The help. This week: Hernán Menéndez, editor, storyteller.

By Gonzalo López Martí – LMMiami.com

In this business we rarely ask the opinion of the artists-for-hire who help us bring to life our lofty, world-changing, award-winning ideas. Namely film directors, photographers, web developers and so on. These folks turn our PowerPoint® psychobabble into real, tangible executions yet we expect from them to hit the ground running, give us exactly want we want, when we want it, at the price we set, no questions asked. This series of articles will humbly attempt to right this wrong.

Hernán Menéndez, founder & principal of The Cut Club!*, is one of the busiest and most experienced editors working in the US Hispanic ad industry today. He has 20+ years of experience “cutting commercials” (as we like to say in our racket) under his belt. He has his points of view too. Read on.

Q: Mention the best campaigns you have seen recently.

HM: “The big leap” for Lacoste. Awesome. Google it. Now. Even the tagline is awesome: Life is a beautiful sport. Sounds better in French: La vie est un sport magnifique.

“The game before the game”, the Beats by Dr. Dre spot for the World Cup featuring Neymar, Chicharito Hernández and cameos by various athletes and artists. Gives you goosebumps. A super production in every sense of the word.

Nike’s World Cup cartoons. They always nail it.

“Batalla” (Battle) for California Milk Processor Board by Grupo Gallegos. A brilliant metaphor.

Q: Mention the worst campaigns you have seen recently.

HM: I’d rather keep my mouth shut. Who am I to judge? Speaking of which, editors are rarely if ever invited to participate as judges of award shows. Personally, I was never invited. They only call us to judge technical categories. By the way, I have an idea for an award show: it would have an on-line open ballot system for everyone in the industry to submit work and vote as well. Essentially, a show of this nature would avoid the behind-closed-doors judging process and make it more democratic.

Q: Am I sensing a certain frustration or suspicion towards the judging process at award shows?

HM: Not really. But it’s what everybody complains about, isn’t it? Why would I be frustrated or mistrustful? I have won a nice chunk of awards myself. I got plenty bragging rights. I personally cut one of the world’s most awarded TV spots in the history of the US Hispanic Market: “Adiós clichés, hola México” by ALMA DDB for the Mexican Film Festival.

Q: What’s the difference between editing for US mainstream sensibilities versus Hispanic or Latin American ones?

HM: Style. Temperature. Very different. Cultures are different so storytelling is different too. Latinos are emotional. One can see it in comedy, which is radically different. Hispanics use comedy and humor way more. Another difference is that Hispanic creatives have an underdog mentality, they try harder by default. When a Hispanic creative shows me references or examples of what they have in mind for a certain job, most likely it will be foreign. They’ll show me a commercial from Thailand or a music video from France. In terms of process and workflow, Latin America and Europe are different from the US in the sense that director and editor work together before the agency sees a first cut of the commercial. Overseas, the director is still involved beyond shooting has wrapped. In the US, directors more often than not are out of the loop after the “martini”. Their participation is over once they leave the set. The agency leads and stewards the whole process, entrusting one specialist at a time. In the US there are extra layers of approval, both in the general and Hispanic markets. As I said, directing and editing here in the US are two silos. This compartmentalization is good and bad. I think the director should be involved further in the crafting of the story. I will be criticized by this statement but, problem is, directors and the agency, more often than not, have different needs. Directors are all about storytelling and esthetics. The agency gravitates, naturally, towards a marketing perspective: strategy and creativity. In any case, as an editor, when you join the process, keeping your mouth shut is your best bet (precisely what I am not doing during this interview). Listen, listen more, listen twice.

Q: What’s the future of the TV landscape?

HM: We concoct images and sound, no matter how the concoction is pumped to the public. Whatever comes our way in terms of platforms or delivery pipelines, we will still need reliable curators who sift through the massive amount of content out there and help us tell apart the noise from the quality. At some point I get tired of having to decide what I’m going to watch, I want a trustworthy entity who can make that call for me, particularly if it is 9pm and I’m burned, lying on a couch at home trying to wind down. I can’t be browsing through the hundreds of Netflix options until I make up my mind. It takes me longer to decide than to watch the actual show or movie I finally end up choosing.

