Cutting Rythms, Shaping Stories: How Film Editing Works

Presented by Karen Pearlman

Few aspects of creative filmmaking are as shrouded in mystery as the work of the film editor. What do they do? How does it work? Film editors will usually say their art is intuitive – magic, instinctive, inexpressible. But this lecture explodes the myth that good editing is invisible, and reveals what goes on in the edit suite to save movies, tell stories and make thousands of bits of footage into coherent and compelling films. Drawing on her first-hand experience as an editor and her many years as a professional dancer, Karen Pearlman puts forward the idea that editing is a form of choreography. She shows how editors shape movement – movement of story, movement of emotion, and movement of image and sound, into moving experiences for an audience. Clips from Pearlman’s Australian Screen Editors Guild award winning films, and quotes from her internationally distributed book on film editing, ‘Cutting Rhythms’, are woven into this talk.

Dates and Locations

Tuesday 10 February 2026 Bowral (NSW)

Monday 16 February Newcastle (NSW)

Monday 23 November Hobart (TAS)

Click on your preferred location above for more details and to book tickets.