Conan’s Editing Team Cuts 'DIY'
Episode While Working From Home

By Randi Altman

Throughout this pandemic, we’ve seen creativity and innovation at its best. In order to keep producing fresh content, late-night talk show hosts found ways to keep shooting from their homes, while their tech teams created new workflows to keep things moving forward.

Maybe it was audiences’ ability to accept seeing their favorite shows presented in different ways that led to "DIY Conan."

What’s "DIY Conan," you might ask? Over the summer, Conan O’Brien asked his viewers to get creative and make their own segments for an episode of his TBS show. And, boy, did they come through. The "DIY Conan" episode, which aired in September, featured live-action footage, puppetry, animation, stop-motion and more.

We recently spoke to Conan’s edit team to find out about the challenges of editing and posting a do-it-yourself episode, with all its varying formats and different video and audio qualities.

In addition to those challenges, the team was working remotely due to COVID. Let’s find out more from lead editor Rob Ashe and fellow editors Chris Heller and Matt Shaw, all of whom told me how lucky they feel to have been able to continue working through this pandemic… even from home.

How did this all work?
Chris Heller: Our web team took our full edited episode and posted it online to Team Coco’s website. The episode was broken into roughly 30-second pieces, and then fans were able to download and recreate as many chunks as they wanted. When they were done, they uploaded their homemade videos, and that's when our job began.

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