The Edit Button
submitted by Meseret
I first met Ryan at one of my first professional editing jobs. Having never edited full time for a company before I was a little nervous about the experience and what it would be like. Ryan was hired a couple weeks before I got there and after my initial onboarding, I met Ryan to talk about post. Like many editors we connected on the challenges/frustrations of communicating with people who don't understand what goes into editing. I remember asking him about archiving and what our backup process was and he just smiled that devilish smile. He had asked the same question when he got hired and we soon found ourselves in the same boat wading through Dante's inferno
One day someone had pitched an editing service that we could potentially use on the team to help streamline our editing process. There are a lot of programs like this where you just input video and the program just self edit's based on some algo that was created. Ryan and I always held our tongue during these conversations, often looking at each other with the deadest of deadpans, almost daring the other person to crack a smile and break.
Of course what was happening was an internal machine of inside jokes and memes we were dying to send to each other the moment the meeting was over. This became a long running joke between us that if someone who didn't know how complicated editing was we could tell them that we have this new program where all you have to do is click the edit button.
The jokes never stopped and as we got to hang out more, along with Jake, we found a lot of commonality. Our love for movies like Jackass or Office Space, being out in nature on a hike, a ski retreat, getting snowed in upstate or sending memes or photos to each other.
Ryan was obviously really talented in his craft and it was wasted for the type of work we were doing, but I know personally he helped me a lot not only technically but also with my confidence. So much of the work is getting feedback and improving off of that feedback and you need someone with experience and patience to foster that development. I respected Ryan and his point of view so his feedback was really meaningful in helping me focus on what I liked and ignoring the stuff that was not important.
He made this really great collage using images and video for a hackathon and it's always embodied Ryan's personality and point of view to me: Multilayered, revealing more and more the deeper you went.
