Mark Edinoff: Out of The Dark Room

Mark Edinoff tells Adrian Pennington he doesn’t miss the bad old days of editing, being ordered around by chain-smoking alcoholics in darkened rooms, preferring now to hang out with his directors, explore their sense of humour and build a relationship that can bring forth unexpected creative fruits

Some scripts are intrinsically funny. Take the 2007 Mini Cooper spot by Traktor in which a man clothed in nothing but brogues and socks walks along a road and is hit around the head with an enormous fish by the passengers – also naked – of a passing car.

“You’d have to be a total moron not to make that funny,” says its editor, Mark Edinoff. “But there are things you can do to make it funnier. You can stick the wettest fish noise you can find on the slap. You can choose the take with the slightest wobble on the naked guy’s buttocks. The tiny things can be used to ramp stuff up. The real trick is trying to find humour in a script that is less strong to start with.”

Arguably more than other genre, the key to comedy lies in audio cues. “Around half the jobs require peppering with sound effects,” he says. This even extends to creating his own. “Sometimes you want a particular squelchy sound and you have to make it yourself. It’s really hard to explain a sound to someone. It’s like trying to explain a smell.”

Edinoff’s first love is comedy, in part because of the collaborative kick he gets from working with directors such as Steve Bendelack, Guy Manwaring, Alison Maclean and Scott Corbett. “You don’t have to be totally on the same page but you’ve got to share a similar sense of humour,” he says. “I like working with people, discussing a job, finding out what I can bring to it and how they see it. Sometimes, how they see it is not always how it turns out.”

While he and Manwaring have worked on numerous spots (including the 007 pastiche for Coke Zero) and have developed a shorthand “that leaves me to my own devices”, Edinoff believes in the importance of building a relationship with someone he hasn’t worked with before. He’s doing that just now with Andrew Lang for a Stink-produced Hellmann’s spot.

“Editors historically festered in dark rooms with a bottle of wine, but everyone has now been pushed blinking into the sunlight,” he jokes. “Last year I worked in Lithuania, New York, Switzerland, Chile, Mexico and Amsterdam – most of those attending shoots. Add to that the fact the director doesn’t live on the doorstep. They’ll be in Rome, LA, Sweden or somewhere. So I find myself on the phone and away from home a lot more.”

While being on location is inclusive – “in that I can get an immediate handle on the job” – it can be counterproductive. “A lot of baggage comes with a shoot and, as editor, you are sometimes best being independent of that – free to see that the problems people imagine exist aren’t, in fact, there at all.”

The North Londoner grew up in the 70s, and boasts a photographic memory for 70s movies: favourites being Cool Hand Luke, Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate. “The sequence in which Benjamin beds Mrs Robinson was one of the cleverest I’d ever seen,” he recalls. “I probably thought it was a special effect when I first saw it – certainly, it didn’t register as brilliant editing until later.”

As a runner, first at C4 music video programme The Chart Show, he got his first taste cutting promos on VHS, then at Jim Bambrick’s and Sam Sneed’s editing suites, logging and synching 16mm and 35mm film prints.

“It was much harsher then,” he recalls. “A lot less laid back. It seemed to be run by chain-smoking alcoholic psychos. You’d enter a room and someone would shout at you to go and get something. You’d wait a week and a half just to get a dissolve back from the optical house. Now you can render a ton of effects in Avid in 10 different versions.”

At The Whitehouse he was made assistant editor on Spice World, seconding to Andrea MacArthur. “They said if I can make it through this movie they’d make me an editor.” They did, letting Edinoff assist Russell Icke on John Woo’s seminal 1998 Nike spot, Airport 98, that featured the Brazilian soccer team (and Eric Cantona) at an airport.

“Editing is a constant baptism of fire,” says Edinoff. “To individual clients, you are only as good as your last piece, but you gradually build a body of work that you’re happy to share with people.”

A prime example is a promo for 2001 Medicine 8 track Capitol Rocka, for which Edinoff animated thousands of 35mm digital stills in 24 hours.

“Someone at Rushes kindly did loads of post on it and it was going to make the cover of shots. Then someone, somewhere – not at the magazine – said they didn’t like it and it was pulled from the cover at the last minute. At the time I was quite depressed about it but I went on to cut for Dave Lodge and I think the reason he chose me was because he saw that promo.”

At Work Post since 2012, he’s completed a variety of jobs including a stint last Christmas in NYC for RKCR/Y&R on Dell, but he still likes to seek out the latest comic spots. “Sometimes I’ll just sit here and watch things like Skittles ads,” he says. “I like short form in the same way I like sketch shows, but I’d love to do a comedy movie.

“I’m not a Black Swan kind of a guy,” he admits. “I’d rather go see Will Ferrell in Anchorman 2. I saw The Lego Movie with my kids and loved it. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate other genres, like Dallas Buyers Club. It’s just that I prefer Lego to Aids.”

The singing bear for Müllerlight, the ironic Road Trip for McDonald’s; Barclay’s Bee Sting or the Snickers series featuring Mr T have all passed the Edinoff laugh-o-meter.

“If you do an ad that’s funny and it doesn’t get fucked up by the marketers then it really sticks in the mind,” he says. “These days it’s increasingly difficult to do that kind of work because the marketing guys are all over it. I haven’t added anything to my reel for about a year because nothing is quite where I wanted it to be. Sometimes it gets changed so far from our original vision that it’s not possible to get a director’s (or agency) cut finished up.”