Podcasts by Once Upon a Timeline

S1E2. The Greatest Fallacy in Editing from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.203730

Is it innate or is it learned behaviour? Is it a gift from the edit gods or can editing instinct really be developed by us? These questions have been circulating around the editing community for de...

S1E3. Essential Editing Skills for the Self Shooter from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.197677

This week I thought that it would be great to talk through some editing theory from the point of view of one of the unsung creative roles in our industry. The self shooter, the videographer, the...

S1E7. In Conversation: Eddie Hamilton PART 2 from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.173646

In part two of this fascinating interview, Eddie tells us how he communicates with directors and creates the perfect environment for creative collaboration. He also talks about many of the films...

S1E11. Truth, Ethics&The Power of Documentary: In Conversation with Will Znidaric Part 1 from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.159197

Will has been a prolific documentary editor over the last decade, cutting amazing films like the Oscar-nominated Winter on Fire, The Black Godfather, and Five Came Back.

In the first of a ...

S1E15. Ring Fencing: The Editor’s Antidote to Uncertainty from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.142109

So much of our creative life is focused around time. How long will it take to cut a sequence? How many hours of raw footage do we have to wade through? What is the intended duration of the proje...

S1E16. Building Creative Freedom: The Career of an Editing Nomad from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.137966

The life of the editing nomad has been made possible with advances in technology, communication and collaboration software allowing you access to millions of potential clients worldwide.

T...

S1E20. Style, Portraiture and the Editor as Writer: In Conversation With Lasse Järvi Part 1 from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.099183

It’s highly intelligent in its structure, amazingly scored and the visual style is nothing short of stunning. On today’s show we’re lucky enough to have the first in a two-part conversation with...

S1E24. Trust, Self Reliance&Behavioural Dynamics in the Edit Suite: In Conversation With Joanna Naugle Part 2 from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.091099

In part two of her interview, Joanna provides us with her unique insight into many subjects that are at the core of our art form: from the complexity of interpersonal dynamics in the edit suite ...

S2E1. Sharpening Our Will: The Fuel of the Master Editor from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.083767

A new year so often symbolises a fresh start, maybe a re-evaluation, or a kind of psychological inventory about where we are. So what better way to kick off the New Year than an in-depth look in...

S2E5. Creative Capital: Applying Economic Theory To Our Timeline from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.070771

There are strong parallels with some economic theories in how we approach the design of any film, and in today’s episode I talk through a huge range of creative principles that helped me design ...

S2E8. Fear&Loathing in the Edit Suite: The Growing Pains of Dan Crinnion ACE Part 1 from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.053967

Dan Crinnion has been nominated for a BAFTA, nominated for an Emmy, won the prestigious ACE EDDIE award for television drama, and he has come face to face with these internal struggles. In this ...

S2E9. Passion, Humility&Exploitation: The Growing Pains of Dan Crinnion ACE Part 2 from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.049629

Dan Crinnion ACE started as a production runner at the legendary Ealing Studios in London and worked his way up from assistant editor on massive dramas like Downton Abbey, all the way up to the ...

S2E11. The Narrative Tuning Fork: Creating Emotional Resonance from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.040031

It doesn’t have a name, so I’ve decided to call it The Narrative Tuning Fork. Its sole purpose is to identify the core emotions within any sequence and use creative techniques to maximise the ef...

S2E14. Edit ROI: Maximising Creative Investment from 2023-12-13T15:50:38.004305

Care and attention need to be paid to how we structure our edit, but we must also take a deeper look at how we get a huge return on every creative investment we make on the timeline.

In th...

S2E17. Gear Acquisition Syndrome: The Curse of The Modern Filmmaker from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.991897

The emphasis on kit and keeping up with all of the latest equipment really does negate the one true aspect of filmmaking which we should all be focusing on more than anything else. It's also the...

S3E4. In Conversation With Carly Brown Part 1 from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.983156

And today's guest on Once Upon a Timeline has one of those great stories. The hugely talented Carly Brown has worked on a unique range of genres as she rose up the editing ladder. From short pr...

