Whether he’s editing with Final Cut Pro on his laptop from a street corner in Rome or conducting interviews from a bar in Miami, the winner of the 2002 Bessie for Best of Series in editing does not spend most of his time locked away in an edit suite. Peter McAuley, known for his effects-driven editing, is on set, working with directors and DOPs on the production level supervising FX.

‘The thing I like about it is that I’ve always been a closet production person,’ says McAuley. Following a production from beginning to end – preproduction, production and post – improves and expedites the editing process. Being on set allows McAuley to bring a sense of what worked and what didn’t during filming with him to the edit suite and is especially important for spots that are FX heavy.

‘Post is so much involved with production when you’re doing FX,’ he says. ‘I like dealing with cameramen and DOPs because there are lots of simple things you can do on set that really help in post. Something that takes 10 seconds on the shoot saves you a day in online.’

Being on set for the filming of ‘Revolving Restaurant,’ for which he received the Bessie, helped McAuley make a stationary restaurant look like it was rotating at a hundred miles an hour. The spot, produced by The Partners’ Film Company in Toronto for Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition Playland through advertising agency Rethink, was shot at Niagara’s revolving restaurant, but is meant to look like it’s in Western Canada.

The spot begins in an elegant dining room where patrons are greeted by the maitre d’ or are enjoying a quiet toast. Then a young DJ appears and starts making the restaurant revolve faster and faster as Trooper’s Raise a Little Hell fades in and the DJ asks, ‘Do you want to go faster?’ The dinning room spins ever faster until chairs and tables begin to fly around the room and diners are thrown helpless against windows. Outside the window a city whizzes by, achieved with a matte painting of a cityscape revolving with motion blur. The catch is that the DJ is a ‘former Playland employee’ and the spot ends with a helpless Grandma holding on to a pillar for dear life screaming her lungs out.

In filming, the restaurant was still, the chairs and tables were being thrown into frame, and it was McAuley’s job to make the whole thing look like it was spinning out of control. ‘In the last year, [‘Revolving Restaurant’] is one of the more fun spots that I actually thought was a good idea,’ says McAuley. He was very pleased with the director’s cut of the spot, but thought the agency pulled back a little bit in the shortened version where there are a few less flying chairs and smashing dishes, not to mention airborne grannies.

McAuley says essentially he is an FX editor. He has kept on top of all the technological changes over recent years and does a lot of work with the 3D animation department at Toronto’s Axyz Editing, where he has been for a little over three years.

McAuley, who graduated from Humber College in 1979, started editing on film in 1980 as an assistant at Editor’s Cut in Toronto. Six years later, he was at Toronto’s The Daily Post in the early days of video editing, and by the early 1990s, was working with nonlinear computer editing. Today, he says, the technology and pace of commercial production may be moving a little too fast.

‘There’s nothing like sleeping on a cut overnight, having at least one night to get up in the morning and approach it from a different perspective. We’re cutting a job one day after shooting and transferring two days later back in Toronto.’

For McAuley, Toronto is the best possible place to ply his craft because the community of talented editors, whose extensive involvement in a project from beginning to end and ability to act as post-production directors, attracts agencies from many markets including the U.S.

‘[Toronto editors] follow projects all the way through from the rushes to compositing, with offline editors sitting in the online room. To be honest, I couldn’t see it any other way.’

Although McAuley loves working on the production end, he is not making any plans to abandon editing for directing or producing. ‘Post is a comfortable place for me and I’m just kind of extending post’s reach into production.’