AMANDA ELLIOTT
ASSISTANT SMOKE ARTIST
ELEPHANT POST/
LOST PLANET
(Santa Monica, CA)

My career path has definitely been an awesome one. I consider myself very lucky but at the same time I've worked extremely hard to get where I am.

I graduated high school in June of 2000 and went to Specs in October 2000. And immediately after I graduated I got an Avid intern position at JWT. I stayed there for almost a year and then landed an avid assistant job at Mad River Post. I stayed there for 2 years and learned A LOT and then moved to Universal Images to be a Smoke/Avid assistant. I stayed there for 2 years and then landed a gig at Red Car in Santa Monica as an Avid/Smoke assistant for a few months but then found a much better opportunity at Lost Planet in Santa Monica.

I've been here since January and now exclusively assisting on a Smoke. I love it here!

Since we do not actually teach Smoke at the school, please explain what it is used for in post production, how you accrued that experience and why it has made you more marketable in your career:
Smoke is the online box I assist on. It’s the last step before anything goes out to air. Avids and Final Cut are used in the industry to do all offline work (rough cuts) and then it’s brought over to the Smoke for finishing (dirt clean up, beauty clean up -- like pimples or wrinkles).

When I was assisting at Universal Images they needed a Smoke assistant so I thought I’d give it a try because I was willing to learn. Even though it’s totally different inside and out than Avid, I found myself falling in love with what it could do, and also what a powerful tool it is.

There are not many Smoke artists out here in L.A. There are lots of Flame artists that do mostly visual effects but there are not many online editors on Smoke.

What advice would you give students who would eventually like to wind up working out on the west coast?
California has been great to me! I absolutely love it here. There is so much more to work on here because its Hollywood. In Detroit I really only worked on cars because it’s the Motor City, but in L.A., I've worked on not only commercials but music videos, short films, and soon enough -- movies!

One of my bosses is the guy who edited Natural Born Killers, Hank Corwin. He’s extremely talented and is working on another movie right now here at his office in Santa Monica.

Basically you do have to work hard for what you want and this definitely isn't a 9-5 job. If you love it then you’ll have fun with it and it definitely has its advantages when I can come in late one day or leave early if I need to another. The people here definitely understand that.

What types of projects have you been working on since you moved to California last summer?
I moved here in August 2006 and started Avid/Smoke assisting at Red Car. I assisted on a St. Ives project, a few short films for local directors, and some car spots for Chevy. They had a few editors and one Smoke guy who was very talented and it was working with him for a month that I realized that I wanted to work in online and be a Smoke artist.

I stayed at Red Car for a short period of time and moved over to Elephant Post (Lost Planet) in January of 2007. Since we’ve been here at Elephant we've worked on Toyota, Gatorade, a Ciara music video (plus more videos soon!), Sprint, Cadillac, Cisco, short films, Clorox, and Ford. And hopefully we will venture into the land of films.

What would be the biggest difference between working in Detroit and working in this business in California?
California has a lot of potential for young people to move up. There are editors as young as 24, just like me. If you have the drive and passion to move forward in your career and to work on a variety of things then this is definitely the place. There is more of a variety here and more opportunity to get a gig especially if your freelance. A lot of cool work for sure.

You once said that you had to move around in the editing world to gain credibility. What did you mean by that and do you still feel that way?
Yes, I still feel that you do need to move around. But if you also have a consistent clientele and are always working or own your own shop, then I think you’re doing fine.

But for someone like me it would definitely work to my advantage because working at different post houses means working with different clients and working on different stuff to broaden my reel and to learn more about what they are doing.

If all I do is work on Chevy and a client has a huge paying Ford job, he’s probably not going to want to work with me because I never worked on Ford before. 

Don't get me wrong, clients do sometimes take chances but the job gets done faster and more efficiently if someone edits who already did it before. And for example, if I stayed at Red Car, I wouldn't be in the know about the new film my editor is cutting. And I wouldn't have been a part of "The Nominees" short piece we did for the Oscars. If you see a chance of a lifetime you take it! And that's exactly what I did.

What have been some of the highlights in your career thus far?
I would highly recommend driving across the country to anyone first of all! Highlights would probably be almost everything I worked on already since I've been here. Ciara "Like a Boy" music video, the Oscars piece, meeting directors, I onlined my first spots, going to Smoke school end of April to learn heavy compositing and effects. And also accomplishing so much by age 24.

Explain the move to Elephant Post and why you are so excited about this particular move.
It’s probably the best move of my career. Chris, my editor from Red Car, and I joined forces to help start Elephant. At the end of the year we will be building out to a new building and hiring more staff and will become a really great online house.

It’s nice because we have the great support from Lost Planet, a very reputable place out here, and they are doing extremely well. Making this move will help me build more clients and work on more cool stuff. I'll be focusing on just Smoke and not both Avid and Smoke to better my online skills. As a female online artist, I'm rare out here and that is what makes me valuable.

Anything else you want to add?
I tell people not to expect to jump in an editor’s chair right away. You need to know much more about being an editor then just the editing.

Can you get what they want within the time they booked the room? Do you know how to use all your tools to do what they want? And in a timely fashion? 

You need to have organization DOWN -- VERY IMPORTANT. They will see you sweat. Your job is not to let them.

You need to be able to take criticism and adjust your cut even though you hate the idea.

They are paying you to basically read their minds and add your touch -- that is why your editing and they aren't. And most importantly... Do you know how to work a room?

Clients DO NOT want to sit in the room for 8+ hours a day with a no-personality editor! You also need to know how to entertain, carry on conversations AND get your job done. Just because you work on Final Cut at home with your peers and edit doesn't mean you’re ready for what’s out there. It’s a great exercise to get into assisting but once you step your foot into an edit bay you need to be 5 steps ahead and 2 steps behind your editor in other to cover EVERYTHING.