postPerspective Update

Editing Conan Without Borders:
Ghana and Greenland
By Randi Altman

Back when Conan O’Brien was airing his traditional one-hour late night talk show on TBS, he and his crew would often go on the road to places like Cuba, South Korea and Armenia for Conan Without Borders — a series of one-hour specials. He would focus on regular folks, not celebrities, and would embed himself into the local culture… and there was often some very mediocre dancing, courtesy of Conan. The shows were funny, entertaining and educational, and he enjoyed doing them.

In 2019, Conan and his crew, Team Coco, switched the nightly show from one hour to a new 30-minute format. The change allowed them to produce three to four hour-long Conan Without Borders specials per year. Two of the places the show visited last year were Ghana and Greenland. As you might imagine, they shoot a lot of footage, which all must be logged and edited, often while on the road.

Matt Shaw is one of the editors on Conan, and he went on the road with the show when it traveled to Greenland. We reached out to Shaw to find out more about editing these specials and what challenges he faced along the way.

You recently edited Conan Without Borders — the Greenland and Ghana specials. Can you talk about preparing for a job like that? What kind of turnaround did you have?
In terms of prep for a show like Ghana, we mainly just know the shooting specs and will handle the rest once the crew actually returns. For the most part, that’s the norm. Ideally, we’ll have a working dark week (no nightly Conan show), and the three editors — me, Rob Ashe and Chris Heller — will take the time to offload, sync and begin our first cuts of everything. We’ll have been in contact with the writers on the shoot to get an idea of what pieces were shot and their general notes from the day.

With Greenland, we had to mobilize and adjust everything to accommodate a drastically different shoot/delivery schedule. The Friday before leaving, while we were prepping the Ghana show to screen for an audience, we heard there might be something coming up that would push Ghana back. On Monday, we heard the plan was to go to Greenland on Wednesday evening, after the nightly show, and turn around Greenland in place of Ghana’s audience screening.