I flew out to Los Angeles for my first time last Wednesday for a weeklong visit to see old friends who had moved out there for work, learn a little bit about the city and feel out the possibility of moving there myself. It was a great trip – full of new discoveries, good times with friends and a whole lot of introspection.
I spent the first few days doing some of the traditional touristy stuff. I visited the LACMA where I saw some of my favorite contemporary artists’ work on display and walked through the Stanley Kubrick retrospective. I went to the Paley Center for Media where I browsed a collection of Steve Urkel’s bow ties as well as some original Bugs Bunny and Animaniacs sketches. I took a stroll through Runyon Canyon to get a view of the greater Los Angeles area from up high (which was helpful for navigational purposes). And of course, I strolled along the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.
The entertainment industry permeates the whole town. Signs on buildings and parking lots that read “Available for Filming” are a common sight. Most of the people I met – even out at bars and restaurants – worked in the industry. And everywhere I turned either looked like or actually was a location from a movie.
For the second half of my trip, I was really lucky to snag a few meetings with some incredible film editors, including Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers (Silver Linings Playbook), Adam Robinson (Spring Breakers) and Greg Finton (Waiting for Superman, It Might Get Loud) as well as some of their assistants. These meetings made a huge impression on me. It was an inspiration just to meet some of these editors whose work I’ve greatly admired, but I also got to see some of their working environments and talk with them about their processes working on some of the films they’ve edited (fun fact – the first cut of Silver Linings Playbook was five hours long!).
The overwhelming consensus from the editors and assistant editors I met was that if I want to work on major motion pictures, I need to move to LA, and I should also do it soon. Cassidy told me that everything I’ve worked on outside of LA (i.e. everything I’ve ever worked on) doesn’t count, so it would behoove me to start getting some industry experience as soon as possible. Though production has been ramping up all over North America, especially in North Carolina (e.g. The Hunger Games, Homeland and Banshee), virtually all post production for television and film is still done in Los Angeles.
So here’s my plan: save up some money to make the move out west, learn the Avid editing system (the industry’s standard non-linear editing software) in the meantime and try to use the connections I made during my visit to land a job after next year’s award season. It’s an exciting and scary prospect but one I feel I must consider. All the work I’ve done since high school has primed me for this new chapter of my life, and I am very excited to make it happen.