FEATURES
Post-Production's Art School:
Manhattan Edit Workshop
by Michael Kunkes
 Editor Alan Heim, left, one of the many artists-in-residence at Manhattan Edit Workshop, with Josh Apter. |
In 2002, Josh Apter was a freelance Avid editor who also had a few private training clients on the side, a couple of whom were keen on learning Final Cut Pro. “There was always this notion in my head that knowing both programs was going to be an important thing for an editor,” he recalls. Apter guessed correctly, for today, Manhattan Edit Workshop (MEW) is thriving as both an Apple-authorized training center and an Avid-authorized education center, and has just built out its new 2,600-square-foot headquarters at 80 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
MEW offers a full range of weekend, one-week and evening classes and workshops in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Avid Media Composer Pro, Logic Pro, Color and Final Cut Studio, as well as private, customized “on-demand” curricula created to include programs such as ColdFusion, Shake, Soundtrack Pro, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and others. The MEW faculty, over a dozen strong, are all working editors and certified Apple or Avid instructors.
The philosopher’s stone to MEW’s creative alchemy is its signature six-week intensive “The Art of Editing” course. It is priced at $5,750 and teaches both Final Cut Pro and Avid basics and real-world workflows, screens mainstream and independent films, takes field trips to New York video and audio post facilities, and provides students with a complete historical and artistic background of picture editing. The course screens everything from pioneers such as Méliès, Griffith and Pudovkin, to the work of today’s leading working professionals and everything in between.
 Manhattan Edit Workshop's Josh Apter assists a student. |
Students also learn DVD Studio Pro so that they can build and modify their personal reels. In addition, as part of a partnership with the Minneapolis-based Institute of Production and Recording (IPR), a Digidesign center for audio instruction, MEW students send their final edits and raw audio, and IPR students create sound design and surround mixes for their projects.
According to Apter, “We start with Final Cut Pro because it’s a little more user-friendly for new students, and then we reinforce and translate those concepts into the Avid. We don’t start all over again with Avid after two weeks; rather, we teach common ideas––creating a project, capture, inserts, over-ride, trim mode, etc.––bring them into an Avid environment, and show what the similarities and differences are. The philosophy here is that you will be a filmmaker making your own artistic decisions, and the sooner you can get those technological processes under your belt, the sooner you will be able to make purely creative decisions.”
The six-week intensive class size never tops out at more than ten students. “Even at ten, there are too many variables in terms of skill level, so even if it gets near that number, we will bring in a second instructor. For all our classes in general, we try and maintain a low faculty/student ratio of 1:6.”
For most students, what makes the course such a well-rounded experience is in-class visits from MEW’s artist-in-residence, a prominent film editor who is invited to lecture, screen his or her own films and critique student work. In addition, at the end of each course, MEW and the Editors Guild co-host an informal event to talk about the process of editing-as-storytelling. The Guild’s East Coast organizer and former Board member Marc Laub also counsels students about the advantages of being part of the union, and, through MEW’s artist-in-residence program, various editors give talks that are also open to the public––usually to standing-room-only crowds at the Guild’s New York offices. The new fall resident artist is John Gilroy, A.C.E. (Michael Clayton, Narc), the latest in a stellar group that began with Larry Silk, A.C.E., and has included Alan Heim, A.C.E., Stephen Rotter, Michael Berenbaum, A.C.E., Carol Littleton, A.C.E., Bill Pankow, A.C.E., and others.
MEW is also expanding its training into a series of one-day master classes, teaching programs such as Motion, Logic, Soundtrack Pro and Color. “It’s important that picture editors learn color and sound design,” says Apter. “Technically, they are not supposed to have to do that, but in today’s real-world broadcast environment, editors will almost always be asked to do it. So we created these master classes to teach sound design for picture editors, After Effects, Logic and a full range of workflow solutions for working editors.” MEW is also sponsoring a five-editor panel for HD Expo’s first New York show in September.
Even though MEW offers no formal placement counseling, Apter claims that more than half of the graduates from the six-week intensive course find work as editors or assistants. “Facilities that are staffing up are calling us first to see if we have anyone we feel is ready,” he says. “That’s a terrific reflection on our students.”
Mostly, Apter emphasizes, “I consider MEW to be an art school, because we teach the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ of editing. Our mantra is ’Less Starving, More Artist.’”
For more information, visit www.mewshop.com.
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