About
The editing bug hit me early in life, although it took me some time to realize it. In high school, I thought it might’ve been copy editing that I wanted to do. I ended up editing my senior class high school chapbook, and then went on to major in English at the University of Washington.
My last quarter at the UW, I took a class studying independent film and found what I was really looking for: filmmaking. The same quarter, I took an English class that studied ‘animality’ in literature. It inspired me to become a vegetarian and I’ve been one ever since.
Before returning to school, I found a new love: Marco. We were married in the fall of 2005 and soon bought a house together. Marco also shared my passion for filmmaking, and he collaborated with me on several filmmaking projects as an actor, producer, and director.
Fast forward to a couple years later, I made it back to school, this time to study film. By the time I graduated, I was already half-way done editing my first feature film, a fun little found-footage style horror film called Eyes in the Dark.
As soon as I graduated, I started my own freelance video editing business, Scaringi Films, and I began editing professionally. One of my first projects was working on a promotional video for the Broadway High School Alumni Association and I continued working on training videos for Skydive Snohomish. Soon, a handful of companies hired me as a freelance video editor, including the advertising company, Creature, and Eyes in the Dark’s production company, Emerald City Pictures.
Although my niche to date is editing promotional videos for corporations and non-profits, including actor reels and tutorial/testimonial videos, my true passion is editing narrative fiction, and working on projects that have an interesting or altruistic subject matter. If you have an editorial project that you think might interest me, please feel free to get in touch.
Click here to view complete resume.
References available at LinkedIn.
Visit Robyn’s IMDB page.
Hear Robyn’s life story on KUOW.
Want to Know More?
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions that Robyn receives.
Why does your work stand out from others who do what you do?
I found that a lot of other editors in my pay range tend to be sloppy. They’ll allow a second or two of black in the video for no reason, they’ll ignore maintaining the correct aspect ratio, they won’t bother to bring music down during a part when people are talking, the list goes on and on. I’m meticulous in my work and I appreciate both editing as an artform and as something that needs to meet certain technical standards as well.
What do you like most about your job?
I really like it when I surprise my customer. For example, when I cut something a certain way that just perfectly gets their message across, or when a graphic I designed turned out way better than they expected. One time, I had a director literally jump for joy after he saw my 1st rough cut because I had fixed some problems that he thought were unfixable. That’s the sort of thing that I love most about being an editor.
Tell us about a recent job you did that you are particularly proud of.
I recently edited some videos for the Seattle International Film Festival and it was a lot of fun. Most of what I did was encoding movie trailers to put up on the SIFF website, but I edited a handful of promotional videos for them too. At one point, Edward Norton came to the festival to receive an award, and I got to edit several videos revolving around his visit. I edited a clip reel that showed off some of the fantastic films Norton has worked on. I also edited a video showing Norton accepting the award, and a video of a Q&A session that he did after a screening of his latest movie, Leaves of Grass. It was a real thrill to edit videos with a big time movie star in them, and Edward Norton has officially become my favorite actor because of the experience.
If you have a complicated pricing system for your service, please give all the details here.
The most common question I’m asked is “How much do you charge?” which is a difficult question to answer.
Sometimes people think that the target length of a final video (for example, “How much do you charge to edit a 2-4 minute video?”) is the best clue on how to answer that question, when actually it isn’t. A better indicator is the amount of footage you give me in relation to the target length. This is sometimes known as a “shooting ratio.” For example, if you give me 10 minutes of footage and ask me to make you a 2-4 minute video, that would probably be only half a day’s work, so I would not charge a lot. But if you give me 10 hours of footage and ask me to make you a 2-4 minute video, that would be several days or maybe even weeks worth of work, so I would charge a great deal more.
Another factor includes the number of rough cut viewings you would like to have before I create your final output. Each additional rough cut viewing, while it adds to the quality and your general satisfaction with the piece, takes more time for your editor to complete the piece. I’ve generally worked with 2 rough cut viewings before the final output. But that can vary, especially if I go to your office to edit onsite, because I can often go through several rough cuts in a day for jobs like that.
Also, the quality of the footage is a big factor in the amount of time it takes to edit. If I’m given all beautiful footage, flawless takes, with a full script of notes on what the director likes and doesn’t like, editing will go by fairly quickly. But in the real world I’m given footage where there’s little to no notes on what I should use, the camera’s shaky half the time, or the framing is poor, or I need to spend quite a bit of time color correcting and sweetening audio. Projects like that take quite a bit more time to get them to the level of quality that I prefer to bring to my clients. And the more time I have to spend on a project means the more money I need to charge.
All of this does not even take into consideration whether or not you want me to design and author a DVD, create titles or graphics for your video, or if you want me to select and integrate music into your piece. All of these aspects of video editing are usually included in a final product, but they do take time (and therefore money) to create them.
Usually, I charge a day rate rather than an hourly rate. Or for some projects, I can charge a flat rate for the entire project based on an estimate of how much time it will take, with half of the money due upfront and half of the money due upon delivery of the final cut.
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