Besides, instead of trying to find what the next big thing is, let’s try and improve the current big thing. TV is a must have in any campaign that pretends or expects a real impact. Mind you, I’m not defending my turf here: we’re very busy editing web content at The Cut Club! Digital is not a threat to us editors. Quite the opposite.

Q: What’s the difference between editing for TV and editing for advertising?

HM: Totally different on every level. The only commonality is the software. Sometimes. TV is preeminently long form storytelling. If it is a bumper or on-air promo, it is mostly vignettes of preexisting footage with a language of its own. Ads are 30 seconds long. TV airs once, generally speaking. A commercial will run dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Producers call the shots in TV. In advertising, well, let’s say it is a consensual process. Deadlines on TV are cast on cold hard stone. Advertising can be a bit more flexible. Costs. In the TV realm there isn’t a client, strictly speaking. Movie trailers? A totally different animal altogether.

Q: What’s your take on digital & social media?

HM: Virality is an anomaly, happenstance. It is a fact, I’m not making this up. As I said, TV still rules. Digital & social lengthens the tail, but TV is still the anchor and originator of pop cultural relevant content. Experiential (as in events or so-called ambush & ambient marketing) is great but it can be the proverbial tree that falls in the forest and made no sound because nobody was there to hear it.

If I was in charge of a brand, I would not use digital and social to “sell”. I would use it to develop a relationship with the consumer through useful content. For instance: If I were in charge of managing the Canon brand I’d post top quality photography courses and how-to videos online.

At The Cut Club! we cut a lot of straight-to-web content and I can tell you that a lot of amazing stuff never gets a decent amount of eyeballs simply because it was not duly promoted on good ol’ TV first.

Q: Loaded question 1: have you ever considered directing? You certainly have experience to try your luck at it.

HM: No.

Q: Loaded question 2: are you an artiste or a businessman?

HM: It is not easy to balance both hemispheres of the brain. The good old dichotomies: awards vs sales, bottomline vs glory, ego vs committee. Fortunately, I always surrounded myself with the right people along the way. Yes, I am, or was, a bit of a bohemian. I don’t want to become a millionaire but I can’t afford to lose money. I run a company and I have to make payroll every month. I admit it: sometimes we are making pizzas, but still pizza has to taste good. I have no qualms, we do it with the utmost care and professionalism. Great ideas survive bad production. The opposite usually is not true.

The Cut Club! has grown organically, smoothly, with a little luck and good karma on our side. I made tough bets which eventually paid off. I have a great team: three top-notch editors (Fro, Tim and yours truly), one producer (Nadia), one business manager (Ana) and an office assistant (Mael) cranking out world-class work for blue chip brands such as a Powerade, Ford, VW, Chase, KFC, BK, Google, AT&T, McDonald’s. We are even expanding internationally: we recently finished a job for German production company Schokolade, they hired us to edit a spot for a line of golf apparel by Hugo Boss. Being based in Miami we continually receive jobs from and for Spanish speaking countries (mostly regional campaigns) but I think post-producing in the US these days might be too expensive for south-of-the-border markets due to exchange-rate reasons.

Advertising is my company’s bread and butter but, personally, my heart is in TV and long form features.

We cut two feature films for MiraVista (a subsidiary of Disney in México): “Cansada de besar sapos” and “Sin ella”, both international releases directed by my good friend and client Jorge Colón.

Q: Going back to culture & ethnicity. Do you see gender or racial discrimination lurking in the business? How about crossover potential for Hispanics into the mainstream? Are the barriers becoming blurred in the new Total Market reality?

HM: You’d be surprised at the sheer amount of Hispanics working in the general market in the editorial & post production fields. However, I think we should consider US Hispanic as a nationality in and of itself. I’m a US citizen, I live in Miami and still I feel like a foreigner. We are not taking full advantage of the wealth of life experiences and insights generated by the Hispanic journey in the US.

