In this episode we spoke with Eddie about his career, movie editing, Top Gun Maverick, working with Tom Cruise, advice for video editors and more!
Who Is Eddie Hamilton?
👉🏻Eddie Hamilton is a British film editor. He is a member of the American Cinema Editors. In 2023 Hamilton is nominated for an Academy Award and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for his editing work on Top Gun: Maverick. Eddie is currently editing the next chapter in the Mission: Impossible movie series. Before that, Eddie cut Paramount Pictures' Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joe Kosinski, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and Mission: Impossible - Fallout and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation for director Christopher McQuarrie. After 23 years in the industry Eddie has cut over 20 feature films (both indies and studio movies) in a wide variety of genres as well as TV dramas, documentaries and award-winning short films. He has given presentations on Avid Media Composer editing at NAB and IBC. Eddie is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, American Cinema Editors and BAFTA, and was on the feature film panel at EditFest London in 2013 and 2018.
THINGS WE DISCUSSED:
00:00 Talk4 EP 079 intro by Louis Skupien
00:29 Who is Eddie Hamilton?
03:39 How did Eddie Hamilton get into Movie Editing?
12:00 How do movie editors collaborate with the director?
19:11 Do film editors feel a lot of pressure?
24:15 Was Danger Zone always going to be the intro for TGM?
29:11 How do you edit a movie? What is the method?
38:39 How can YouTubers get better at video editing?
42:38 Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning
43:40 Signing off!
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🌍 Eddie's Links:
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's Website: https://www.eddiehamilton.com
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eddie_hamil...
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_H...
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's Twitter: https://twitter.com/eddiehamilton
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0357835/
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/egfhamilton/
👉🏻 Eddie Hamilton's Google Page: https://g.co/kgs/6kE9D9
Transcript:
hey what's up guys and welcome to episode 79 of talk for the quickfire podcast where we ask four great questions to unique and interesting people behind the mic today is your host Louis Skupien that's me and let me introduce our incredible guest for today Eddie Hamilton is going to be answering a few questions today Eddie welcome aboard the talk 4 podcast please say hi to the Fine people listening and just yeah just give us a rundown of who you are and what you do and then we'll shoot a few questions at you great thanks for inviting me on my name's Eddie Hamilton I'm a film editor um I have been working in the industry for probably about nearly 30 years wow now and uh I have worked on um top gun Maverick most famously Mission Impossible Fallout Mission Impossible Rogue Nation um Kick-Ass Kingsman uh X-Men first Class among others so I've worked quite a lot with director Matthew Vaughan and then a lot with director and producer Christopher Macquarie and of course Tom Cruise and uh yeah we're we're just coming to the end of uh working on Mission Impossible dead reckoning part one which has been nearly three years of work um so it's very exciting that people around the world are finally going to get to see it um film editing is an amazing um creative job you're you're the the absolute Hub of everything that goes into making a film you take all the footage that maybe up to three or four hundred people have worked on between action and cut um all that information that picture and sound comes into your um computer your laptop or your desktop whatever and you work on it you're in charge you control everything that the audience sees and hears from the very beginning of the movie to the very end of the movie every single image how long they hear it how or how long they see it and what sound they hear what music they hear what sound effects they hear all the way through to the end credits of the movie and it's you have enormous power and control over how you manipulate the audience and how you affect their and perception of time and emotion and um then once you've you know after many many many months of work years sometimes then then all the information that that you have um all the all the sequences that you've built then gets get sent out to the music department the sound Department um the visual effects department and then the color department and for kind of final post-production touches so that's my job I think it's the best job um obviously I love doing it and I it no two days are the same and um I kind of pinch myself every day I go to work that I'm I'm doing something that I've been passionate about all my life you know and getting paid to do it it's great oh yeah I mean it clearly is and it's just a beautiful thing that you've got to do that then and um yeah I mean I was always thinking I was wondering with um when you take like the music side of things with movie making I was always wondering if you kind of edit the movie in a style that goes to the music or if the music comes as kind of like the post thing so interesting that you've clarified that because that was actually something I've always sort of wanted to know about um but yeah like you said top gun Maverick my favorite movie in your do you know the mission impossible stuff so it's fair to say that Tom Cruise has had his fair share of time on your displays and stuff I can imagine but so yeah we look at all these incredible projects you do now but um just take us back like for question one wind back the clocks a bit so how did you begin on your path in editing video and movies and what was your dream with it and just take us through your kind of just your little process into getting to where you are now yeah sure so um I I remember that a big kind of bolt of lightning happened to me when I was around eight years old um when I