By Karen Moltenbrey 

Editing commercials might not have all the glitz and glamour of editing a tentpole film, but the work can be just as challenging. An editor has only a small amount of time to tell a story when doing 30- or 60-second spots, so every frame must count.

Here, we speak to two editors, both of whose experience has been focused mostly on these short-form projects. They prefer the limited deadlines that enable them to move on to a new challenge much faster than if they were working on longer-form pieces. Yet every so often they welcome the change of pace that a long-form job offers.

Grant Gustafson — Cutters Studios

Grant Gustafson

Although Grant Gustafson has made his mark editing some well-known and highly rated commercials, including some recent Super Bowl favorites, if circumstances had been different, he might be making his living in a totally different career. Possibly in medicine.

While in college, Gustafson was pursuing a pre-med degree at a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. By his junior year, he knew that career was not for him, but he wasn’t really sure where his future would lay. That’s when he got a summer internship, in a very roundabout way, at a business called the Looking Glass Company in Chicago (now Whitehouse Post), acting as a runner. “I didn’t know a lot about them, but it sounded like a fun place, and it had a very positive environment with so much creativity. All the people were so interesting and really welcoming,” he recalls. “I thought, OK, this is a field I’d be interested in.”

Gustafson returned to college, graduated, contacted the Looking Glass Company and was welcomed back, again as a runner. He learned the ropes and was quickly promoted to assistant editor and later transferred to the New York office after the company merged with Whitehouse Post. It wasn’t long before he was summoned by management and asked to return to the Chicago branch, this time as an editor.

Rocket Mortgage

“I was surprised. I wasn’t pushing for [the position]. It wasn’t even on my radar,” says Gustafson. “I didn’t even have a reel.” Nevertheless, clients remembered him as an assistant back in Chicago, and upon his return, he was booked on Bud Light jobs almost immediately.

“They gave me a shot, and it went well. And they gave me another job, and it just snowballed from there,” he adds. “I’m still working with [the ad agency Highdive] today, 18 years later.”

In 2010, Gustafson transferred from Whitehouse to Cutters Studios and has been working as an editor there ever since. He continues to expand his growing portfolio with comedic commercials, such as the Rocket Mortgage Certain Is Better spot that aired during this year’s Super Bowl and Jeep Groundhog Day from last year’s Super Bowl. Both were rated in the top spot in 2021 and 2020, respectively, by the USA Today Ad Meter, which ranks spots airing during the big game.

“I like the instant gratification of working on something for a couple of weeks, and then it’s always exciting to see it on television,” Gustafson says of working on these short-form projects.

In particular, the editor enjoys dialog spots that are humorous. But telling a story in 30 seconds, or even 60, can be challenging. “You need to tell the story in a way your viewer can understand and that does its job as an ad and sells the product — and also lands a funny joke. Those are the three most important things you want to accomplish in those 30 seconds,” Gustafson says. “Often it is a balancing act with those three aspects.”

Commercials tend to have fast turnaround times too, which make them even more challenging. After organizing the footage from an assistant, Gustafson hits the ground running, usually preparing a wide range of options for his clients.

How does Gustafson know if the edit is working? “Most of my work is comedic, and it’s pretty clear it’s not working when the vibe is not funny. When the joke is really landing, you know it,” he says. “If you watch the spot over and over and it’s still funny after viewing it a hundred times in the editing process, then you’ve got a good spot.”

Since day one, Gustafson has used Avid Media Composer for his work, and that continues to this day.

Jeep’s “Groundhog Day”

Prior to the pandemic, Gustafson worked from the Cutters office, so having a remote workflow thrust upon him was certainly new. “I was in the middle of a job when everything basically shut down. They had shot a ton of footage, and the editing process had to continue. I got a computer set up at home, and then the question was, how do we edit with clients remotely?” he recalls. “We refined that process very fast, and within that first week, I was editing in real time from home with clients. Over Zoom they were seeing my screen, and I was amazed at how effective remote sessions were going nearly immediately.”

In fact, Gustafson, like many editors, has come to realize that remote editing can be done, and done smoothly. “I think the future of working remotely will depend on the client, whether they’d like the process to be in-person or not,” he says. “I’m happy to drive down to the office and work in person; I still enjoy working in-person with clients.”

