Meet the Creatives: Brett Nicoletti
Each week we talk to a leading member of the Movidiam community about their professional journey, their industry insights, and how they have worked with Movidiam on innovative projects. This week, we spoke to Brett Nicoletti, award winning editor and director.
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Hey Brett, welcome to the first in Movidam’s ‘Meet the Creatives’ series!
You’ve worked on some of the more high profile commercials in the industry over the last decade. How do you remain current in an ever changing market?
I’ve been very fortunate to have great working relationships with some incredibly talented Production Companies and Directors over the past decade. As far as staying current, I just try to work as hard as I can during every project that I’m hired for. It’s important to be open to any and all ideas, regardless of whether I think they’re the “right” idea in the moment. I also think that it’s important to be open to working in new ways, with different applications and tools. There’s no right answer to “what’s the best editing software?” The answer is always to figure it out within the parameters that you’re given. It can always be made to work.
Psyop is one of the top studios in the world. How do you build that initial trust and chemistry with a prestigious company like that?
Again, it’s about working hard and being open to anything that your client is interested in exploring. Psyop is so successful because they have a knack for finding incredible people. That means people who are talented, but also people who are wonderful to work with. They really make it easy for any Artist to come to work and be at their best. They have a long-lasting culture of success there, and that success is ingrained in every project that goes through the studio. Whenever I’m on a Psyop project, I do my best to work within their culture and workflow because I know that they know what’s going to work.
Several of your projects are VFX focused — how do the requirements change from, for example, editing a long form documentary like Breaking2?
With VFX projects, and specifically VFX commercials, everything has been designed, pre-visualized, and thought out very carefully before filming begins. In these cases, I always want to honor the hard work that’s gone into the project by executing that plan once we get into edit. In the VFX world, a big part of my job is to collaborate very closely with Animators and Compositors to bring the edit to life, which I love. In the documentary world, it’s completely different. Production will hand me, in some cases, hundreds of hours of material with an outline as to how they’d like the film to come together. That outline is then constantly changing as we work our way through the edit. It’s really quite the opposite from VFX work. You have to find your story in the editing room, which is incredibly challenging but also incredibly rewarding when you have success, such as was the case with Breaking2.
After coming close in the Nike Breaking2 program that you edited with the team at Dirty Robber, Eliud Kipchoge has since gone on to break the 2 hour marathon barrier. How do you approach this type of documentary when a lot of the audience already knew the outcome? Do you have to focus on other aspects of the story to create the tension?
For Breaking2, the logline of the film is whether a human being can run under 2 hours in a marathon, but the story runs far deeper than that. The fascinating thing about Breaking2 is that we all get to take a peek behind the curtain at Nike and these East African distance running teams that have been dominating the marathon for decades. Seeing the contrast of Nike’s scientists and cutting edge shoe technology with the culture of Eliud’s team in Kenya, where every runner shares a small room with another team member and has to clean the bathrooms regularly as part of their camp chores is unreal. It’s the process behind how these runners achieve such greatness that, to me, is compelling — and I could watch that story any time and be inspired, regardless of whether I already know what happens in the end or not.
Tell us a bit about your recent documentary that you directed and produced ‘The Running Man of Pasadena’. How did your experience there differ from your previous editing roles?
I live in Pasadena, and I’m a runner, so I was always curious about this white bearded, colorful, beautifully happy man who I saw running all over the city. I wanted to learn more about him, and specifically about his running. Discovering that he was a refugee from Lebanon who came to the US by himself in the 1970s because he wanted freedom was unbelievably inspiring. Producing and Directing this film had a profound impact on how I look at my career. I had an idea for a story that I took from inception through completion, and that opened up my eyes to new possibilities. I love to edit, and I love to learn from Directors and Clients who are using different methods to bring their stories to life. Now I know that I too can take on this role, and it’s given me a new perspective on how I see my career moving forward.
What’s next on the directing front?
Several things! I just wrapped, and am in the final stages of post, on a Corporate Culture Film that I Produced, Directed, and Edited for RGP, a Multi-National Consulting firm with over 80 global offices. I’m in post-production on a short documentary film for Repair Cafe, an organization that brings local “handy” volunteers together once every two months to offer repair services to the community for free. They repair toasters, bicycles, jewelry, pants — you name it. I’m also developing a feature-length documentary about a wildfire event that took place in Los Angeles in the 90s — very early stages on that one.
You’ve just wrapped working on another edit for Dell, through Movidiam. How did this come about, and what was the experience like for you?
Movidiam introduced me to Dell and their documentary brand stories last year for a project about how Environmental Engineers are using Dell’s technology to learn about the effects of wildfire events on local waterways. I had a great experience working with the Dell team and was fortunate to have them ask me to edit a second brand story for them last month. To me, this 2 minute documentary format is a great way to give people some insight into what your brand can offer. You can give your audience a real sense of the impact that your product is having on the world, in ways that you simply can’t with a 30 second commercial.
You do most of your editing remotely now. How have you seen this change over the years?
I’ve been editing for over 20 years, and when I started we all worked on Avids — these massive machines that were very expensive to own and maintain. Final Cut Pro changed all of that, and now there’s lots of different platforms that allow you to edit wherever and whenever you’d like. And with sharing tools like frame.io and google hangouts, you can set up virtual sessions between collaborators sitting at workstations anywhere in the world. But, I do still travel to client offices to edit and, in all honesty, it is always great to look someone in the eye and have direct and immediate feedback on the work at hand.
What’s your editing set up?
I’m running Adobe Premiere on a MacBook Pro with external monitors and hard drives.
What does the next 5 years of post production look like for you.
During the last 5 years I’ve seen our schedules compress quite a bit, especially in commercials. You can shoot material and be screening and editing that same material in a matter of minutes. But the truth is, in order to attain a high quality end product, whether it’s a film, commercial, etc., you need to spend your time going through all of the footage and working through any and all ideas. At a certain point the creative process will be compromised if you rush. What I think is going to change is the access to tools that will allow you to create more sophisticated work for lower costs. Obviously we’ve already seen that happening, but it’s going to get easier and easier.
And finally, do you have any tips for aspiring editors that you wish you had known when you started?
Obviously, as Editors, we all need to work hard and never cut any corners. You never know what lies in the last 12 frames of your last clip of dailies! But, more importantly, we always need to be open to the opinions and ideas of our collaborators. When I was younger, I opened my mouth WAY too many times to let someone know that their idea wouldn’t work, only to be surprised (and embarrassed) when I finally tried their idea and discovered that it actually did! It takes much less time to simply try something and find out if it works than it does to argue about why it won’t.Be open to new ideas. Your collaborators are you partners and just because they don’t know the software like you do doesn’t mean that they can’t offer a great idea that can take your project to another level.