saw Star Wars on TV I didn't get taken to the movies much as a kid um my parents weren't really into films and you know I I got to see you know Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi and the odd Bond movie but but never really anything else and so I saw Star Wars when it was on TV and I remember seeing people's names at the end of the credits and thinking wow to Hume do people actually make films and and when I was eight like the penny dropped that maybe this was something that you could actually do with your life and so from that age I was obsessed with movies and Movie music and behind the scenes um visual effects and everything that went into making films so I I used to read as many books as I could and watch as many films as I could and listen to music and anything that was on TV about how films were made I would I'd record it you know on a VHS tape and watch it over and over again and I learned so much about um how films are made and and you know how Movie music was recorded and how visual effects were done I remember um at school when I was about 16 doing a a project on film visual effects based on you know matte paintings and models and Miniatures and photochemical compositing and all that stuff that I'd seen and and loved in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and many other movies that ilm had worked on industrialized Magic and when I was at school about the same age I hooked up to VHS machines and was playing around with editing montages of my favorite movies to kind of my favorite soundtracks and I found that hours would fly by in the creative process I'm quite a nerd so I like technology I love storytelling and editing is this wonderful combination of Storytelling and Technology um and so I discovered that that maybe instead of being a writer or a director which is why I thought I would be because when you're young you just think you're going to be Steven Spielberg or George Lucas or James Cameron you know and I I decided that maybe editing was where my future lay um and so uh I went to University at University College London did a psychology degree but I knew that UCL had a great film and student film and TV student Film Society you know student society and so I spent basically eight hours a day of my three years at University making student films and TV and the bare minimum of time doing my degree but I still managed to get a 2-1 in Psychology after three years amazingly and then after that I actually failed to get into film school I applied to the National Film School the Royal College of Art Northern School of film and television but I didn't get in I was a bit young and I was unashamedly commercial in my tastes um which didn't necessarily go down that well I don't think I hadn't really had any formal full training I watched any foreign films hadn't studied Phil history that much I was just a child of the 80s and I was in love with you know Back to the Future and Robocop and die hard and all those movies that had really touched me in the 80s and so I ended up getting a job as a runner uh in a post-production facility in central London making tea and getting lunch and around about then which was 1994-95 that was when the very early Avid media composers were starting to get used seriously in um offline editing so I taught myself how to use that that program and um spent about a year editing Portuguese and Spanish sport television programs which is the which is mostly what this post-production facility did and then uh but always always wanted to work on you know low budget Indie movies with a view to one day working on these kind of big action adventure movies that I'd seen and loved as a kid and I I I basically found a movie that was a very very low budget movie that was being made and I reached out to the producer and the director and I said you have anyone editing your film and they said no so I basically worked on that for a few months for free and then that led to kind of me meeting other young filmmakers in London and none of the films were necessarily very good and not many people saw them but they were they were great you know low budget movie experiences and I used to pay the rent by editing promos for the comedy channel two days a week and then use the other five days a week to work on stuff for free and slowly work my way up the the kind of ladder of the film industry as an editor um did loads and loads of short films um and then my big break really was meeting Matthew Vaughn in 2001 and I did a film that he was producing called mean machine which had Vinnie Jones playing football in prison uh as Jason Statham was in it as well but that was that was a film that was being made by Paramount in the UK so it was and it was it had a six million pound budget which was certainly the biggest of anything that I'd done up to that point and so that relationship with Matthew kind of LED on to things like Kick-Ass and X-Men first Class and Kingsmen over many years you know um and when I was doing Kingsman in 2015 2014 we were doing the the first kingsman the final sound mix on that I got a a call about maybe going to meet the director of mission impossible and that's when I met Chris McCrory and I never thought they'd give me the job to be honest because um I'd never never done a film of that scale on my own but I went in with a very enthusiastic positive attitude and said to myself right you're not going to screw this up it's going to work very very hard and try and do your best work every day which I always do um and that and and I met Tom Cruise on that film and that led on to Mission Impossible Fallout and then onto top gun Maverick which was incredible getting a call to work on that film and working with Jerry Bruckheimer working with Joe kazinski the director living in La for a year took my family over to La spent you know weeks and weeks on different Naval bases around the the the west coast of America um and then when we after two years working on Top Gun went on to dead reckoning part one so that's kind of a potted history of of you know starting uh making tea and then 20 years after that getting a