S3E7. The Editor's Guide to Visual Grammar from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.976492

How are many scenes structured? What are the can and can't do's in visual logic? When and how can we break the rules? These are just some of the editing questions we'll be discussing on this we...

S3E11. How I Edited Top Gun Maverick: Eddie Hamilton Exclusive Part 1 from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.962608

Eddie has taken time away from his Mission Impossible 7 timeline to come back on the podcast and talk through all of the trials, tribulations and triumphs of his latest collaboration with Tom Cr...

S3E12. How I Edited Top Gun Maverick: Eddie Hamilton Exclusive Part 2 from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.958202

The pressure was immense, the hours were punishing and the shooting ratio was enormous. They had air craft carriers, F-18’s fighter jets, insane arial sequences, Covid lockdown, Tom Cruise was s...

S3E15. The Subtle Art of Narrative Sprinkling from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.944750

So, what is it and why is it useful? Well, this skill is about identifying, planning and deliberately constructing the subtle visual elements that reinforce the overall arc of the story. Quite s...

S4E1. The Checklist: An Essential Creative Inventory from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.911940

On this weeks show Paddy talks through the definitive checklist of every single thing we need to consider when cutting, as well as every single thing directors and producers expect from us.

S4E2. Scene Modelling: Understanding Creative Archetypes from 2023-12-13T15:50:37.909579

We want to build a huge creative filing cabinet in our minds that we can apply to any set of raw footage that comes into our cutting room. I’ll be breaking down the key concepts, techniques and ...

S3S5. In-House vs Freelance Editing from 2023-06-30T05:46:28

Of course, there are pros and cons to both but it’s important to analyse every single one. We need to take a close look at how useful they are to us at every stage of our career. On this week’s ...

S4E4. The Art of Pivoting from 2023-06-23T05:58:49

In this week’s show I’ll be going deep into the art of piloting, our ability to immediately change direction after negative feedback about our work. We’ll talk through what exactly pivoting is, ...

S4E3. Creative Actions vs Creative Reactions from 2023-06-16T05:14:10

Every cut we make, every shot we make longer, every piece of body language we include or exclude has massive repercussions. We’re shaping the experience of the audience with hundreds of these de...

S3E17. The Director's Perspective: In Conversation with Suemay Oram Part 2 from 2022-11-25T10:05:21

We all know that the way we work with directors is essential to our career success but how does that actually work? What are the specific character traits that we need to develop? And what are t...

S3E16. The Director's Perspective: In Conversation with Suemay Oram Part 1 from 2022-11-18T14:14:11

On this week's show we are very lucky to have the hugely talented documentary director Suemay Oram as our guest. Suemay has directed films for everyone from the BBC to Netflix to HBO. In this tw...

S3E14. The Observer Effect: Quantum Mechanics in the Edit Suite from 2022-10-21T06:11:42

People change when they know there is a camera pointed at them and this causes all kinds of issues for us editors, especially in non scripted editing. One of the fundamental laws of our art form...

S3E13. Promo-itus: The Perilous Journey From Short to Long Form Editing from 2022-10-14T06:42:27

There's a whole bunch of barriers standing in our way in terms of designing and navigating this path successfully. But on this week's show we're going to focus more on the creative residue that ...

S3E10. The Fundamental Laws of Shot Selection from 2022-05-13T06:07:34

There are a huge array of psychological, behavioural, action and dialogue based considerations we need to go through in order to get the best elements onto the timeline.

In this week's ep...

S3E9. What Should an Editor Look at First in a Shot? from 2022-04-29T06:18:25

There is a psychological and subconscious grading system with which the mind views new images and what it thinks is most important within a new shot. Much of it is the result of our evolution ov...

S3E8. How Can We Create Value in the Mind of Our Clients? from 2022-02-11T06:50:28

It's not good enough to just focus on the craft, there are numerous psychological traits we must be aware of as well. On this week's show I'm going to be talking about a major one; the art of cr...

