Music videos, photo series, and LEGOs. Those are just some of the origin stories of our Meet the Experts: Film Editing panelists Peter Schiberras (“Blitz”), Marco Costa (“Challengers”), Juliette Welfling (“Emilia Pérez”), Nicholas Monsour (“Nickel Boys”), and Myron Kerstein (“Wicked”). Watch the full roundtable above. Click each name to watch that person’s individual video interview.
“I think the first thing I ever edited was actually a music video for a housemate,” Sciberras tells Gold Derby. “He was directing a music video. It was pretty lo-fi. It was very low-budget. It was all set in a friend of a friend’s basement. It was really fun. Literally how it all started. I literally looked up the most well-known music video editor in town and started working for free essentially and shadowing him.”
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Similarly, Kerstein’s friends would constantly ask him to cut things — this after he had already cut his teeth (no pun intended) on a photo series and a short film. “I did a photo series with myself in it and I would just take, like, hundreds of photos and I would put them next to each other. In a weird way, that was the beginning of my editing process because I was like, ‘This image goes in front of this,'” he shares. “Then I did make a short film on 16mm and I cut it myself and it was the first time I’d used music. I used ‘Higher Ground’ by Stevie Wonder, and there were a bunch of people walking around with suitcases in town. It was really bad, but I loved using music. It definitely gave me the bug of using music and trying to manipulate images.”
Costa, meanwhile, didn’t huse humans in his first short film but LEGOs. The “really, really short, short film” was based on a novel by Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni that you can watch right now. “I shot it with LEGOs and everything was shot in stop-motion. I shot a lot of picture, I shot a lot of photo, and then I put it together,” he says. “But I really wanted to do something, to try to play with the narrative, to play with images, so it was funny. I think it’s still on YouTube, but I should remove it.”