call to do mission impossible so it was a very very very long journey um to kind of slowly move up the industry and get to that that kind of level of working on the the most ambitious films being made today that's just amazing and yes so true you really did kind of climb that ladder over a long time enough so yeah just fascinating to see that kind of a story but it's funny because I had this talk with someone else in the podcast a while ago though but it seems to be that the people who are genuinely really passionate about something or they've got a genuine interest and invested interest in an industry or something like a movie thing or if you're really into that kind of a thing and then when you go into something like this you've you've got so much just Firepower and so much experience from watching them and consuming it that you're going to do such a good job at actually creating a vision for these moves and features so I mean I have to say it is great and very inspiring to hear that kind of a story but so obviously these kind of movies there's a lot of moving Parts in them and you've got loads of very important people and it must be a challenge with the communication side of things so just as an editor how do you collaborate with the directors and other team members to create a movie with a unified vision and regardless of that how much of your personal style and Flair do you get to express in the editing when you're creating the final product that is a really great question it varies from film to film um but the the true answer is that that I watch the footage that comes from the camera from the shoot days and I let the footage dictate to me how how it feels like it should be put together I don't at this stage of my career I don't really implant any um specific Creative Vision on it initially because you just wanna you wanna feel your way through all the raw footage and put it together put it together in the way that best reflects um the strength of the raw material and once you've got and and like anything creative the first time you do anything it's pretty rough and raw and won't necessarily be very good because it'll be way too long and it'll be lumpy and it won't be focused and it won't have any any style really because you're just kind of starting with very raw material and the process of the creative process of editing is something where you work at it for weeks and months every sequence every shot in the film you work at improving it and improving it and improving it and refining it a little bit like if you're writing something or if you're you know sketching a drawing or something you kind of work at all the details slowly slowly you know when you're painting a room for example you you start with a roller and you paint like most of the room but then you you use smaller and smaller paint brushes as you kind of get closer to the edge of the room that's a great way because like yeah it's like that it's like that with um with editing you know you start off in Broad Strokes to get something down on the timeline and then you end up refining it um but you do work very closely with the director and with the producer initially on the very first pass what happens is they'll they'll they'll film on day one of principal photography and on day two you get all the footage from day one and you start building it breaking down it because one of the things I'm really thorough about is is breaking down all the footage so that I can find stuff very quickly later you know if you've got two or three or four hours of footage um it you can't just load it on a timeline and scrub up and down and hope to find anything I kind of break everything down by lines of dialogue or by pieces of action if it's an action sequence so that I can see all the kind of uh corresponding angles for a particular piece of action and then you can review it quickly with the director later you know months later when you finish filming you're refining the edit but one of the great privileges of being an editor is that you're the first person to see the film come to life yeah because when you're when you start putting the shots together you're literally the first pair of eyes on the planet to see the film um having some kind of life beyond the raw footage which is just lots and lots of coverage of one character saying something and another character saying something and wide shots and medium shots and you know the film doesn't really exist as a movie until you start editing it together you know unless you've got a film which is literally one uninterrupted shot
um but the power of editing is that is that you can then choose once you've got a rough structure you can then choose which way to go and how to refine it and you then start thinking about ways of um of of adding a kind of sense of of of style or Rhythm or Pace to it you know and sometimes that comes with music although um the director I'm working with now Chris Chris Macquarie he really dislikes using music as a creative tool until much later in the process he he wants us to work on the scenes and make sure that they work first visually so quite often we'll work with no sound at all um and then we'll turn on the dialogue and he'll listen to it or listen to what sound was there certainly action sequences we work on completely silent and we imagine the the percussive nature of punches or gunshots or car tires squealing or motorbikes revving or whatever it is the Hollywood thing yeah exactly so so you're imagining all that stuff as you edit it and then you start to layer in the dialogue layer in the sound effects and then right at the end we layer in the music sometimes we will adjust the edit very slightly to hit certain musical beats but but really we want we want the scenes to work
