- Susan Scott is a documentary filmmaker and her films have been seen in cinemas, on tv and streamed digitally on six continents around the globe. She has gone on to win nearly 50 awards for her work. Prior to her becoming a director/writer, she was a film editor for nearly twenty years. Susan started her career in the United States as an assistant editor for an A.C.E. editor in Washington DC after graduating from Baylor University in Texas. Susan was drawn to documentaries early on in her career and went on to edit in Washington for the next six years cutting films for National Geographic, PBS, Time Life, TBS, Discovery, Animal Planet and NBC. But Susan's heart was always in natural history/wildlife and she moved to South Africa to edit for some of the best natural history filmmakers on the planet. Her work for two decades in the cutting room was recognized with several awards, most notable being a Jackson Media Award (the OSCARs of wildlife) for Best Editing in 2011 as well as the prestigious acronym from the editors guild of South Africa. Susan returned to her love of cinematography (well served by cutting some of the best wildlife footage from the likes of Dereck Joubert, Richard Matthews and Peter Lamberti) when she started filming the independent documentary film 'STROOP - journey into the rhino horn war'. The film was an epic odyssey nearly four years in the making, and released to critical acclaim winning 30 international awards and officially selected for 40 film festivals. Her second film, 'Kingdoms of Fire, Ice & Fairy Tales' was broadcast in 2021 after premiering at Jackson Wild and has received awards and praise for its portrayal of the natural world. Susan is in pre-production on her next investigative environmental film.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Susan Scott
- Susan Scott won an athletic scholarship to Baylor University.
- On admiring editors: The famous ones like Walter Murch, Ralph Rosenblum, Thelma Schoomaker, Michael Kahn and so on are easy to admire. They have huge freaking film budgets, loads of assistants, and lets be honest, really really good directors who have tons of experience in the cutting room... so they're bound to get the stuff that will cut. I'm not saying they're not great, it's just that I think we need to consciously admire normal career editors that struggle with half decent footage to make a sequence understandable. There are many many editors out there who should be admired for making 'shit' work. And of course, they have to be silent about that, or else they won't get work again!
- I used to want desperately to be a classical 'no-dissolves' kind of editor. But I don't think there is a style that any one editor can have... it comes from the project itself. What might happen is that you might be more drawn to cutting on a traditionally shot film that say doesn't need frantic, choppy cuts to set the tension. Or you might find the brief a director gives you of a snappy, effects heavy film more appealing to work on than something slower... so I firmly believe that the Producer or Director informs the style of the film and you're drawn to that. Plus, you should know how to cut those different "styles"... because even on a performance heavy film like "Babel" (Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione: ACE Eddie Award Winners 2007) where there are long silent dramatic scenes between actors, there are also hectically paced scenes set in Mexico and Morocco where you'd better know how to cut montages and vector movement into your sequences to get that restless out-of-control feeling.
- Having just returned from several weeks of undercover filming in Asia, it felt surreal sitting there (at a wildlife photographic exhibition) looking at these gorgeous images of elephants, pangolins and rhinos knowing that we had just seen their body parts on counters, in the hands of carvers and cancer patients. If we admire their beauty and the pursuit of showcasing that, we must also be grounded to the fact that their beauty is disappearing. I think we should not be afraid to address that.
- My job as an editor is to bring to fruition the Producer's vision of her/his film. It's pretty simple. That's it. There should be no power struggle in the cutting room. The Producer is the author of the film, and apart from pushing them as well as keeping them motivated, it's your job to bring their vision to life in the best possible way you know how.
- The nearly two decades I spent in the editing suite really honed my storytelling abilities. I worked with some of the best producers and writers in the genre and learned so much from all of them. I was incredibly privileged to learn from filmmakers who are deeply committed to making the planet a better place. How could that not inspire me to set challenges for myself?!
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