in the sense that everyone worked so well together."
Willis recalls that it took two days to get a rough cut to show to BBDO, and he spent a couple of more days tweaking it. "I’m at a point in my career now where people leave me alone to do a first cut, which is great," he says.
Willis, who went to film school at Emerson College, Boston, has been with Crew Cuts for 17 years. "I was more interested in features and long format, and kind of fell into commercials," he recalls. "I don’t look at the advertising side, that’s what the ad people do. I look at the film end. I approach everything I do as a mini-story." His most recent spots are AOL’s "Backstage," directed by Samuel Bayer of bicoastal RSA USA for BBDO New York; and Right Guard’s "Foosball" helmed by Tom De Cerchio of Incubator Films, West Hollywood, also for BBDO. In addition to commercials, Willis edits the occasional short film and recently cut a pilot for a how-to television series.
"Fish"
John Smith, an owner/editor at The Whitehouse, which has offices in London, New York, Chicago, and Santa Monica, has nothing but praise for the PBS spot "Fish," out of Fallon, Minneapolis, and directed by feature helmer Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), who does spots via Independent Media, Santa Monica. However, Smith professes some embarrassment about being asked to talk about his editing of the spot. "It’s great to be attached to a spot that is so highly thought of," he says, "but from an editing perspective it’s probably the least work I’ve ever had to do."
That’s because the spot was meticulously planned out and timed before Smith even saw film to accommodate the CGI goldfish—done by The Mill, London—which is the ad’s central character. "The ‘Fish’ spot was very well planned and designed before it came to me," Smith says. "Alfonso and The Mill had designed storyboards. I had back plates without fish in them. At times I had a dummy fish on a piece of wire and that gave me an idea about timing. I knew I had a sixty-second frame to fit it into. But at the end of the day, all I’m doing is imagining in my head how the fish will work based on the timings of the storyboard and the plate shots, the backgrounds I’ve been given. I basically put together a load of plates and timed the cuts of the plates to what I thought the picture and story should be. I had no fish, so I was cutting an invisible film."
The careful planning meant that Smith didn’t have a lot of interaction with Cuarón during the cutting. "I sent Alfonso tapes of the cut and we talked about it on the telephone," Smith says. "He liked the direction I was going in and the cut hardly changed. I just understood the idea and what was meant to be happening."
Smith began his film career 25 years ago as a runner for London production companies. He learned editing in various places before forming The Whitehouse, London, 12 years ago, along with several other partners. Two years ago, The Whitehouse merged with The Lookinglass Company, which had offices in Chicago and Santa Monica. Today, Smith mixes commercial work with feature film editing, having cut films such as Leaving Las Vegas and Sliding Doors. His current project is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers for HBO, starring Geoffrey Rush and directed by Stephen Hopkins. "It’s a very unusual treatment, not a straight bio, or I wouldn’t have done it," Smith says of the film. "I like to think I’m given projects that are not conventional and are challenging. I like to cut comedy, but I think I’m thought of as a person who has a lot of movie and dialogue experience."
"Squares"
The Volkswagen (VW) Beetle spot "Squares"—directed by Malcolm Venville of bicoastal Anonymous Content for Arnold Worldwide, Boston—was another spot that was relatively quick and easy to cut, according to Andre Betz, owner/editor of Bug Editorial, New York. The spot, a sort of slide show of square objects culminating with the curvy lines of the Beetle, appealed immediately to Betz. "It’s a simple concept, and simple is better," he says. "I love working with Malcolm because he’s an incredible visualist. The trick was putting all the images together."
The picture went together relatively easily, with Betz choosing the sequence of images. The soundtrack was the question mark. "We made several different attempts," Betz says. "One dealt with just sound design. We discarded that. We tried several different tones. Joshua Ralph [of The Rumor Mill, New York] came up with this weird, hypnotic metronome-like tone. It has a sort of Stanley Kubrick quality to it. You felt watching it that there was a hidden code that you just weren’t getting, but there wasn’t."
