Editor Jay Nelson at L.A.'s Cut and Run is coming off a streak of funny spots for high-profile clients like Activision, eHarmony and, working with director Jason Reitman, Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart spot is the most fully realized mini-movie, but his spot for runaway hit video game Guitar Hero 2 is equally endearing – a fun, fast-paced, and retro-cheesy look at two young dudes rockin' out. We got Nelson on the phone to talk about technique, technology, and the old Madonna video that started it all.

Watch "12 Minutes" (Wal-Mart)

Watch "Math" (eHarmony)

JAY NELSON: Oh, thank you!

Well, first of all, a great spot like that, a fun spot like that, begins with a great concept. So often good concepts are not realized because the elements and the execution don’t come together in that way. In creating this spot, you have to take your weakness, which is a low budget, and make it a strength. In so doing, using stock backgrounds and not having the luxury to get angles perfectly, you take that reality and turn it into a more funny un-reality, in that these guys are just living out their rock fantasy. Conceptually, that look lent itself to ‘ the fact that these guys themselves were kind of low-tech.

We pulled hundreds of different choices for types of backgrounds. Some of them were more abstract. They were meant to invoke your impression of the rock lifestyle. Jet airplanes and groupies. Falling money. And the things that really stuck were the crowd backgrounds and the energy they gave. It fit the song.

Jason Reitman is a fantastic director who can edit in his head. His footage is an editor’s dream. The guy thinks about the pace and flow of things, and he can see the way a story is supposed to unfold in his head. He’s one of the best I’ve seen at that. All of it, in that case, was storyboarded.

Well, there were a ton of choices to be made. But the notion of the spot and how it would unfold is represented in that cut. It’s not that each shot is timed and matched perfectly to the storyboard – but there wasn’t a whole lot of guesswork. The question was, “How much can we cram in? How fast can we make it and still tell a coherent story and get this guy through 12 minutes of pure sweat?”

Exactly. That’s how Jason saw it in his head and pitched it to the agency and, ultimately, how he described it to me. Once you start putting the pieces together, the pace becomes obvious. That’s the type of spot I got into editing to do. And this is something I’ve wanted to do since I was 13 years old, so …

I was watching Madonna’s “Lucky Star” video, and I would try to predict where the editor was going to cut. So I started to become aware of editing by watching MTV. I was very interested in it – in what sense I don’t know, since it wasn’t really a technical interest. I went on to major in painting and creative writing in college, so it was a perfect union for me, and I moved to L.A. right out of college. So I knew this was what I wanted to get into. Ironically enough, the editor who became my mentor, a guy named Christopher Willoughby, had edited most of the videos I grew up trying to figure out.

Our parents’ watching television gave them an understanding of an advancing language – a visual language, a way of seeing things – that we inherited as we watched, say, MTV, or cartoons in the 1970s. In our heads we developed an understanding of the language and how to speak it. If somebody like me becomes an editor, the rules are inherent because I’ve been watching them. You can see what works and what does not work because of what you’ve been brought up absorbing, visually. MTV pushed that boundary by doing things that hadn’t been done – or bringing together techniques that had been done but putting them into one format – and then spoon-feeding it to every teenager in America. We all began to absorb a new language, and it ultimately allowed the plethora of styles that we see today.

Well, I certainly take the more classical approach. I believe that an editor is supposed to be invisible. If you’re announcing yourself for the sake of showing off your style, then I think you’re doing a disservice to whatever it is you’re selling. Unless, of course, the technique of editing is inherent to the concept. If you’re called upon to carry something that is visual, then that’s when you step up and start displaying yourself. I personally don’t believe in doing that. I think we’re there to service the story. We’re there to service the imagery. I edited a feature film last year, and in doing that you really want people to sit back and watch and absorb the story. You don’t want them to become aware of your editing. It becomes tedious. In 30 seconds you can allow yourself to stretch, to spread your wings a little more, but I try to let my ego take a back seat to the story. It’s easy to announce yourself, but it takes a much bigger editor to sit back.

I don’t think most viewers would view it the way you or I would view it. You, especially, are looking at the editor. You’ve got me under a microscope, so you’re aware of what I’m doing. But I don’t edit for people in our industry. I’m editing for the people we’re trying to reach in advertising. And ultimately I think they just enjoy a spot like that. I don’t think most people know what an editor is or does, and I’m OK with that.

Absolutely. That’s the fun of it – knowing the rules of the language and being able to communicate ideas and feelings to people in a visual and aural way. That’s a pretty involved intellectual undertaking. And that’s why I find my job so fascinating.

I think they shot seven or eight different dates. They had pages and pages of lines they would give to the women that would create a reaction in this guy, and they shot a ton of film. They did a fantastic job of execution, because they did all that in two days. I could go back to that footage right now and churn out an entirely new campaign. And that's because you’re working with combinations. You find that line that’s a humdinger that allows you to announce what this message is. And if you can find eight or nine of those humdingers that allow you to wrap the spot up, you’re going to create a funny spot.

