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Across the Bridge

Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer

How to make a living in Brooklyn.

Ryan McKenna

Although the largest feature of his studio is his bed, Ryan McKenna has edited TV commercials that have found significant national airplay here, such as a recent one he did for Subaru. He's got a completely professional editing suite — the core of which, a Mac Pro tower, is available for purchase at any Apple store. Similar NLE setups can be found in perhaps several hundreds of apartments within the borough.

Most of these, however, don't include eight processor cores, an attached MiniDV deck, and a Blackmagic Design Intensity card for realtime preview via HDMI to a 40in. Sony Bravia screen, as McKenna's does. He also has 2TB of internal storage in a RAID 0 configuration, plus a 30in. Apple Cinema HD Display.“I can do uncompressed HD fine,” says McKenna, who estimates he spent about $18,000 setting himself up earlier this year.

He learned nonlinear editing on Final Cut Pro version 1.0 (and Avid) at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. McKenna says the school's focus was on teaching the tools rather than discussing films. With his friends, he would come up with a visual effects gag and write a short movie around it. “It wasn't the most genius writing,” he says, “but it helped us develop techniques.”

These techniques helped him find visual effects work in New York, such as broadcast design/branding firm Plus et Plus, where he spent countless hours rotoscoping. These days, however, he's focused on editorial, and he'll take on jobs independently or spend a few days at a time editing at Post Millennium in the city or at Lifelong Friendship Society in his neighborhood.

Although he'd love to work as an editor at one of the big edit houses in New York, McKenna says he doesn't want to restart from the ground floor as an assistant. “That's a difficult thing to break into,” he says. “They promote a lot from within.” But the types of cinematic projects that make these houses attractive to McKenna are starting to come his way. Recently, he edited a music video for the song “Peacebone” by New York psychedelic-folk-etc. group Animal Collective that looks and feels like a big-budget production.

If several favors weren't called in, of course, the budget probably would have been quite large. A former classmate from Fitchburg, Jeff Shepherd, served as DP on the video. He filmed Super 16. Shepherd and McKenna also shot moody time-lapse footage of trees and the sky with digital SLR cameras during the nine weeks prior to the formal shooting days. The director, Timothy Saccenti, and McKenna wrote the treatment for “Peacebone,” which features a romantic interaction between a green, lanky monster and a Corvette-driving young woman with a horrifying mouth. Most of the video's budget went to a creature shop in New Jersey called Monster in My Closet.

Mark Szumski and Tom Hurlburt from Click 3X worked on “Peacebone” as a favor. In Autodesk Flame and Maya, they did CGI work on a scene where another monster comes out of the woman's mouth. Needing to stretch the actress's mouth and push back her teeth, they first modeled and animated based on test Panasonic P2 footage that came in before they received Digibeta plates of the Super 16 footage. Telecine was at The Mill, where James Bamford color-corrected the video. As soon as McKenna got files from The Mill to edit, he had to cut it together quickly in order to pass it off to Click 3X, so they could do their final compositing on Digibeta plates.

It might seem like a lot of high-powered, unpaid work went into a video for a relatively unknown indie band, but the video has made an impact on YouTube, where it was briefly on the Featured Videos page. In one day, according to McKenna, “Peacebone” received more than 100,000 hits. (At press time, it has attracted about 400,000 viewers.)

So far McKenna's Sony DSR-11 MiniDV deck hasn't gotten much play; most of his projects involve high-quality QuickTimes shared with collaborators over the Internet or via hard drives. For McKenna, who says he learned to type in Final Cut Pro, a file-based workflow just makes sense. “As things get more and more post-heavy, your browser in Final Cut is just like your Finder in your Mac,” he says. “You can point to [QuickTime] files on your hard drive, and there's something that an After Effects artist can use, a Flame artist can use — anybody can use those files.”

When I visited his bedroom/studio, McKenna was getting ready to receive a client, James Wills of the electronic record label Love Is War. He had seen the Animal Collective video on the Web and Googled the editor's name, leading to McKenna's website. With that, McKenna had another gig editing a music video. He says he's at the point where he can pick and choose the projects he wants to edit at home and work freelance gigs at other facilities as necessary. A recent example of that is an NBA commercial McKenna edited for post house Lifelong Friendship Society (LFS). He did all the work from home, editing DVCAM dailies of 35mm footage and participating in review and approval with the director, the agency, and LFS via the Web.

Current short-term plans for McKenna include a bigger apartment. “If I could get the bed out of the office, it would be cool,” he says.

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