Without a doubt, Gustafson is happy with the career shift he made all those years ago, serendipitously finding his way into post editing. He still loves the job, finds it fun and engaging, and has made many long-lasting professional friendships.

Craig Lewandowski — Utopic

Craig Lewandowski

While post editor Craig Lewandowski’s career has been primarily focused on advertising, when talking with people who aren’t in the business, he says, “I don’t really say I work on ‘commercials’ anymore because we’re doing so many additional things for agencies and their clients that go beyond the standard commercial.”

Like many other editors, Lewandowski also dabbles in other projects that are not in the advertising space. Last year, he edited a movie — not typical but certainly not unheard of at Utopic, a boutique editorial shop in Chicago where Lewandowski has been for the past 7 years. Prior to that, he spent the majority of his career at Optimus, a production/post house also in Chicago. “We do a variety of work at Utopic, including shorts and music videos. But in terms of how we promote ourselves, it’s mainly commercial work,” he explains.

Utopic employs approximately 20 people, including six editors, two junior editors and those in the graphics, audio and other departments — all of whom occupy an entire floor of a building downtown. There, Lewandowski and the other editors use Adobe Premiere, while the rest of the shop uses the full Adobe Suite, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Pro Tools, Maxon Cinema 4D and more.

Mothers

Of course, when COVID hit, the entire process changed with the adoption of a remote workflow. Lewandowski had already set up a Premiere system at home right before the pandemic began in preparation for Halfway to Somewhere, a movie he was about to start working on, so he wouldn’t always have to trek into the office. Both he and the director discovered just how efficient it was working remotely over Zoom as opposed to in-person. “The director, who was planning to fly in from Vancouver to spend over a month in Chicago, said he plans to work remotely from now on,” Lewandowski notes.

Once the movie edit was complete, Lewandowski transitioned back to commercials, using pretty much the same remote workflow and continuing to communicate with clients via Zoom.

Early in the remote workflow, media management presented some difficulty, as the assistant editors and editors were working individually and sharing the project back and forth. To help manage this, the studio began using new tools, such as Frame.io, a video collaboration platform recently acquired by Adobe, and Masv’s file-transfer solution for sending large bulk media over the internet.

Not Fair

“I believe that moving to a remote setup will have been much easier than moving back [to in-person]. Everything is different now. We’re not just going to go back to doing things the way we did them before. There’s going to be a big learning curve, where we figure out how much of what we’ve been doing remotely we’ll retain,” says Lewandowski, who, like so many, foresees adoption of a hybrid model with some in-person and some remote collaboration and communication between editors and their clients.

Despite his recent film project, spots have been, and will continue to be, Lewandowski’s mainstay. “I love the quick turnaround and how collaborative the process is,” he says.

“I like being able to finish the work and then move on to something else that involves a new set of people.”

TaxAct

While he finds it refreshing to occasionally do a longer-form project, such as a movie, from time to time, Lewandowski is usually anxious to get back into the commercial side of things.

Some commercial editors gravitate to a certain genre, but Lewandowski finds that his reel contains a wide range of work, including a fast-paced University of Chicago Medicine spot titled Not Fair, a heartfelt piece set to music as patients fight to survive devastating illnesses. “To me, it’s a total editor’s piece. I love working on pieces like this that are so completely music-driven. There was so much incredible footage to pull from that it allowed me to create such nice pacing and not have to worry if I only used a shot for a few frames,” he says.

Craig Lewandowski

Lewandowski also highlights a recent Black Lives Matter piece called Mothers, which started out as a dialog piece but transitioned into something else entirely during the edit, as mothers whose children were killed by police are rendered too emotional to speak. (The spot won Best of Midwest at this summer’s AICP Post Awards.) On the opposite end of the spectrum is an amusing spot for TaxAct featuring a person being chased by a bear.

All three commercials were done during quarantine. “We’re all past the point of saying, ‘look at this, we did this in lockdown,’” says Lewandowski. “But when we were doing them, we were kind of shocked at how relatively seamless the process was as long as we all pulled together.”

Karen Moltenbrey is a veteran writer covering visual effects and post production.