OK, so it’s no longer unusual for an editor to set up shop on location, especially for a shoot that requires a lot of planning around VFX shots or many different types of footage. But when was the last time you cut a spot on a folding table set up on the deck of an aircraft carrier?

That’s where editor Leo King and his assistant, Ben Campbell, found themselves earlier this year. They were on hand to make sure the myriad elements going into a Johnnie Walker spot – including footage of airborne fighter jets, a Formula 1 racecar, and aerial shots of the boat itself – would all cut together. That meant King had a lot of homework to do before the shoot so he could hit the ground running on location. Watch the video, then read the interview with King about thinking outside the Avid suite.

FILM & VIDEO: So why was it so important for you to be on location for this shoot?

LEO KING: Generally the director likes having the editor on location when we cut, but it was particularly important for this one. They shot the backgrounds for the planes in one location. They shot the Formula 1 car on a track somewhere else. And then they shot the aerial shots of the boat and the actual on-boat stuff in dock somewhere else. They had to cut all these different locations and make this advert feel like it was all in one location. I was dropping bits of the car onto the boat and cutting from the aerial shots of the boat to an actual on-boat shot to make sure it worked.

What systems did you use?

I’d already done a bit of work back in the office using Animatte in the normal Avid. When we got down there, I was just very simply cutting stuff out and drawing boxes and putting it in the right position in the frame just to make sure it worked and all the angles matched up, using Avid Xpress DV.

What were the difficulties of working on that particular location, in the bright sunlight?

Well, it was lovely weather. Normally that would have been nice for us, but working was a bit of a nightmare. Our gaffers were really helpful. They constructed a movable black-out tent that went around us to block out the sun. We had a little gap so we could see what was going on, and a walkie-talkie so we could hear when they were calling takes. We were on this decommissioned boat, so we had our hard hats on. And every time you left the boat, it meant a 10- or 15-minute walk through the bowels of this old boat that was falling apart. It wasn’t that fun.

What else did you bring along?

We always bring too much gear, just in case stuff goes wrong. We had two flight cases full, and then a laptop case. There were two laptops because we were loading rushes as we went, so I’d be cutting, nightly, the second day’s playback from the camera feed while my assistant was loading the first day’s rushes and pasting over what I had done on that day. We had a MiniDV deck and all the wiring for that. A Canopus ADVC-110 box was our main kit to digitize the footage – we took the analog feed from the playback guy, looped it through that and loaded it into the laptops. On top of that we had a few external drives, because you always want a few backups. We just brought tons of stuff. Once we were on the boat, we got it down to a concise amount of equipment we could move around quickly.

Was the spot shot on film or HD?

On film. So we were just cutting with the playback – low-res video footage – and then as we get the rough shots, we pasted over what we had already done.

And what was your final deliverable, SD or HD?

I think it was SD – but they transferred a lot of it in HD because I was twisting and zooming into the sky plates to make the shots more dynamic. Instead of trying to recreate that in telecine, they transferred it in HD so the Flame operator could zoom into the sky and not lose resolution in PAL.

It must have been a mental exercise for you to just keep track of what all the different pieces were and where they were needed.

First, the post-production guys at [VFX house] Lola built a rough 3D version of the whole commercial, based on the storyboards, so we had that to start with. I got them to give me all of the different shots of planes they had built, and I then took the background elements and really cut it the way I thought it should work. By the time we got to the shoot, I had the plane section roughly cut and I had the car footage by that point as well. So I started putting the car on the boat, and where I didn’t have shots, I just left the rough CG elements in. When they came to shoot, I’d drop those in and maybe we’d realize it needs an extra shot. That was very handy to keep my head on top of everything, because some shots had four or five elements going into them.

What’s your best advice for anyone who finds themselves working in a similar position?

Be prepared. If I hadn’t done that kind of work up front, if I had just turned up and tried to cut it there and then, I wouldn’t have known what to do. When you’re on set, you don’t have a lot of time. It’s not like you’re in your suite somewhere where you can casually spend a couple of hours thinking about the stuff. It’s like, bang bang bang. "OK, we’re shooting. Now we’ve got the shot. Does it work? Uhhh – yeah, it works. Next shot." You’re not contemplating all the different ways of doing it! That’s for when you finish the shoot, when you get back and have those few days to really look over your edit.