you know pure Cinema is visual storytelling with no dialogue at all you know and so and and you know a lot of the audience out there don't speak English you know who watch these movies so really the emotions that you're trying to communicate should come through the composition and the lens choices and and the behavior of the cast and then the dialogue that gets laid in is is another um aspect of communicating you know the emotion to the audience and then after that the sound effects and the music but um we so so when we first screen these films we very often have no music on them at all so that it's a very raw kind of unprocessed way of watching it but you get a sense of if you feel anything just from the images and the behavior and the and the dialogue and the sound effects um so however working with a director like Matthew Vaughn he really likes using temp score so you know I'll be working with music from other films and from other movies that he's worked on just to just to start getting a sense or a Vibe sometimes when I'm editing I'll have my my you know Spotify playlist on shuffle and it'll just play random stuff which might Inspire different rhythms or ideas or different a different pace to try um sometimes I'll work with a piece of music and then turn it off just to see how it how something plays visually um you know so but I I would say earlier on in my career I might try I might have imposed a bit more Style on something earlier but now with a lot more kind of experience and maturity I I tend to watch the footage and just let it speak to me and figure out how I'm going to build it from there if you see what I mean yeah I totally do um so just something that's popped into my head while you've been talking about this now I'm just interested like just to kind of dig into a bit of like the mentality towards this um do you feel a lot of pressure with your job do you feel like with these kind of huge budgets going into the movies and stuff and you know you have these this end product all the filming's done you've got all the content there and you've got this Monumental task of constructing this movie do you feel pressurized and do you feel like I really hope this kind of does well do you have like complete trust in your process yeah no it is it listen the responsibility is enormous on something like top gun Maverick um the film had to work on Mission Impossible the film has to work and we take the responsibility to the studio to Paramount Pictures to any Studio very seriously they're investing a lot of money and time in um the filmmakers uh so you know Chris McCoy Chris McCrory Tom Cruise myself all the other heads of Department you know production design wardrobe hair and makeup visual effects um cinematography all everybody involved takes their responsibility very seriously and you do feel pressure but the process if you if you engage with the process um which involves showing the movie to an audience and then listening to the audience and listening to how they react to it and listening to them tell you when it's confusing when it's boring when it's slow um and really confronting the film after each screening and listening carefully to what the audience tells you and addressing the notes so if the audience is telling you that a really um you know elaborate stunt sequence is too long and boring then you look at it and you cut it down you you and sometimes you remove really elaborate parts of the movie that you thought were great or you still think are great but in the run of the movie they're too long um so that is part of the process and and the more you do it the more you realize that things never start off well interestingly the easier a film is to watch almost the harder it has been to make because to make something that is completely effortless to watch where it just feels like everything has fallen into place and of course it was supposed to be that way and you can't imagine it any other way is is almost the hardest the harder the harder kind of films to put together and certainly on on a film like Mission Impossible dead reckoning part one we you know we have been working on the movie for nearly three years at this point and screened the movie many many times and shown it to to audiences and listened carefully to their responses and we really want the film to be great and we want it to be great from the very first second to the very last second we don't want a single moment of the movie to Sag or be confusing or to or to kind of let you down or disappoint you and the same with Top Gun you know um very few people thought making a sequel to Top Gun was a good idea uh and so we wanted to make sure that from the very beginning of the film even over the opening music over the Paramount logo and then over the um opening titles we use the same typeface and the same logos and the same music and we we treated the images the same so you really felt like the filmmakers cared about your experience and that you were being welcomed back into the world of Top Gun so by the time danger zone kicks in you're just thinking okay this is great I remember feeling this way on the first movie and I'm gonna give the filmmakers and they haven't screwed it up in the first five minutes and I give them a chance to keep keep my interest and then of course we meet Maverick we change the channel and we meet Maverick in his hangar and he goes to the Dark Star and does that whole Mark 10 sequence which is very different to the first movie but reintroduces you to the character of Maverick and it's great fun and is is visually stunning and very suspenseful and has beautiful music and he says talk to me goose in the air and then of course you have the scene with Ed Harris and then by the time that he's riding into Top Gun on his bike and you have the Top Gun Anthem playing in the F-18 blasting you're just thinking okay this is it I'm totally in it's awesome I love this and we've kind of won the audience over I hope by that point um but we really worked hard at it it did not come easily you know there were many different ways there were there were several different openings that we tried and different ways of of cutting the Dark Star sequence and ways of communicating all that emotion and we just kept working at it and working at it and working at it so you do feel the responsibility and if the film isn't working it's very disappointing sure but you know that with time and hard work you can improve it and make it and make it