Career Success in Post Production- Interview With Zack Arnold (Part 2)
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 would you tell someone who was graduating film school today and wanted to be an editor? What piece of advice would you give?
A: I always say to people: the secret to success in this industry and probably, frankly most industries is really only two things. Everyone thinks that it’s who you know or to work on this project or blah blah blah. The details don’t really matter. It’s just two things:
#1) you have to be awesome at your craft and
#2) people have to know that you’re awesome at your craft.
And most people only focus on one. So they’ll either do all the networking, all the meetings, all the user groups, except their not focusing on what they do, so people know who they are but don’t think that they do great work. Or, the more common one, especially in post production: I sit in a dark room for 16 hours a day, I hate being social, I hate going to events, but man am I good at what I do. Well guess what, if nobody knows then you’re never gonna find the work. So I feel like you have to have both.
You have to structure your time in a way that you’re both improving your crafts but you’re also making sure that people know you exist. Usually when I have young students or young graduates who come to me, they think that there is kind of a magic bullet. Is it this job or is it this meetup group, the answer is basically yes, it’s all of them but if you’re getting in front of people and you don’t have something to show them then you’re not going to get noticed. There are so many people trying to break into this industry, they need to find a way to stand out.
Q: In full time vs freelance, is one better than the other for climbing up the career ladder?
A: There’s definitely not a right answer to this one. I think some of it depends on the type of work that you’re really interested in because different sectors of the industry are structured differently. So for example, if you said ‘all I want is to edit amazing movie trailers for the biggest budget movies out there’? I would say it’s about 80-20, where you have about an 80% better chance being a staff editor than you would a freelancer. In the trailer world you can just work for one company, work 50 weeks a year with two weeks paid vacation, with health insurance, it’s basically just a regular job working for a corporation. You can work your way up the ladder and get noticed and be there for a long period of time and really establish yourself. You can also make it up the ladder freelancing. But in order to successfully make it up the ladder freelancing, and when I say successfully I mean support yourself and pay the bills, you already have to have some form of established resume otherwise you’re pretty much not going to get called in to the type of jobs that are going to help you build a resume.
If you’re talking about the world of feature films and television, there really isn’t a world where you work full time for anybody. I haven’t had a full time desk job for a company for 13 years, since the days that I was editing trailers. When you’re doing any form of television or feature film it’s always on a project by project basis. If you work for a studio, let’s say for example Marvel, they have a lot of crossover so they’ll basically take one team from one show to the next show to the next show, but you’re still working from show to show to show so technically I guess you could call that permalancing.
“I almost gave up the freelance lifestyle because I got to a point where I could barely pay my rent… but I just kept persevering because I knew that if I went back to a staff job that I wasn’t gonna be able to meet the people or work on the projects that would ultimately get me where I wanted to get.”
I really think that at the end of the day if you’re thinking about, should I go the freelance route or the full time route: first of all, it comes down to what do you want to work on, and secondly, I think it has a lot to do with personality. Some people just need the foundation where they know they have a job, they don’t constantly put themselves out there, they don’t have to send out resumes, they just don’t have the stomach that it takes to be a freelancer, because there is no time that freelancers work harder than when they’re unemployed. So you really don’t get a lot of time off because you’re either working 60 hours a week and getting paid for it or you’re working 80 hours a week trying to find the next 60 hour week. So it just kinda depends on your personality. I almost gave up the freelance lifestyle because I got to a point where I could barely pay my rent and thinking is this really worth it, but I just kept persevering because I knew that if I went back to a staff job that I wasn’t gonna be able to meet the people or work on the projects that would ultimately get me where I wanted to get.
Q: You’ve mentioned that you had a lot of short form experience before you started on Burn Notice and that almost kept you from getting the job because they saw you as a short form editor, but that experience has come in handy. Where is the line between specializing and pigeonholing?
A: I would say that my answer to this question would have been a lot different 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago. I think that it’s very very hard to focus on just one thing anymore. Given that at any time on any project as an editor, you’re expected to do color correction, you’re expected to do audio mixing, you’re expected to do music editing, graphics, basic visual effects, compositing, so I think the expectations are changing where the craft of editing is not just picture editing any more.
When it comes to specializing in a type of editing, let’s say the only thing you’ve ever edited is reality television about crazy families and you have 15 years of that on your resume- that’s very specialized. And the odds of you breaking in to anything else are extremely, extremely slim, and that’s not because you don’t necessarily have the talent to do, let’s say, scripted comedy. But if you go from one hour crazy family reality shows, like Kardashians or whatever, and then all of a sudden a 30 minute scripted comedy, like an ABC show- there is, in my mind, I don’t the term pigeonholing, but at a certain level your brain has been wired for a specific type of pacing and storytelling, from doing reality for 15 years. And if you transition into 30 minute comedy there is a bit of a learning curve and there’s going to be a transition that your brain needs to make just at the speed that it moves, and most studio executives and producers and directors don’t want to have to retrain the work that you’re doing.
“It’s really really tough given how many different types of media and the expectations that are put on the editor nowadays…”
So it’s my belief that yes, you should get really good at something, but in this industry if you want to be able to do more than one thing, you just have to do that more than one thing, even if it’s at a much lower level than what you want to do. An example would be, I’ve always wanted to do character drama, that’s always been my thing, kinda dark visceral character drama and I wanted to get into feature films and I saw the transition happening where they don’t do a lot of dark character dramas in film anymore that all transitioned to cable TV. So that’s why I made the transition to television. But I was doing dramatic feature films and other things that were super, super, super low budget that nobody has ever heard of, and frankly if I could take them offline, yeah I probably would, but I was always doing that and I was making the choice, do I want to make a lot of money editing big budget trailers or do I want to make nothing honing my craft doing this specific kind of thing and I jumped back and forth which is what kinda got me in the door at USA because I didn’t have 15 years of editing cop shows and goofy cable shows on my resume. It’s really really tough given how many different types of media and the expectations that are put on the editor nowadays, but really what it all comes down to is studio executives and producers don’t want to take the risk when it’s their own butts on the line, the whole concept of CYA, they don’t want something that could fall apart and then all of a sudden ‘What happened?’ ‘Oh, well, look at the editor’s resume, it totally makes sense’ so you have to really find someone who is willing to go to bat for you. So I think you need to be varied in different types of media to find someone who is going to go to bat for you.