Shannon Rosato - Editor
Job title - Editor
Experience - 5+ years
“The biggest epiphany I ever had working in post was when I finally acknowledged I actually know what I’m doing. Unfortunately, all the think pieces are right - Imposter Syndrome is real and lethal, and comparison really is the thief of joy.”
Describe your job role and the kinds of projects/clients you work with.
I am an Upstate NY-based Senior Editor at Conscious Minds Studios, an LA-based agency that specializes in branded content. I primarily work on edits/mgfx for long-form content series with brands like Nike and Jack in the Box, functioning as the lead editor on hero episodes while parallel pathing with editors tackling shorts/promotional content. Outside of the office, I sit on the Board of Directors for Out at the Movies International Film Festival, an LGBTQIA+ film fest based in NC.
What does an average day look like in your post production working world?
As an East Coast editor working with an LA agency, the first 3 hours of my day are a real wild card. If I’m in the throes of a project already, I usually spend this window before the majority of my team is online going heads-down and hitting my hardest tasks. This may include chipping away at a first pass, ie, the intense experimental process of tying creative’s big idea and your own vision together and bringing the whole thing to life for the first time like Frankenstein’s monster, or hitting in-depth story/structure notes. Doing this before the Slack pings start feel’s like a naturally built-in focus block, and if I can get a cut in a good place by the time LA is on, it’s gonna be a good day.
However, sometimes in order to be in sync with the rest of the team for kick-offs or deliveries, I shift my working day later and take full advantage of an open morning for a lil mental health walk for some desperately-needed vitamin D and coffee with my 3-legged cat/coworker, Joan. Regardless, by 12 pm EST/9 am PST, it’s time to log the heck on & gab. We typically have a status meeting for the whole project, in which the post and creative/studio teams review the day/week’s objectives and discuss any questions or flags. Then I get a little more granular with the immediate post-production team. I feel privileged to be at a place in my career where I enter every project with an assistant editor and a post-producer, who always have the patience of saints and the brains of supercomputers. Without them, I’d probably just be staring at an empty timeline and a full calendar and openly weeping all day.
After going over the marching orders for the day with this dream time, it’s time to prep my station for a live edit. Live edits are a process element our agency has recently got back in the swing of doing, after putting them on the back burner in 2020. Once the agency became fully remote, it became clear that we needed a way to emulate the connection/creativity that can come out of an IRL edit session where post and creative really get a chance to dig deep and talk. We are now able to screen share edits with little latency while on a call with the whole team, and it’s come remarkably close to the synergy that happens when the team can camp out on an edit room couch. We stay in these sessions for upwards of three hours, massaging out moments, trying out structure changes, and watching the edit down. It’s helped us close the communication gaps and get to intentionality/the “why” together rather than getting ourselves stuck in a feedback loop. Heading into the afternoon is when I like to focus on more technical edits. This is when I’ll fine-tune the changes made in the live session, hunt for & time music, or my favorite, hop into AfterEffects for motion graphics work.
It can be taxing being a combo video/mgfx editor sometimes, but there’s something so delightful about getting away from the intensity/ambiguity of story editing and dialing in an animation. I just love making shit move. At the end of my day, after I send out my EOD link, I clean up. If I had to move fast adding new assets earlier in the day, chances are my project looks shamefully chaotic by EOD. I like to spend the 10 minutes before I sign out tucking all my lil assets away in their lil labeled bins, archiving outdated sequences or projects, and just generally tidying up. This wasn’t always a habit of mine (my project window early on in my career was a frightening hellscape), but I’ve learned there is so much value in being a well-organized editor. Not only does it make me a better teammate, should I have to make a quick handoff, but it just feels like a favor to Future Me and their stress levels. It’s been a journey, but today I could write a book on the Ethics of Organization. (I won’t write that book, because it’d be very boring and it would contain the word “folder” a lot, but, y’know, I could.)
How did your career in post production begin?