great absolutely very very true um a bit of trivia then was playing danger zone at the beginning of top gun Maverick was that always a non-negotiable or were there kind of um was it kind of like an adversary idea to have like something new or was it always going to be that kind of a callback thing do you think I Tom Cruise's idea was always we gotta start this movie in a very similar way to the first movie in order to put the audience right back in the mental headspace of of the world of Top Gun and we always were going to use danger zone I think there was a thought about maybe re-recording it but the original version of danger zone is such a classic yeah it's brilliant isn't it that that um we didn't we didn't want to mess with it really and uh yeah we we just leaned into it so there was never really an idea of not doing that the only thing that's interesting Louis is that it is very similar to the first Top Gun but the original opening Montage of the first Top Gun I think if memory serves us around two minutes twenty and originally my Montage in Top Gun Maverick was the same length but because audiences tastes for the uh tempo of a movie have changed over the decades I ended up having to cut about a minute out of the opening montage and make it about a minute and 20 seconds and it almost has double the number of shots as the original so it's it's a minute shorter and has twice as many shots and the music the Top Gun Anthem that plays is uh compressed as well so if you literally start both movies and play them side by side you'll see that we get to Danger Zone about a minute earlier in Top Gun Maverick than we did in the original Top Gun and that's just that's just the way that that you know audiences prefer to be propelled through a film quicker I think these days than they did back in the in the mid 80s how do you know that how do I know what how do you know that audiences prefer that like is there well I think you just you just feel it when you watch the film you just feel like gosh this is going this is this feels quite long it's going on quite a long time and and let's get on with it you know and if you watch the original Top Gun today it does really take its time in that first Montage to get going um and so it's it's something which you just feel and when you one of the stages of film editing is once you've got the whole movie together and you've kind of got it working you go through the film and you look at every single shot and every frame of every shot and you ask yourself does this shot need to be in the movie can it be shorter can I remove it all together and it's called a trim pass and the idea is to make sure that the story is moving as fast as it can move without it being confusing um audiences and also audiences are very sensitive to repetition so if you use the same shot more than once in a sequence the audience can sense that and sometimes they the they start to feel like the movies repeating itself and so they'll they'll emotionally disengage from the film and that happens really quickly um and so you're interrogating every shot in the film and you're saying in the audience's mind are they leaning into the film or are they withdrawing from the film you know is the is the needle moving into the green or is it moving into the red and you want the audience constantly leaning in and feeling like they're never ahead of the film um unless you really want to give them an insight into something that's going to happen that the characters are not aware of which does happen in Mission Impossible sometimes in which case then it's delicious because you know that something's going to happen and the characters aren't aware of it and the audience is in suspense thinking what's going to happen you know in two minutes when the characters discover that this thing is going to go wrong uh and so that that's basically the process you're constantly trying to kind of compress compress compress compress um and quite often you'll over tighten the movie so it becomes too fast and incomprehensible and the audience with jaws with jaws from it because they're confused because they're not given enough time or they're not given enough um uh they're not given enough of an emotional weight in in certain dramatic sequences so they don't feel anything or they don't understand the same the stakes of an action sequence you're constantly kind of modulating the pace of the movie so that you find that total sweet spot from beginning to end awesome that's really interesting trivia I'm loving this um so going on to that that thing about the process then so this is gonna sound like a scary question that's a big one but actually just just in a nutshell so how do you actually edit a movie so obviously it's a huge topic and a lot to cover but I was wondering if you could just take us through like stage by stage kind of in a nutshell when you've got this content and film like how do you set sail on turning this into the end I see it it's it's a very long process and the basically there are two maybe three types of sequences you have you have dialogue sequences you have montages and then you may have action sequences and when you're editing a dialogue scene you are you're looking at all the characters in the scene and you are trying to uh put yourself in the audience's point of view or put yourself in the audience's headspace and you're thinking who is the protagonist of this scene so who's the lead character say Maverick is the lead character and then who are the uh secondary characters so you know you've got rooster maybe hangman maybe Phoenix uh maybe Penny whoever and you're using the different types of shots that you have to tell the audience who has power in the scene or who is under pressure in the scene by choosing whether to use a medium shot or a close-up and how to use composition to tell the or to infer to the audience about the character's state of mind um interestingly you're always balancing information and emotion in a scene and information is the death of emotion and you want the audience to have an emotional experience and generally speaking the closer you are to