S3E6. The Perils of Full Disclosure from 2022-01-21T12:26:04

We're kicking off our first podcast episode of the new year with a discussion around Full Disclosure and all its perils. Crafting the information and story content is one thing but knowing when...

S3E5. In Conversation With Carly Brown Part 2 from 2021-12-10T08:20:34

Within just a few short years Carly's grit, determination and relentless pursuit of her dream to edit high-end drama has paid off as you can now see her work on the latest season of the BBC/HBO ...

S3E3. In Defence of Jump Cuts from 2021-11-26T12:00

But without an in depth look at why they happen and all of the many ways we can actually benefit from them, we'll never look at them as anything but an inconvenience.

This week's show is a...

S3E2. The Chameleon Effect: Working With Directors from 2021-11-19T13:16:17

In this week's episode of Once Upon a Timeline I discuss the power balance in the edit suite and all of the psychological aspects at play. What do directors want? How do they think? What do the...

S3E1. Story Arcs: What Every Creative Editor Needs to Know from 2021-11-12T11:14:41

As visual storytellers we need to concern ourselves with many different types of arcs that are never really talked about in the editing world. And so to kick off Season 3 of Once Upon a Timeline...

S2E16. The 3 Most Important Words in Editing from 2021-06-18T21:36

They save us, they help us and they make sense in a world full of chaos. Like a thousand editors before me, I've spent large parts of my career using these words to construct the essential journ...

S2E15. Embracing Complexity: The Essential Guide to Edit Intelligence from 2021-06-11T19:13:09

On this week's show I'm going to break down and talk through all of the advantages to this perishable skill and show that there are many art forms that can teach us how to embrace complexity. Listen

S2E13. Creative Pruning: Cultivating The Garden On Our Timeline from 2021-05-27T21:12:23

Nothing should leave our edit suite without us making it the very best it can be and going through and pruning all of the last details to make sure everything is perfect is essential.

In t...

S2E12. The Ruthless Art of Subtraction from 2021-05-13T18:15:54

But there’s one place where we actually need to be amoral, Machiavellian and downright ruthless and that place is the timeline. Developing an unsentimental attitude to the vast majority of our r...

S2E10. Manufacturing Authenticity from 2021-04-16T15:45:39

Across this broad range of genres, we often need to make the audience feel that what they are watching is real, is happening right now, and immediately pulls them deep into our narrative. And of...

S2E7. Hitting the Target: Finding the Meaning of a Scene from 2021-03-26T15:30:43

This has to be one of the best questions I’ve ever been asked, as it really gets to the core of what it means to be an editor. There is a very specific mindset that we need to cultivate in order...

Normal Service Will Resume Shortly from 2021-03-18T15:43:46

Another contributing factor was that we never want to put out any substandard content to you, our wonderful community. Every single podcast episode, every single tutorial in our creative editing...

S2E6. The Power of Backstory from 2021-02-19T14:50:46

In this week's show, I talk through how creating a backstory for any scene or sequence we’re cutting has a remarkable effect on distilling the shot and dialogue selection process. It is yet anot...

S2E4. The Renaissance Editor from 2021-01-29T18:35:16

I first discovered the idea of The Renaissance Editor nearly 20 years ago when reading about Italian history: the idea that if someone wanted to progress in this art form, they would need to bec...

S2E3. Persistence, Break Throughs&Editing in a Covid World: The Rise of David Fisher Part 2 from 2021-01-21T14:19:28

From a small village in the north of England with absolutely no connections to film or television, he relentlessly pursued a career in front of the timeline. While working in McDonald's by day, ...

S2E2. Tenacity, Hustle&Drive: The Inspirational Editing Journey of David Fisher Part 1 from 2021-01-14T12:00

Also, you can now go and book a front-row seat to this month’s live Bootcamp webinar. Our four-hour January masterclass is going to teach you every single thing you need to know about the comple...