When I was in middle/high school, I got into filmmaking and editing as a way to get out of writing papers. I’d make my friends put on historical reenactments of WWI trench warfare or sing songs about conjugating past participles in French, film it on my trusty mini-DV camcorder, and edit it on CD-ROM software called Pinnacle Studio 8, a budget NLE with a truly iconic library of transition animations. Then in college, while getting a broadcast degree with a concentration in radio, I snowballed one class in Final Cut 7 into a 13-episode local public-access TV show in which my besties and I ate and reviewed calzones. Editing was this thing I kept finding myself doing for fun while never acknowledging it as an actual life path. But after an aimless post-college year at home, an advocate in my corner helped me land a paid internship with the in-house post department of an agency in North Carolina. It’s there where I finally started to understand that editing was more art than science, where I became enamored (for better or for worse) with agency life, where I got to really study Premiere and AfterEffects for the first time (under the patient tutelage of the senior editors), and where I found my mentor & my collaborators of the past eight years. At the end of that summer, they took a chance on me, and I joined as a full-time Assistant Editor. I’ve worked exclusively at agencies ever since.
What has been your career highlight?
I’m incredibly proud of the team of pals with whom I’ve participated in half a dozen 48-hour film competitions. These are exhausting weekends where you write, shoot, and edit a short in 2 days, and every time I make it to Sunday’s delivery, I can barely see straight, and I vow never to do this again to my body. But after a 12-hour nap, it sinks in that my besties and I made a whole-ass movie in a weekend, and it was magical. Not only have these competitions afforded us opportunities like showing our silly movies at the Cannes Film Festival or speaking at SXSW on what it means to be creative in a pinch, but it’s also some of the most creatively/emotionally rewarding time I’ve spent in this craft. I’m also very proud of spending 2020 editing in the politics/advocacy space (a gig that would make my middle school self, who had a weird hyper fixation on presidential history, absolutely lose it). Working on persuasion campaigns for the presidential election during such a pivotal year was a privilege for many reasons that are not lost on me, but most of all, because it’s the kind of work that makes you feel a little less useless during a time when so much was beyond our control. Elections are won and lost by single percentages, and it was some of my most rewarding work getting to be a part of moving that needle. But I really hope the real career highlights are still coming down the proverbial pike. There’s so much more I’d like to do - I want to tell more stories about queer joy & fat liberation; I want to help young girls get into editing movies so it isn’t a surprise to them in their 20s that this is a real job they can have, and I want to finally figure out the proper way to sit in a chair and edit to avoid my almost inevitable hunchbackian future. Now that would be a career highlight.
Who are your role models in post?
My mentor and buddy Evan Pease (Director of Post @ dPost in Buffalo, NY), not only coached me in the technical skill of editing but also the craft of story and what it means to be a generous collaborator. I’m also deeply enamored with the women in post during the early days of Hollywood. When editing was seen more as a below-the-line technical skill, it had a lower barrier to entry for women who entered the field as cutters. But they took this technical skill and blew it up into so much more. They were the ones figuring out that every film has a rhythm and how you cut on those beats will change how the picture feels, and they were the ones experimenting with match cuts, and they were the ones infusing early cinema with so much more emotion. Barbara McLean, Blanche Sewell, Margaret Booth, and so many other women were part of building these styles and techniques that laid the groundwork for the invisible art that is editing today.
What advice do you have for others wanting to start a career in post?
The biggest epiphany I ever had working in post was when I finally acknowledged I actually know what I’m doing. Unfortunately, all the think pieces are right - Imposter Syndrome is real and lethal, and comparison really is the thief of joy. I would agonize over an empty timeline, thinking about how a better editor would cut this some very specific way, and that very specific way was secret information that would forever elude me because I wasn’t actually good at this. I got nervous in live edits and reviews, thinking that this is the time they’d finally find out I was faking it all along. But somewhere along the line, between a brutal round of edits and a celebrated delivery, you figure out that everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. The mythical better editor in my imagination could have the same footage and the same hotkeys as I do, but we can still tell completely different stories, and that’s what’s so unbelievably cool about this work we do. After I realized that, I got louder. I spoke up, asked questions, trusted my gut, and stopped assuming I was wrong. And miraculously, my work got stronger and the process got easier. It took a lot of really incredible people cheering me on to rewire that part of brain, and it still shorts out every once and a while (I’m still not necessarily convinced I deserve a spot on Edit Girls amongst all these unbelievably talented womxn in post), but my advice will always be to trust yourself. Ya know what you’re doing.