a character the more emotionally connected you are to them or the mo the more that you feel like you're processing their thoughts whereas the further away you are from a character The Wider you are in the scene the more it's about the geography of the characters where they're standing uh but it's less emotional so you're finding this balance between making the scene as emotional as possible but also trying to make sure that the audience is never lost in the geography of the scene where everybody is um uh some great directors will combine shots so that they start wide and then push into a character or they create coverage within a scene but you're trying you're trying to make sure that the audience is is having a seamless emotional experience from beginning to end and they're connected with the main protagonist of the film uh who is Ethan Hunt or or you know Pete Mitchell Maverick in Top Gun and you want the audience to to to have an emotional connection to that character and to understand how they're feeling minute to minute through the film what they want what they're trying to achieve what their obstacles are and how they feel about that through the movie from beginning to end so so that you uh so that you're completely emotionally engaged and it's very very difficult to get the balance of that right but that's what you're trying to do during a dialogue scene is you're trying to connect with the protagonist and and feel your way through the emotion of the scene what does that character want what are the other characters want where does the scene turn because normally there's a turning point in the scene where a character learns something or something significant happens you know how to make sure the audience is aware of that emotional turn um and then in an action sequence what's most important is that you understand the stakes of the action sequence so you have to set it up properly you know what is this character after in this action sequence what happens if they fail what happens if they succeed and that is how you lean in and you you care about the the end result of the action sequence um making sure that the geography is clear so you can see where your protagonist is and where they are in space compared to the antagonist or whoever's called whoever's creating an obstacle for them so that you understand you know what they have to achieve and how far they have to travel in the space to achieve it all that stuff um which is you know essential and then it's about the rhythms and the pace and giving the audience making it feel unexpected and exciting using music to kind of allow the audience to put their emotions in certain uh parts of the scene you know whether to feel excited whether to feel suspense whether to feel scared whether to laugh so so it's it's a very long process so each day I look through all the footage I break it down line by line and then I start building the scene with all those criteria in mind you know trying to make sure that that I'm always think putting myself in the audience's point of view what do they need to see next what do they need to hear next so that they understand how the protagonist is feeling in any particular moment um and it always starts out very long and lumpy and confusing and then over the course of the shoot you start building up the movie in the computer so that by the end of the filming process you've got like a very rough pass of everything then you sit with the director it's always a very depressing experience because the First Assembly of any movie is always is always you know a mess to be honest and it's it's unfocused and it's very it's it's quite often confusing um and so so you experienced directors understand that um and then you start working at each scene um and you take you know several days usually to work on each scene and you improve it and you improve it and then you work your way through the whole movie and then you watch the whole movie again and then you can start to feel like where it's working where it still needs to more more um Improvement where the pace is slow where the pace is fast and then what what you might be able to remove out of the film um to compress it if it's too long and most movies are too long to be honest at this stage so you're constantly asking yourself what can I take out but not sacrifice on the on the clarity of the story and the emotions from beginning to end um and it can take a very long time so top gun Maverick took two years we had over 800 hours of raw footage on that movie um we got a similar amount of footage on Mission Impossible dead reckoning part one and that's you know we've spent nearly three years but we have been filming Parts Little sections of part two as we've been going along so it hasn't all been part one so probably if we were just doing part one it would be about two years if I'm being honest but you know we started in um September 2020 and as we speak it's June 2023 and the movie's coming out in July 2023 so it has been you know a nearly three year Journey for me um yeah and then you work on sound effects you work on music you work on visual effects sometimes on these big movies the visual effects you have to get them started months or maybe even years in advance because some of the visual effects shots are very very complex um and you know one of the things that you're doing is looking at the footage and working out if anything is missing so that you can feed back to the direct director and the producers that we haven't got this little piece of action so we might need to go back on the set with the actors and get this little piece to make sure that we we've got everything covered before they knock the sets down all that kind of stuff so it's it's a very creatively rewarding but it's very very hard work you know my days normally start normally leave leave home around half past six start work at half past seven um and then work till maybe you know eight or nine PM depending on the day and you know sometimes I'm home by nine sometimes I'm home by ten and that can be six or seven days a week depending on how intense the schedule is um so