Roberta Bononi - Editor
Job title - TV and Film Editor
Experience - 10+ years
“Never ever give up, learn every day, be a sponge, be modest and humble but confident in what your best skills are. Be the person someone looks forward to spending a day with.”
Tell us about your job role and the kinds of projects you work on;
I’m an offline editor with 12-years experience, I’ve worked on all sorts of projects, from feature dramas, feature docs, short films, animation and all kinds of commercial/corporate stuff. At the moment I’m editing an animated Netflix show aimed at little girls. Gonna be a fun one!
What does an average day look like in your post-production working world?
My working day really depends on the project I’m editing, in this current project (which is animation) I chose to work in Premiere. We don’t have the budget for an edit assistant and I’ll have to be able to deal with an enormous amount of files coming in constantly - Premiere allows me to be more flexible with so much content. Since Covid I’ve mainly been working from home, so a day in my working life looks like this: wake up, prepare my daily maté to actually keep awake, go to my home studio, sync up the drive (I have a hard drive linked to the main server in the studio), receive new panels for the animatics of the current two episodes I’m working on, edit all the new material in, send a review export to my directors. Then I’ll go into the office when needed, to have review days with the directors and the creator of the show. On other projects, mostly features and broadcast, I’d normally be working on Avid. Sometimes in-house (where everything is all ready for me to work on every day, thank god for assistants and techs in post houses!!) and sometimes at home. This is usually a more independent situation, hence most times I’ll be my own assistant.
What’s been the highlight of your career so far?
I think every time a director/client called me back to work with them again really is a highlight. That feeling that you’ve done a great job the first time around to make them want you again is invaluable. But if you want some names then I guess editing my first animation show, Robozuna, for Netflix and ITV in 2017/18, definitely was the biggest highlight. Before then I guess getting my hands on my first indie feature drama, Fallen Soldiers, directed by Bill Thomas, back in 2011/12 was equally exciting (It then took a few years before it actually came out in 2015!!). It’s really hard to choose just one highlight, as a career is built upon a lot of steps forward, one definitely being meeting director Emma Miranda Moore in 2015, building an incredible working relationship (and friendship) with her and winning Depict with our short film Lit in 2019. Another one was getting selected for Busan Film Festival 2020 with the latest feature I worked on ‘Trouble Will Find Us’ with director Alexander Milo Bishof.
How did your career in post-production begin?
I started uni wanting to be a journalist, hence I was studying mass communication, which included TV, radio and film studies too. While I was there, for a film class I was taking, I had to put together a short film for the exam. I realised I really liked that world. After my degree I then got an internship in a local broadcast in Treviso, Italy (where I am from) called Reteveneta, where I was mostly doing archive digitisation and helping out with little news edits. There I found out about this one-off, 1 year editing course at the Cineteca of Bologna, I applied, and I was lucky enough to be one of the 15 students of that school. I spent a year learning Avid and the art of editing and film making with some of the best Italian personalities; Paolo Cottignola and Fabio Bianchini being my main editing coaches. I LOVED that school!! After that I dived straight into the editing world with a feature documentary called ‘+ or – The confused sex’ with directors Andrea Adriatico and Giulio Maria Corbelli, which was an incredible and crazy experience, starting my career off with a feature documentary definitely gave me the full on experience straight away! I then moved to London in 2010, where I started working on a few shorts here and there until I managed to get a bit more into the UK film industry. I still have not reached my final career goals (exclusively editing drama features and high end TV shows), but I’m happy with how things are going and I’ll get there eventually!
Which women in post do you admire?
Definitely Sally Menke, loyal editor of Quentin Tarantino, she was just an insanely talented editor. In the last year, thanks for my involvement in the board of governors of BFE I had the immense pleasure to organise some events and interview some fantastic women, some of them went up in my list of women to admire, such as Tatiana S. Riegel (who has a great attitude to her job), and Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, who is just the most positive person I’ve met in post!! I can also say that I hugely admire all the women in sound. For women, ways of making it into post are limited, but in the sound department it’s still so much worse. They have it really hard and I know only a few who’ve made it, so big kudos to them!
What advice do you have for other women wanting to start a career in post?
Never ever give up, learn every day, be a sponge, be modest and humble but confident in what your best skills are. Be the person someone looks forward to spending a day with. And more logistically speaking, unfortunately, network, network, network the hell out of it!! Invest time in the people you like working with, so that come the day when things take off for them, they’ll take you with them.