Hi, I'm Katie Wade. I'm the head of post-production in the U. S. and I'm based in Los Angeles. As head of post-production, generally I am still editing films, in the UK London office. I also work closely with Katie Wade, our fantastic head of post production in the US, in terms of shaping the creative culture within our global post production departments.

So we're often communicating and collaborating as a global team, sharing films that we've seen online by our competitors. And also sharing films that we've created and discussing them and keeping on top of new techniques and styles that have come out.

One thing I'm really excited about with this roundtable is that it really peels back the curtain for some of the clients. So that they can see how much time goes into some of these earlier stages of the post-production process. The common phrase of fixing it in post has painted some of the editors as somewhat of magicians, and in some cases we can be. But often those skills are crafted over time and are normally very manual solves for the problem at hand.

Artificial intelligence is helping alleviate some of those manual tasks, but for the most part, we're still scrubbing all the logos from the frame, trimming out all the ums and uhs, and layering each individual color correction and vignette layer.

Rather than approaching my edits on a shot-by-shot basis. Where you might say, Oh, this shot goes there, then we'll follow it with this shot. I like to build out full fluid sequences within those edits. So these would incorporate things like camera movement so the camera might pan left to right in the first shot, and that movement would continue into the next shot. And then maybe you'd see an object moving from left to right and the one after that. And it creates a lot more engagement and fluidity to those edits and ultimately brings a lot more viewer engagement from it.

After I organize and familiarize myself with the media, I then pick a music track, or a couple, so that I can shift into them as the edit develops. Once I have a string out that I'm happy with audio-wise, that's when I then focus on the visuals. To start, I like to go through the current edit and see what VO delivery looks like. Disabling the clips that may not be as visually interesting, or if I know that I have some b-roll coverage for this already. Once I feel good about the amount of interview footage remaining in the edit, I start building out the b-roll scenes. I rough in all the spots just to make sure that I have enough coverage for everything, and then I go back and refine each scene and cut to the beat or find interesting ways to transition from one topic to another. This is also a great time to think about where subtle sound design can help sell the edit choices and really round out the piece. When I have a full V1 ready to roll, I do one last pass of slight color correction just to make sure everything feels cohesive, and then off to the producers or client it goes.

Quite often clients will come to us rather excitedly and want to push the boat out and do something creatively different. You know, we want to do something completely different from what we've done before. We want to try something new, and we want you to produce something really creative for us and have that wow factor. And that's great when we hear those briefs; we're really excited as well because we like to push the boat out and try different things. But often we find as those processes go forward and we start to get into scripting and storyboards and mood boards, the client will kind of retreat a little and start to get a bit worried that, oh, no, actually, maybe we should do the more traditional route and do this film in a similar way to how we've done the others.

Not this will lead to a film that's very similar to what the client has produced before, and it's very similar to what's out there in terms of the industry content and general content noise, and it will get lost within that. I'd like clients to be a bit more confident in terms of trusting our ability to take that initiative and do something creatively different with their film and their messaging and ultimately wow them with the result.