The last six months of my editing career have been, to me, the culmination of a lot of hard work. It’s been a string of great creative stuff. I was editing the movie Broken, with Heather Graham and Jeremy Sisto, which premiered at AFI last November, while doing commercials. The sheer volume and pressure of that was overwhelming. It’s the volume of what we do as editors, the cumulative pressure that we have so much to process and there’s so little time, that's the intense part of the job.

The feature was so long-term. I love commercials because it’s a new thing every week. With a feature, you have this long-term challenge of having to hold on to and maintain an idea, and you have to get through a massive amount of footage. And then once you get to the end of the line, you’ve got to go back and completely rewire it to get the desired effect. Because when you put down that first draft, you’re not invoking the feeling you want to invoke. You’ve got to go back and revamp it and restructure it. This particular movie has a very complex narrative, so we spent three months editing it and six months trying different structures. There’s no way I could work on a 30-second commercial for six months without losing my mind.

Oh, yeah. I think about that all the time, actually. I draw upon experience. As editors, the older we get the better we get. We have a wider range of things to draw upon, and therefore we know how to answer our own questions faster because certain styles of editing are going to be rote. If you’re doing something that is, for example, a whole bunch of boxes on the screen, and if you’ve done that exercise before, you’re going to draw upon every single experience you’ve had with it. You may not recall them all individually, but each one is an exercise toward perfecting your craft. Now, one of the strengths of being a fledgling editor is that you’re prone to second-guessing yourself. As you get older, you develop habits – and those habits can be dangerous. So it’s important to constantly remind ourselves that we’re always students of this craft. You’re never a master of this craft. That’s a necessarily humbling thing for me.

I’m constantly drawing on the work I’ve done before. Even if one job is different from the next, there may be something in the way I treat the music. The music I’m listening to today may inform a new style. I find it really interesting, for example, that back in the mid-1990s the commercial world discovered techno and overnight we went from this sort of hip-hoppy thing to a techno world, and it informed the whole art form. The way we were shooting things and the way we were transferring things fit the sound of the music we were applying to it.

That kind of thing comes in cycles. If grunge and Nirvana was the thesis, techno was the antithesis of that, and after that we had the synthesis of both those ideas. I think we’re in a dark age right now, artistically, but I think we’re about to pop out of it. I think we’re waiting for that discovery ‘ it could be an artistic one, or a musical one ‘ that’s going to inform the other forms.

I’m kind of straddling a line. I’ve worked on Avid Media Composer for 14 years and I love it. The Wal-mart spot was edited in HD on a HD-capable Media Composer, and I absolutely love the HD world. I’m about to embark on another movie which was begun and logged in Final Cut. And I’ve been resisting the Final Cut step forever. But I have been brushing up on it, and it’s a fascinating program. It’s radically different from Media Composer. They approach the discipline from two different angles and I’m very interested in seeing how Final Cut informs me in new ways. But I’m fortunate to have a really buffed-out Media Composer system. I constantly have four or five different things going on at once. I’ve got a 2 TB fibre-channel SAN that my Media Composer is hooked up to. Occasionally I’ll use Adobe Photoshop CS 2 to create graphics and mattes. But primarily I exist in the Media Composer world, and I’m about to take the big step into the unknown of Final Cut.

I think it makes sense because it handles multi-format a lot better, and the documentary I’m working on was shot on five or six different formats. Media Composer kind of tunnels you into one format within a project. Final Cut seems to be more flexible in dealing with multiple formats. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a strength. As editors, for the work we do, simpler is better. I’m not one of those people who wants to get caught up in the technical things surrounding pixel aspects and frame rates and stuff like that. But you obviously have to be aware of it. I find Final Cut an intriguing proposition not just because of the flexibility it allows with regard to formats, but also that the interface evolves to a point where there’s five or six ways to do just about anything. The tactility of it seems like it’s bringing us one step closer to painting in motion. I’ve always wanted to pioneer that sort of thing. I don’t know if you remember the scene in Minority Report, where the future cop played by Tom Cruise is doing the forensics and he’s standing in front of screens and using hand commands to move things. That’s the way I want my job to be. It ought to be that tactile, and the response ought to be that immediate. I can’t wait for the day when these monitors we use become touchscreen palettes so we can slice and dice with our hands and not have to interface with a keyboard and a bunch of buttons to do it. Anything that brings me one step closer to that is something I’m going to be willing to attempt.

It does. And that’s the daunting thing for me as I look at the 140 hours of footage I have to go through for this movie. How am I going to organize this in a completely new language when I don’t speak that language? It’s much easier for me to visualize it in Media Composer because I’ve been visualizing it every day for 14 years. I’ve evolved along with this thing, and my brain has developed the habit of seeing my bin sorting the way Avid wants me to. But I think that’s all part of evolution in this business. You have to be willing to adapt new disciplines. If you’re not, you’re going to sink.

I think I need it. We all need a fresher-upper.