“I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. Everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.”

Stanley Kubrick

I still remember the moment it clicked. The ripe old age of 6. I’m pretty sure the number of times I’d watched Indiana Jones run from that paper mache boulder rivalled the amount of months I’d lived by then. And yet there I was again sitting in the middle of the lounge room floor, legs neatly crossed, eyes glued to the screen. My back arched so acutely that I could have passed for a school kid trying to win over teacher with a demonstration of how impressively attentive they are. This was my standard Sunday afternoon. And there was no better way I’d rather spend it. But as the VHS wearily spooled away, something about this viewing was different. There was a certain artifice coming to the surface that had never emerged before. The film was playing less like a movie and more like a series of shots stitched together. It was as if a third eye had been opened. Someone had assembled all this like a jigsaw puzzle. And this thing I would watch religiously each week was at its most base level nothing more than an amalgamation of image and sound. To me this seemed as close to playing God as one could get. Things were different now. The curtain had been pulled back and the magician’s secrets were revealed. And I wanted in.

A neighbourhood friend of mine had a JVC handicam. The image quality looked like it could have been filmed by a potato but to me this thing made finding the holy grail seem like a footnote. We set off making whatever movie popped into our heads, roping in any extra face we could find along the way - that bucktooth kid down the road, a mate’s mum... Hell, we would have found a place for the postman if he was keen. “The Incredible Rolling Man” may not have received an Oscar nod that year, but it did serve as the starting point of an obsessive foray into visual storytelling.

I’ve been cutting professionally now for over 20 years. With a portfolio of work covering some of the world’s biggest brands and consistent stints at Sydney’s most prestigious production house and adverting agencies, I see myself still tackling what I do with the same level of enthusiasm as that kid way back when. I’m a strong believer that although we all get stuck in daily grind it’s important to remember why we pursue our chosen path - because there is nothing we’d rather do.