you know the hours are quite long but I have a great team around me a team of assistant editors who help me and um but also I want to do a great job you know I'm passionate about what I do I love what I do and I I'm I strive to be one of the best in the world at what I do um uh which is very subjective so you you know it's something that you can aim for but you can never really attain but I I've always had that kind of drive to be really good at my job and to want to deliver the very best work every day it's really the only thing you have control over in your life as well because there are so many other factors external factors that you have no control over but the one thing you can control is how hard you work at what you want to achieve in your life and so I've always had that kind of drive you know um to try and be great uh every day if I can that's great Eddie and it's it's clear that you're a absolute expert of what you do and you're just a magician with all these things um so last little question then um just having I want to tap into your brain here a bit then so obviously like we said you're at the top of the game when it comes to editing and creating these Incredible movies but my question is for the much smaller guys and people like myself and other YouTubers who are making you know short form contents much more basic video stuff do you have any tips resources courses or tools that helped you which it might help up the game and ability of our content and these platforms too that's that's really it's a great question the the thing is that the the industry is constantly evolving okay so what I was learning on 20 years ago um was not available on every laptop but now it is you can even edit on your phone you know for free but the the real trick is to keep doing it uh and do it as often as you can and fail as quickly as you can so that you can start to improve it's there's a theory that it takes ten thousand hours to get good at something which I think is true you can get good at anything that you want to if you practice it for ten thousand hours now that sounds like a lot of time but actually it's realistically it's about four years of really hard work so if you were to work you know 200 days a year uh yeah um for 10 hours a day or say 250 days a year let's say for you know if you've got 365 days a year if you take off weekends that roughly leaves 250 days a year and if you work for 10 hours a day that's 2 500 hours a year so four years you can do 10 000 hours and if you wanted to learn the guitar or learn the violin or learn the drums or learn to cook or um uh or or learn to paint or whatever it is that you want to if you did literally did it for 10 hours a day for four years you would be very good at it and so I feel like that that is a really good metric uh with which to kind of guide yourself through your your your learning adventure you know and um if you want to make films you should write a little one-page script on a Friday and film it with your friends on a Saturday and then edit it together on a Sunday with music and sound effects and put it on YouTube on on a Sunday night and if you do that you know every week for a year you'll have made 50 short films and you will have learned a lot you would have made a lot of mistakes and honestly within within one or two films you'll soon learn how important sound recording is and all that stuff which you think is really simple when you start but that actually is essentially important you know in order to make the film watchable um so the other thing is there's a really great online editing course called inside the edit which is a a gift really if you want to learn how to edit um it's run by a friend of mine a guy called Paddy bird who was a very very experienced editor he has an amazing podcast called once upon a timeline and honestly it's the best editing podcast in terms of the creativity of editing not about whether you use Avid media composer or Premiere or Final Cut he just talks about the the creative Instinct that you need to hone behind editing um and his online course is absolutely fantastic and he has free taster courses as well so you don't even you know need to pay anything up front in order to experience it um but that that I think is a really great resource to learn about you know the all the different aspects of creative editing um but yeah the main advice is just to do it as much as you can and to fail as quickly as you can so that you improve as quickly as you can brilliant advice Eddie thank you so much and um yeah well that has been our four questions for today and before we wrap this up it is time for what I like to call the Shameless plug so Eddie feel free to take a minute and just promote anything that you're working on you want people to take a look at or just something you believe in
um I would love everyone to go and see Mission Impossible dead reckoning part one when it hits the cinemas later in July 2023. um and if you're listening to this way in the future then then try and find it seek it out uh online somewhere or get a Blu-ray or a 4K disc but the we've worked at it incredibly hard I I really hope it's a great night at the movies the same team behind top gun Maverick pretty much um certainly led by Tom Cruise who cares passionately about creating great uh movie experiences for worldwide audiences I'm super proud of it um it's it's a great great exciting adventurous movie and I think you'll all enjoy it so check it out okay I will I can't wait to go and see that so as soon as that hits the cinemas I'm gonna be right over there but yeah Eddie thank you so much for joining me today for the talk 4 podcast it has been an absolute pleasure having you on and thank you for making the time to do this thanks for inviting me on Louis great to speak to you no worries at all and thank you guys for listening this has been episode 79 and if you'd like to listen to the past episodes go and have a look at our Channel and if you'd like to listen in for the future ones make sure to hit that subscribe button and spread some love by leaving a like and a comment signing off for now
