Post Profile: Joe Guest

Despite a childhood spent in sound studios, and formative working years spent in a record store, it seems Final Cut editor Joe Guest was destined to work in moving image from an early age, starting out as a precocious teenage film projectionist. The award-winning editor tells Ryan Watson how he started at the birth of digital editing and got in with leading directors, cutting everything from their first music videos to today’s top Lion-bagging spots

Returning from the shoot for this feature, Final Cut editor Joe Guest jovially confesses his relief at not getting arrested. After all, a man brandishing a chainsaw in the woods would usually be a cause for concern, but on this occasion it’s a celebration of a prolific year cutting some of the top commercials of 2014.

Having made the shots Awards 2014 Editor of the Year shortlist for work including campaigns for Cadbury, John Lewis and Smirnoff, and winning the Best Editing gold at the British Arrows Craft Awards in November for Lurpak Adventure Awaits, it’s clear the editor, whose career spans more than two decades, is in the middle of something of a peak period.

Growing up in the business

At 17, Guest couldn’t wait to get started in the business. He lied about his age to get a job as a projectionist at his local cinema in Selborne, the Hampshire town he and his parents had left for London three years earlier. It would prove to be a step in the right direction, and he returned to the capital in 1991 to work as a runner at a company called AV Department.

“It was a small building opposite Black Market Records [in Soho],” Guest recalls. “I spent most of my time at work in the basement at Black Market listening to drum and bass.”

Sound had played a big part in Guest’s life up to that point – his mother was a voiceover actress and he’d spent a lot of his childhood hanging around at various sound studios. Naturally, this rubbed off on him and he began to believe he was destined to work in the medium too, in some way.

“When I started the job at AV I thought I was going to be doing sound, but I’d been there only about a year when the editing software Avid came out. I was really into computers so I took to it and helped set it up. They didn’t really have an editor so I just sort of taught myself in the evenings and hung out. I wanted to do everything that came through the door.”

What came through the door were the first music video projects from the likes of Dougal Wilson and Si & Ad, directors who’ve remained loyal to Guest to this day. “We’ve all grown up together, really,” muses the editor.

Another important figure in Guest’s development was Rick Russell, the founder editor and CEO at Final Cut, whom he’d also met during his time at AV Department. The pair kept in touch before being reunited at Russell’s London editing house years later.

“I moved to Final Cut in 2001,” Guest remembers. “I’d been editing for nearly 10 years by that point so I went there with the hope of getting some commercials and maybe doing more music videos. Then Street Music for BBC 1Xtra happened [directed by Nick Gordon]; that was a big one that blew me up quite a bit.”

Asked whether he thinks there’s such a career-defining moment for every editor, Guest replies “Definitely. There’s always that one job, one director or something that basically gets your foot in the door. Then you meet people and that’s how it works.”

Although he confesses that the art and freedom of music videos will always remain his first love, there’s no denying Guest’s passion for storytelling, even if, in his advertising work, it has to make its way through many more opinions and tiers of decision-making before it sees the light of day.

“What was great about music videos was that we were kind of left to our own devices and obviously with commercials you’ve got so many people: the director, CDs, the ECDs… and that’s before the client’s even seen it. I don’t enjoy that as much as I used to enjoy music videos when you basically presented something, they said it was amazing and then you saw it on TV.”

The joy of responsibility

With today’s faster deadlines and even more layers of feedback, it’s hardly surprising that Guest prefers to visit the set whenever he can to ensure a seamless understanding of the job at hand.

“I think it really helps if you aren’t just coming into it blind. It makes it very different when you turn up on a Monday and all your rushes are there and you’ve never seen anything other than a treatment. I like being part of the production. It’s great fun to have a laptop there next to the director with a live feed. Having a bit of responsibility on a shoot is always good fun.”

With a beautifully-crafted spot for IKEA, The Joy of Storage, released in early 2015  and having started the year working into the early hours, it doesn’t appear that Guest will be letting up any time soon.