As Live Production | Editor Research: Dan James

I've been looking at the work of editor Dan James who is known for his work on Top Gear and The Grand Tour.  George (VT Director) and I were discussing the sort of look we wanted to go for with the 'Old to New' VT, and we both liked how both shows are edited and we wanted to incorporate these features in our VT.

James has been nominated for four BAFTA Craft Award nominations and worked as senior editor on Top Gear for 11 years.  James is now editor for The Grand Tour, moving along with a lot of the old Top Gear team to the new Amazon show.

In an interview for 'Pro Video Coalition', interviewer Steve Hullfish asks Dan James about the editing process for shows like Top Gear and The Grand Tour.  Both series involve a combination of heavily scripted content and improvised actuality.  James describes the traditional 30 minute The Grand Tour VT as a 'rough guide' to which the editor fills in the gaps from the huge amounts of footage captured.

He also describes how these 'insert films' are not involved in the studio at all - the studio content more-or-less revolves around the content from the inserts which are prepared months in advance of the studio recordings.  He also talks about the shooting ratio of these shows being 150-200:1 which is an insane amount of footage - although baring in mind that for long road trips etc, the cameras are always rolling.  This makes for vast amounts of footage that James has to sift through to find "the real gems".  James must sit and watch through all of this to form his edit - see left: Avid project window and bins from The Grand Tour.

He will sit with the director and go through the basic structure of the edit, but he says that he is left alone for a lot of the time during the edit.  The producer, Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson have the final say in the edit, but James and the director form the shape of the film.

James uses a sort of 'formula' for his edits, which he describes as 'hold and release', which involves intense passages of about 30 seconds with frame cuts between longer periods of calm with more spaced out cuts.  He also discusses how to cut humour, such as through answering a question with a cut.

James' editing work on Top Gear and The Grand Tour is masterful at showing off the vehicles featured on both shows and I would like to transfer this to a similar style for our VTs in Steal the Style.  I love the 'hold and release' technique and I aim to incorporate this into the 'Old to New' VT in some way.

https://www.provideocoalition.com/aotc-grandtour