A week in the life of an editor

Editing has a bad reputation: people imagine it as solitary, silent work stuck between two screens. The reality, at least at Puffins, looks more like a week where almost every day brings a different problem to solve, rarely the same one twice in a row.

In detail

Monday usually starts with receiving footage from a weekend shoot: hours of material to sort, catalogue, and above all watch once without judgement, just to spot the moments that, without quite knowing why yet, feel important.

Tuesday and Wednesday are generally devoted to the first assembly, the most creative but also the most frustrating phase: trying structures, dropping them, starting over. This is when a film that seemed clear in the director's head has to prove it actually works on screen.

Thursday almost always brings an internal screening, often the cut's first encounter with an outside perspective. Feedback can be hard to hear, but it is exactly what prevents delivering a film that only works for the person who edited it.

Friday, finally, mixes corrections, light grading and exporting deliverables. It is rarely the most glamorous day, but it is the one that turns a project into something the client can actually watch and approve. Then it starts again, with a different subject, the following week.

The weekend is not always entirely free: a shoot sometimes falls on a Saturday, which pushes the following week's schedule accordingly. These adjustments are part of the job, and the team has learned to absorb them without the editing quality ever suffering.

The software used varies by project, but the method stays constant: a first rough pass, with no music or effects, to judge the narrative structure alone. Music and effects only come once that structure is validated, never before, so a fundamental problem never gets masked behind an attractive finish.

One project stays particularly vivid in the editing team's memory: a short documentary whose structure was rebuilt entirely three times before finding the right version, five days before delivery. The client never knew just how different the film had nearly turned out.

What often surprises people outside this craft is the time spent NOT editing: watching the same footage over and over, taking notes, letting a cut sit overnight before coming back to it with fresh eyes. That apparent patience is actually an active part of the work, just as important as the hours spent in front of the editing software itself.

Exchanges with the rest of the team also shape the week far more than outsiders would imagine: an offhand remark from the art director sometimes completely changes a transition; a question from the account manager about what the client will understand forces a rethink of a sequence that had seemed perfectly clear in the edit suite.

Some weeks look less like this outline and more like a constant juggling act between three or four projects at different stages: a first assembly here, a minor correction there, an urgent delivery somewhere else. Those are the most exhausting weeks, but also, in hindsight, the ones that best taught the team to prioritise without ever sacrificing the quality of the final cut.

What makes this job sustainable over time, more than the passion often talked up, is a solid routine: the same backup schedule, the same folder structure for every project, the same review rituals before every export. That rigour, almost invisible from the outside, is what allows creativity to express itself without ever getting lost in chaos.

None of this would work without genuine trust between editors and directors. An editor who feels free to challenge a director's original vision, respectfully but honestly, almost always produces a stronger film than one who simply executes instructions without ever pushing back when something does not seem to work on screen.