Thanks for Your Support This Year from 2020-12-10T18:51:54

S1E23. Comedy, Improv and Timing - In Conversation with Joanna Naugle from 2020-11-26T14:48:58

Joanna is a comedy and drama editor working out of Brooklyn, New York where she co-owns the award-winning Senior Post. She’s worked on a ton of great projects including numerous HBO comedy speci...

S1E22. Should We Edit Our Own Footage? from 2020-11-19T23:19:01

On one side of the fence, some believe that having an impartial observer of the footage is a must in any kind of filmmaking. On the other side are those who think that this concept is outdated a...

S1E21. Manipulation, Symbolism and the Making of an Editing Renegade: In Conversation With Lasse Järvi Part 2 from 2020-11-12T15:05:54

Lasse talks about the weaknesses and strengths of documentary thinking, what can be taken from drama in terms of structural techniques, and his thoughts on visual symbolism.

A masterclass ...

S1E19. The 3 Stages of Edit Mastery from 2020-10-29T17:27:13

The first of three stages in edit mastery is often not talked about: the stage of imitation. One of the quickest and easiest ways to kickstart the learning process is to copy those who have mast...

S1E18. How Daft Punk Taught Me to Score Scenes from 2020-10-22T15:40:09

How we design our cutting patterns and what we choose to select within the music track to help us create that stylisation, is a rarely talked about skill. Most of us discover it by accident as I...

S1E17. Pigeonholing: How to Break Free From Genre from 2020-10-15T13:54:28

So many people suffer from it. We work in one area of editing but have always considered it a stepping stone and never the destination for our career. It’s a difficult subject to discuss and has...

S1E14. Journalistic Compression: The Art of Selecting Essential Sync from 2020-09-24T16:57:13

Developing the ability to take an enormous amount of sync, stripping out 95% of it and piecing it together into a coherent narrative while still explaining all the facts is an art in itself.

S1E13. The People vs Interview Transcripts: The Case For&Against from 2020-09-17T11:00:06

I talk about how a seemingly offhand comment a director made to me in one of my first documentary edits completely reshaped my view on editing and sent me on a fascinating investigation into on ...

S1E12. Propaganda, Perfectionism&Structure: In Conversation with Will Znidaric Part 2 from 2020-09-10T11:49:52

It’s another packed episode as Will dispenses yet more edit wisdom for our community. He delves deep into theories on structure, propaganda in film and what parts of the brain the art of editing...

S1E10. How to Streamline Our Sequences from 2020-08-27T12:26:49

After we’ve gone through the mammoth task of viewing all of our raw footage and constructing our first assemblies, we can often feel deflated by what we see on our timeline. Our construction is ...

S1E9. Cultivating Memories for Editing from 2020-08-20T10:30:01

Through cultivating different memory systems in our mind we take on the creative influences of those around us, mix them with repetitive action and give ourselves the ability to sign our own art...

S1E8. Method Editing: Cutting in Character from 2020-08-13T11:34:03

In this episode I talk through a trick that I picked up and adapted from what was going to be my then career... acting. This mental technique allowed me to conquer the very problem of watching s...

S1E6. In Conversation: Eddie Hamilton PART 1 from 2020-07-30T10:00:10

From humble beginnings on the south coast of England, Eddie has built a career ladder that has placed him at the very top of Hollywood. I recently caught up with him as he was finishing off the ...

S1E5. How to Design Character Behaviour on Screen from 2020-07-23T10:34:32

This week’s discussion on Once Upon a Timeline is all about one of the most fascinating areas of our craft, human behaviour. As editors, we’re often thought of as arm chair psychologists. One of...

S1E4. How To Give Perfect Editing Feedback from 2020-07-16T10:21:40

There are a long list of communication and psychological based skills that are absolutely essential for a successful career in editing. Front and centre amongst them is the ability to give perfe...

S1E1. The Power of Editing from 2020-06-25T00:15

This art form of ours is truly remarkable in the way it can direct the emotional state of our audience. As editors we can bend and shape the blocks on our timelines in so many different ways and...