Today I wanted to eat up some time by writing about my experience cutting Neil’s Puppet Dreams for the Nerdist channel and Henson Alternative. So here goes nothing. I have been curious about how other people get their jobs, how they work to cut their pieces and how it all comes together as I have been learning and cutting more and more so I hope this does someone a benefit.
Getting the job to edit Neil’s Puppet Dreams started about a year before I got the footage on a drive. That’s because it started with a connection I already had. My producer from Yo Gabba Gabba! felt that because of my experience in cutting notes with directors over e-mail, having my own system (I cut at home for YGG now so I could come home and put my kids to bed) and my “OCD” nature with handing shots off to VFX people (I kind of went over the top and made a google doc for each episode, treating each shot respectively and while it was over the top, we got the job done)..(take a breath sorry for this huge sentence)… that I would be a good fit for this project. While we had Neil Patrick Harris, it wasn’t a large blockbuster project. While it wasn’t a free project, it wasn’t a union project, but I like to do projects for the experience and because they are fun when I can pay the bills.
Rita sent me the scripts to the shorts without telling me who was attached to the project and I read them through to make sure it was a project I was interested in doing. I think she did this to see if I could do it for passion over profit. I accepted and we moved forward. It was when I read the scripts that I finally figured out that it was Neil Patrick Harris so I then decided to go for it and commit, as it would help my reel in terms of “star power” and cutting narrative shorts with a good amount of VFX.