Austin Scott is an LA-based TV/film editor with over 15 years of experience in post and over 25 years in the entertainment industry. After years of assistant editing work and cutting sizzle reels for companies and networks, he found his niche editing stylistic show opens, packages and promos for reality TV shows.
Austin Scott
His editing credits include ABC’s Dancing With the Stars and Miley Cyrus’ Stand By You pride special. Scott’s other credits include Fox’s Lego Masters, HBO Max’s About Last Night, the new Bravo spin-off Below Deck Adventure as well as NBC’s Little Big Shots. He was most recently part of the editing team working on Fox’s MasterChef Legends.
We reached out to Scott, who is on the board of directors of the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild, about his workflow…
How did you get involved with Fox’s Master Chef: Legends?
I was hired to work on Season 11 because, in addition to working on Season 10, I had also cut Season 8 of MasterChef Junior and multiple other shows for Endemol Shine. Before that, I had worked with several of the producers on The Four for Fox, and they knew what I could bring to a show like this. Shout out to Mike Tumino at Endemol and the whole post team there. It really was a great experience.
Can you walk us through the needs of the project?
I’m known for my ability to craft engaging show opens and super-teases and was doing a lot of those at the time, so I was primarily hired for that set of skills. If you don’t know what a super-tease is, it’s essentially a trailer-style open at the beginning of the show that serves several purposes: a recap of previous events, a preview of the night’s program itself and occasionally, a deep tease of the entire season.
To build those, I would typically watch the entire episode and pull great moments as I went through, then use the moments I pulled from the prior week’s episode to build out a recap/“previously on” segment. Of course, we never wanted to give anything away, so if we had a bombastic comment from host Gordon Ramsay or a congratulatory moment with a judge, I would always show a different contestant’s reaction to misdirect. This is all work I would usually do by myself for several days until submitting my cut and then working through notes. When all was said and done, usually about seven to 10 edit-days went into each and every one- to two-minute super-tease.
Of course, some days I jumped in on episode notes or cut a tasting or elimination because that’s what you do when you’re on a big team of reality editors. This team was anywhere from 10-15 at any given time, and sometimes it took a lot of jumping around from episode to episode to make sure deadlines were hit. I want to extend a huge thank you and congratulations to the whole edit team — Roger Bartlett, Kevin Benson, Matt Cluett, Greg Fitzsimmons, Dylan Hart, Ezra Hudson, James Messina, Rod Schultheiss and Molly Shock, ACE.
What gear did you use?
We edited on Mac-based Avid Media Composers in massive, beautifully arranged shared projects on Nexis storage. Our amazing assistant editors were Sean McGah, Kenny Lane, Dale Estabaya and Brendan Maghran. They and the rest of the team worked literally day and night to make sure we had the most organized, structured projects to work out of. They did an extraordinary job.
What were some of the interesting or unique challenges you faced while working on MasterChef?
I don’t like to be cliché, but our biggest challenge during this season of MasterChef was dealing with the pandemic and working from home for the first time. We actually hadn’t even started editing the season yet; it was just about to go into post production, and I was wrapping another show for Endemol, the first season of Lego Masters. When we were all ordered to pack up our computers and go home, we had no idea that we would never actually come back to the office.
When we started editing MasterChef a couple weeks later, we were told we had half of the season ready for post. Production had to be shut down in the middle of shooting, and there was still the back half of the season to produce. So we cut for about four months or so. Since the pandemic was still raging and production was nowhere in sight, we all took breaks and other jobs and came back months later to edit the back half of the season.
It was also extremely challenging on a personal level, as I had just gone through a divorce and was facilitating remote learning for my preschool and kindergarten-aged kids as a single parent. Several difficulties came up as we navigated shooting after the COVID break. We made it work, however, and edited a truly phenomenal season of television. We were rewarded for that when in March of 2022, just over two years to the day we shut down for COVID, the edit team from MasterChef Legends Episode 1115 was nominated for an ACE Eddie for Best Edited Non-Scripted Series.
Tell us a bit about your background and how you got into editing?
I’m originally from Orlando and have always been fascinated by the movies. I was a child and teen actor for many years, and after co-hosting a live Nickelodeon show the summer after my senior year of high school, I took off to Los Angeles. I delivered food as a full-time job to make ends meet, until one day I got my car impounded for not paying parking tickets. As I sat there watching my car get towed away, pondering my uncertain future in the food delivery biz, I realized I needed to find full-time work in the industry.
My best friend was able to get me an entry-level night job duplicating tapes at 20th Television, where I learned how to do that and many other duties related to post production. It was a part of the industry I hadn’t even thought about joining, and the amount of creativity I saw the editors using in their everyday careers was fascinating to me.
After assisting in scripted television for four years, I was itching to jump into the editor’s chair and flex some creativity. I didn’t see many opportunities in the facilities I was working at, so as soon as I heard about someone needing a sizzle reel to sell a show idea they were pitching, I stopped assisting and never looked back. I booked my first show in 2012 and years later I can say I’ve cut over a hundred TV shows, worked on Emmy-nominated projects and was elected to the board of MPEG for 2022.
