PBS Short Film Festival

(peaceful music) - I went to this really big office party and they gave me a work award for doing a good job.

So I told my son, he was like, "Cool."

That was an accident.

I accidentally won an Oscar.

Also, I don't know what I'm talking about.

I'm making it all up as I go.

(peaceful music continues) My parents were super supportive.

My mom's an artist.

She's a photographer, so she got it.

And my dad is a lawyer, which is just kind of another type of storyteller.

(peaceful music continues) When I went to film school and I went through the process, being on set was just an excuse.

I just wanted to get through it as quickly as I could so I could start actually making, what to me was making the film, which was editing.

I graduated and saw a posting for a documentary editor at Alabama Public Television and I was like, "There's no way I'll get a job.

Just outta college, I don't have any experience."

(peaceful music continues) They hired me.

Mission-based work is intoxicating and powerful and exhilarating and energizing, and the opposite of that is so depressing.

(peaceful music continues) I was at work one day and I watched a film called "Until the Quiet Comes" by Kahlil Joseph and I watched it again and then I was like, "Oh God."

And I went home and told my wife Becky, I was like, "I think I have to quit my job and move to LA and find Kahlil."

This is the work that I want to be doing and that I always wanted to be doing, but then had kind of forgotten about, narrative and experimental stuff that I was really attracted to.

So I found his editor, Luke Lynch, online.

He kind of said, "Look, if you come out here we can give it a shot."

The deal that I had with my wife was six months.

I'll see if I think I can make it out here.

Started working at "The Eric Andre Show" as an intern and wasn't getting paid.

Did a bunch of other stuff, wasn't getting paid.

Eventually I started to get these little paid gigs, you know, enough to just kind of almost pay my rent.

I called Becky and I was like, "I think I can make it.

I think we can do it."

A coworker at APT, Justin Garr, moved out and so he invited me to Daniel Scheinert's birthday party party was at a roller rink.

I just showed up with Justin and Daniel was like, you know, he didn't know me, he didn't invite me.

I had like forgotten my wallet so I didn't have any money.

So Daniel had to pay my way in and he rented my skates for me.

But we skated around and I just kind of like fell in love with this group of friends that led to "Turn Down For What," that's how I started working with them.

(peaceful music continues) You can be friends with the people you work with and you can do good work.

Something that lasts and puts something good into the world and says something and makes people feel like they're included and makes people feel less alone, which sounds simple, you know, and obvious.

But it's surprising how little of that there really is.

(peaceful music continues) Being a good editor also means being emotionally in tune with yourself and the world, because that's kinda what you're doing.

You're like an emotional tuning fork for the film and everything comes through you.

So if you're not living life and having experiences and gaining knowledge of the world and people and the way that people interact, your tool gets dull and you start making weird decisions.

It's hard because I'm also obsessed with what I do.

So like I'll dream about it.

I'll wake up and be in the shower and be like, "How can I fix that scene?"

So many of my ideas, the majority of them are bad and don't work.

I go through these stages on projects where I'm stoked, I'm excited, I'm confident, get the footage, start editing, start watching really, even more excited.

I'm gonna kill it, it's gonna be great.

And then I start cutting and then I get to this point where I'm like, "I'm a bad editor.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't know why anyone has ever hired me.

I should quit and be a farmer."

And then I've realized that I just have to push through it that I've just keep working, I'll accidentally do something interesting and then I can just like dig into that.

(bright music) My process is like so different always because a lot of it's just keeping myself from getting bored and keeping myself from getting into these like repetitive patterns that can creatively kind of screw me up.

It's both learning to trust your instincts and having fun working against them.

And a lot of that also comes from working with other editors and being able to jump in and out of their projects, and their timelines and seeing like, "Wow, they did it like that."

It all comes back to collaboration.

(bright music continues) It doesn't matter how good you are technically, if you have a good idea, it's gonna be good.

There's so many like pieces of work out there and even in other mediums of art that are like not technically incredible, but the feeling behind it is amazing.

And that's the kind of stuff that I love doing.

At the company that I'm a part of now, Parallax, it's part of our like working philosophy.

(bright music continues) The journey with the film and everything everywhere and all the awards and the Oscars is amazing, but I think I'm more like blown away by the fact that I am running a company with these people that changed my life uploading this thing to the internet that I watched in Alabama in an office.

Luke, Graham Zeller and Kahlil Joseph, who's the director of "Until the Quiet Comes," and that's like way cooler to me.

(waves crashing) I love my work.

The end.

(waves crashing continues)