I just discovered that The Jim Henson Company posted some clips from a series I edited for them when I was but a lad. It’s funny to see these scenes so many years later and realize how the long-forgotten dialogue actually wormed its way into hidden depths of my brain.
This makes sense because editing is such an intimate experience: you spend a lot of time meticulously working over the recorded sights and sounds, shaping their rhythms to match the intended plot, altering their meaning along the way. I recommended that all aspiring screenwriters try editing, or at least spend some time sitting in on an edit session, to appreciate that part of the storytelling process.
I hardly spent any time on set during production, but over the years, I became friends with many actors who appeared in the show. Now that I think about it, maybe our relationships actually began when I was editing the footage of them.
Jason Margolis 