While editor Kirk Baxter excels at cutting performance-based, dramatic storytelling, he’s also proven his prowess for effects work. Propel’s “Ordinary Water,” out of Element 79 Partners, Chicago, and directed by Rupert Sanders through now defunct Omaha Pictures (Sanders is now with bicoastal international Morton Jankel Zander), features water in various environments–dripping out of a faucet and spraying out of a sprinkler head. Eventually athletes spring out of the droplets and begin engaging in sport–riding a bike, hitting a volleyball, jogging. “I call that sort of work more like being the graphic designer than being an editor because you are working with shape and speed, and really it’s design,” relates Baxter, who cut the spot via Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, the edit shop he joined in October 2004. “I never find myself going for scripts like that. I normally avoid them because I don’t think they are about storytelling,” he explains, “but I thoroughly enjoyed that one because it was completely loose, it was like, ‘Here are our ingredients what are we going to do?” … It was a good lesson for me, I think I’ll stop avoiding design jobs.”
Baxter has been having a good year regardless of what type of spot he’s cutting. A campaign he cut for Mini Cooper out of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami, won a Gold Lion and a Titanium Lion at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival. The package, which included a spot, a DVD, as well as Web elements, was directed by Bryan Buckley of bicoastal/international Hungry Man. The tongue-in-cheek “Counterfeit” warns consumers to be on the lookout for counterfeit Minis, and features interviews with people duped into buying the fake cars. “I like doing that sort of work,” Baxter shared. “It’s the absurd but treated with compete reality.”
Baxter began his career in Australia, becoming a commercial editor by the time he was 20. Three years later, he relocated to London, working with Sam Sneade at the now closed Sam Sneade Editing. He later joined Final Cut, London, and in 1998 he left the U.K. to help open–along with managing director Stephanie Apt–the New York branch of Final Cut. He recently decided to move to the West Coast, joining Rock Paper Scissors last fall. He moved out West partly for personal reasons–he has a new baby girl, and wanted to travel less. (Baxter estimates that while living on the East Coast, he spent about four to five months a year on the West Coast.) Baxter, who worked out of Rock Paper Scissors while cutting his West Coast jobs for Final Cut, opted to sign with the Los Angeles shop because of its boutique size and his comfort level with how the facility operates.
Baxter notes that while he works on performance-based projects frequently, he’s open to a variety of genres. He cites “Improvisation” for adidas out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, and directed by Jake Scott of bicoastal RSA USA–a frequent collaborator and one of the editor’s favorite directors. “I especially liked that job because it was Jake — he’s just a fantastic guy and that’s how I rate the directors I want to work with–the ones that are nice people,” Baxter says. The special effects laden spot features a basketball player who is suddenly in competition with the hardwood floor of the court, which comes to life and surrounds him. Baxter laughs that the early footage–of men in blue suits standing in for the floor, which was created later by Digital Domain, Venice, Calif.–looked fairly ridiculous. He noted that the key to the spot’s success was being open to collaboration. “Improvisation,” reports Baxter, wasn’t a classic effects job that was planned out like animation; he described it as being very “loose in its construction,” and was shot with hand-held cameras and edited like a sports action piece. “Jake Scott approached it this way intentionally so that the film had a natural reality to it, not locked off and predetermined,” explains Baxter. “I did the rough cut first, then gave it to Digital Domain to do the effects. We found that some sections that needed to be cut fast in rough cut form to keep the energy up could now be simplified once the ‘character’of the floor began to take it’s form.” Scott and Baxter recently collaborated on another spot, an upcoming Hummer commercial out of Modernista!, Boston.
On his general approach to editing, Baxter believes that it is important to “have a go” at cutting a spot on his own before the client comes in. Doing that initial pass allows him to master the material and challenge himself. Otherwise, he said it becomes a lazy endeavor, with other people leading the way. His process is clearly working.