Editor Stephen Berger has come aboard Cut+Run, continuing the company's growth curve over the past year which has included expansion into San Francisco and Austin. Berger will be available to work from any of the Cut+Run offices including Los Angeles, New York, and London.
Berger has a natural inclination to connect with each project, which can be seen in his beautiful, lyrical and intense work for Activision directed by Reynald Gresset, XBOX directed by David Fincher and Tim Miller, the Cannes-winning Logitech directed by Paul Hunter, BMW directed by Carl Erik Rinsch, and Sony Dreams by director Jessica Sanders.
Among Berger's other high-profile projects the Chevy Volt Super Bowl spot directed by Filip Engstrom and a Battlefield 3 spot directed by Noam Murro, as well as the BMW clean diesel launch directed by Raf Wathion, and Ugg spots with Tom Brady directed by the Guard brothers. Berger also garnered attention for Logorama, which earned the Academy Award for Best Animated Short; two Spike Jonze short films I'm Here and We Were Once A Fairytale; and Patrick Daughters' Grizzly Bear music video "Two Weeks" which won a Yellow Pencil. Berger, formerly of Final Cut, comes to Cut+Run having just edited a Target holiday campaign via 72andSunny.
Berger joins a Cut+Run's editing roster which includes Eve Ashwell, Ben Campbell, Isaac Chen, Nick Diss, Georgia Dodson, Alex Dondero, Frank Effron, Steve Gandolfi, Jon Grover, TG Herrington, Akiko Iwakawa, Sam Jones, Staci LeVan, Julia Knight, Gary Knight, Pete Koob, Dan Maloney, Chris McKay, Joel Miller, Jay Nelson, Sam Ostrove, Nathan Perry-Greene, Dan Robinson, Julian Tranquille, Graham Turner, and Dayn Williams.
Lucy Walker Made A Searing Documentary About Wildfires In 2021; Now, People May Be More Inclined To Listen
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
"It was really hard," the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. "I didn't blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation."
"This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable," she said in an interview.
She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish."
Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency
In "Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the... Read More