Film and Video Editor

Marcus Brill: This is a creative agency so, of course, we've got lots of cool things like this car in our lobby. Hi, I'm Marcus, and I am an editor and motion designer. Welcome to my Day In The Life.

Two, 1 for me, 1 for you. Here we go.

Editors and motion designers work in the post-production side of a production. So post-production basically just means everything that happens after the shoot day. So we've done a shoot, the footage comes in, and then the editors and motion designers cut up all the footage to make stories.

What gets me excited to go to work everyday? It's coming up with funny ideas and then making them and then having people laugh at them.

So the 3 main things I would do in my job is reading briefs, editing footage and animating graphics.
So this is a timeline and this is where I'm gonna build our sequence. This is all about footage. As you can see, you can quickly take all your footage, get it on a timeline, and start building a story out of it.

So being an editor is just one part of the process of making great videos. You need great producers, you need great directors, you need great camera people. Everyone here does a little bit of everything.

My path, I ended up going to university and studying a Bachelor of Arts and Design. The best thing I took away from university was the ability to generate ideas. Ideas that people can relate with; how to take an idea from a concept and make it into something.

So I've been editing for about 5 years. When I first started, I didn't know that much about motion graphics. I knew I enjoyed doing it and just through trial and error, I picked up a few skills. But as I got better and better, I realized how little I actually knew. The company I worked for put me on a course. It was sort of like a 10-week online course that sort of solidified all the little bits that I knew and it filled in all the gaps that I didn't know to give me a really solid foundation in using after effects and motion design.

I'd say the majority of editors in this industry are contractors or freelance, which means they can be working here 1 day or they can hustle and get their own work.

If you've ever heard of anything called imposter syndrome, being in a place where you're surrounded by super talented people can be quite off putting in a way because you're battling with yourself thinking, they're gonna figure out that I'm not a real editor, when in actual fact, a lot of those people are going through the same thing.

Honestly, I don't really think about my paycheck so much. The reward for me is when someone goes "Oh, that's cool, oh how'd you do that? That's awesome". I love making things, basically making things that people appreciate.