Still there were subtle elements to the way the picture and sound went together. "We built up a sort of off-beat cadence to get it to the point where the images are moving a little quicker, but they’re not really going faster to the music," Betz explains. "They’re almost double-time, but not exactly. It’s almost as if it was cut to a different piece of music than you’re hearing."
Part of the concept was to make the spot look somewhat homemade, with all but the last shot of the VW shot in 16mm, and no repositioning of the square images to line them up better. "The camera never moved, but certain images moved into frame," Betz says. "I sent Malcolm cuts and we had a couple of phone conversations, but he pretty much loved the first thing we did. Everything went swimmingly. It was a very simple process."
Betz’s method is generally to cut from the beginning to the desired length. "I look at every frame of film and something usually jumps out at me," he says. "In this case it was a couple of shots with motion in them that I could build around. I like to start with the one piece in the middle and then build pieces around it to create a structure. I let the film speak to me. I don’t edit with select rolls. I keep everything in its rough form in the bins so that I have to constantly go back looking for things. Things jump out at me."
Betz’s clients generally leave him alone when he edits, and although he welcomes input from directors, it rarely happens, he says. Betz knew he wanted to edit film as early as high school, and he entered the profession upon graduating in ’83. He joined the New York office of bicoastal Lost Planet in ’94 and four years later started Bug, a company that has kept him busy with commercial work—although in ’96 he edited Looking for Richard, a documentary/drama on Shakespeare’s Richard III directed by Al Pacino. Betz edits a number of Volkswagen spots for Arnold, and is currently working on more of those.
"Angry Chicken"
The offbeat nature of the Nike’s "Angry Chicken" is what brought agency Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., to the equally offbeat Traktor directing collective of bicoastal Partizan—and it was Traktor that brought editor Rick Russell to the spot. "I met [the guys from] Traktor around 1996," says Russell, founding editor and joint CEO of Final Cut, with offices in New York and London. "They were very fresh. I got a chance to cut something with them and after that I became one of their regular editors."
Editing the picture of "Angry Chicken," in which a young man acrobatically flees a persistent chicken, was purposely kept simple to preserve the reality of the stunts. "Traktor wanted to do something that was very real, that felt very ‘thrown-away’ so the athletics would just look like part of the story," Russell says. "It was shot with an A and B camera, so you could cover what you cut, but it became obvious that the way to make it most impressive was to stay on shots."
The trick was the audio, which was a send-up of an obscure documentary with a French narrator under a not very good English voiceover translation. "We thought it was funny that you’d hear a lot of graphic French narration with just a single phrase in the translation," Russell says. "It was critical how much you wrote and the timing of it and where it was placed. Mike Byrne [the W+K copywriter on the ad] did a lot of writing, we tried different voiceover artists, and we tried to place it where it would feel quirky."
Russell cut the spot in London with Traktor, and they then brought it to Los Angeles to finish the audio. "We spent a couple of weeks altogether working on that," he says. "It was quite collaborative." That’s the norm with Traktor, Russell says, and it’s for the better. "Because they have such an idiosyncratic style, if you ignore their input you won’t get what you’re buying into. The intelligent agencies know you need them to be involved to get what they’re bringing to it."
Russell studied and worked in the theater before deciding in the mid-’80s to pursue a film career. After working as a runner for some London production companies, he joined The Film Editors, London. "I learned my trade there," recalls Russell. "My break came working with Tony Kaye [now with bicoastal Minder Media]. I was an assistant working on a lot of his spots and he gave me my first job."
In ’95, Russell founded Final Cut in London. Current projects include a big Sony PlayStation commercial with Frank Budgen of Gorgeous Enterprises, London (Budgen is repped stateside by Anonymous Content), and a VW Passat spot with Dominic Murphy of Partizan. In addition to his commercial work, Russell has cut a few short films and is still looking for the right feature film project. "I’ve done a lot of effects work and visuals, but my favorite is simple performance-based stuff," he says. "I like quirky. I prefer it to the glossy car or effects commercials."
