Career Success in Post Production- Interview With Zack Arnold (Part 1)
We caught up with Zack Arnold, an editor of 15 years, who has worked on a multitude of project types including feature films, film trailers, and TV shows such as Burn Notice, Empire, and briefly on Glee. He is also passionate about health and created Fitness in Post, a resource to help creative professionals stay healthy in demanding, sedentary jobs.
We talked to Zack about what someone needs to find success in post production and how best to build a career.
Q: What traits do you need to be a good editor?
A: In order to be a great editor there are 2 things you need to focus on. The first of which is that you need to understand and be able to anticipate what the audience is feeling at any given frame of your project. Not any given second, any given frame, you really understand what somebody feeling, so as an editor you’re manipulating emotion. For example there’s an analogy where they say that photographers paint with light, I believe that editors paint with emotion. So first of all, an editor really understands what somebody is feeling at any given time and knows how to get them there. Secondly they need to know where the audience’s eyes are, they need to understand eye tracking so they know where somebody’s looking so that really helps you understand what’s a good cut, what’s a bad cut, and you can create some type of emotional reaction thought the edit based on the eyes.
“I feel like to be a really great creative editor, there has to be part of you that gets upset and offended if people want to change your work.”
So that having been said, knowing that those are kinda the 2 main things I think are important to an editor, there are psychological traits that help. The first is probably being very patient and willing to spend incredibly long and focused periods of time working on small bits of different iterations. I believe you really have to be a perfectionist. I believe you have to, as much as I hate say it, I’ve really seen this across the board that a lot of people choose editing because they like to be controlling of things. We are controlling of a performance, controlling the emotion, and we take ownership of our work. So I feel like to be a really great creative editor, there has to be part of you that gets upset and offended if people want to change your work because you’re really hired as kind of the bodyguard or the bouncer of the project, you’re the person that everything comes through. So you need to defend the integrity of that project- the director might not agree with you, the producer, or studio executive- but it’s your job to protect it so part of you has to have the personality to be willing to stand up for your choices and defend yourself.
Q: What are people not expecting when they are planning a career in editing?
A: I think the biggest thing that they don’t expect is the lifestyle. I think that’s the biggest one. It’s funny because I just recently did a 2 hour interview for a documentary about the elusive concept of work-life balance, especially in post. I think that the first thing they don’t understand is the lifestyle of being a film editor where when you’re in school, you’re balancing different projects, you’re writing papers, you might be a director, you might be a producer, and you’re editing. But now all of a sudden you went to the real world and you’re an editor for 14 hours a day, stuck in one spot in a dark room and they don’t realize how quickly that can take a toll on your health if you don’t start to develop the right habits early.
I think the other thing that a lot of people that come in to the industry don’t expect when their young or inexperienced is that no matter what you may know of how far along you were in your projects at school, you need to start from the bottom. So I know quite a few young editors that have decent editing experience and they’re talented, and they just expect and assume that when they come out of college that they should be working jobs as editors. I have to kinda give them that reality check conversation where they’re most likely going to be, at best, an assistant editor and more realistically they’re probably going to be a post PA working for assistant editors and editors. So I think it’s a combination of lifestyle and expectation of where they think their talent will take them at a very early age. Not realizing that they’re really going to have to take a step back and prove themselves.
Q: In post production, is there a ‘big break’ in the way that actors talk about it? A point when things become easier in your career?
A: So it depends on your definition of a big break. If your definition of a big break is you get a much larger project that’s going to pay better? Yeah, that happens to a lot of people. My story certainly goes along those lines, where I spent years working on really tiny low budget features and editing commercials and editing trailers. I had long periods of unemployment just picking up anything that I could and then one day I wake up and I’m editing Burn Notice. So that’s an example of catching your “big break”. But becoming an overnight success? Everyone is like ‘oh my god, an overnight success story” and I’m like ‘yeah, it only took me ten years to get there.’ So I think in that sense, it certainly can happen if you really hustle and you grind and you get yourself in front of the right people and you’re good at what you do.
“‘Does it get easier’? No. God no.”
But as far as ‘Does it get easier’? No. God no. As soon as you hit your break and you think ‘it’s finally gonna get easier’ the only way it gets easier is that you’re probably getting paid more so maybe you don’t have to worry about ‘am I gonna be able to buy groceries and pay rent’. That goes away, but the pressure only increases and the deadlines only get tighter the higher that you go. I’m not saying that I’m at the highest level of the industry. I mean I haven’t edited 200 million dollar feature films or anything. But I’ve worked at high enough levels in television, to know that, yeah, the higher you get the harder it gets. Definitely it does not get easier. Even though you might have union protection more than you have on an indie film it’s still a very, very difficult industry to survive at any level.