It is true that it is not frequent to find female editors. I wouldn’t say it is rare but the truth is that men outnumber women in this craft. Couldn’t tell you the reasons. Speaking of discrimination, there is a certain level of “ageism” in this racket (discrimination against older folks). The paradox is, if you watch the Oscar ceremonies you will see that every time the trophy is given to an editor, the winner is a septuagenarian, wheelchair-bound dude receiving the statuette. For instance, Martin Scorsese’s go-to editor, Academy-Award winner Thelma Schoonmaker is a 74 year-old lady. What I mean is: editing is a craft that requires decades of experience. To tell a joke right, you gotta tell it a hundred times. For centuries, human kind was based on a very simple premise: listen to your elders. There are many ways to skin a cat, yes. There aren’t so many ways to skin a cat without ending with cat scratches all over you.

Q: When and how did you start in the business? Did someone mentor you or give you your break?

HM: You always depend on a mentor. This business is a bit of a clique. Somebody has to usher you in. In my 20s during the early 90s, I was studying computer science at a very prestigious college in Buenos Aires while working a pretty cushy and well paid IT part-time job in the corporate world. My brother-in-law at the time worked for the local office of Ogilvy & Mather. He regarded me as a music lover with a certain erudition in the field so he asked me for a recommendation to select a soundtrack for a commercial. Out of sheer curiosity I went to the editing room with him. It was a Thursday. The following day, Friday, I quit my cushy job in IT. On Monday I started working as a messenger slash assistant slash apprentice at the post production house I’d visited with my brother-in-law. It was not a lateral career move. Quite the contrary, I took a substantial pay cut. But it made me immensely happier to the point that I also dropped out of college soon afterwards.

I’ve always been extremely lucky in my career. The first music video I cut was a promotional piece for the launch of a big radio station featuring many of the most successful pop music acts at the time in Argentina. It got lots of exposure. The second music video I cut was for none other than the immensely successful song Matador by Fabulosos Cadillacs.

Eventually I landed a full-time job as editor at AméricaTV, a broadcast TV station in Buenos Aires. I have to admit that I was not too experienced at the time to undertake a job with the level of chaos and pressure that TV thrusts you into, yet I took the leading editorial role of a crazy, skit-based comedy show cast with underground performers. The show had a staunch cult following among pop culture snobs and hipsters. Think of an Argentine version of SNL. It was a free-for-all, intense scene of unhinged, disruptive talent and creativity. It gave me considerable professional caché. I worked one year on this gig. What I learned there would have taken me seven. It was a total breakthrough from narrative standpoint at the time. After AméricaTV, I was part of the team that launched Sólo Tango, a cable signal devoted to, obviously, tango music.

From there I jumped ships to advertising proper, working as in-house editor for an advertising film production company, Spots International in Buenos Aires.

Those were the days when the internet was becoming less of a geeky curiosity and more of a full-fledged tool. I used to receive and read in detail the BBS (Bulletin Board Service) from Avid (Avid was and is the main software developer catering to the editorial and post production fields). To my surprise I found lots of job openings posted on this bulletin: at the time there was massive unsatisfied demand for editorial talent on US soil. Editors seemed to be a hot commodity in the behemoth of the north. Plus, being bilingual was also a plus. I thought, what the heck, I’ll take one of these short jobs to spend some time in the US during the dog days of the Argentine summer. A paid vacation. Lo & behold, by the end of ’96 I ended up taking a full-time job in NYC for The Cutting Vision, a company founded by Orlando Jiménez Leal, a leading advertising film producer director in the US Hispanic market at the time. I spent three years at TCV. After that I was tempted by the competition, Wild(child), in NYC too. I spent another three years there. I’d dare say that TCV and WC were the two best options for US Hispanic editorial and post in NYC in the late 90s and early 00s. We did lots of jobs for Heineken, AT&T through Vidal, Conill , Siboney, all of them. Living in NYC can be an intense rollercoaster. It is very stimulating and ultra competitive, which can take a toll. I don’t have tattoos but I have a collection of t-shirts to mark certain moments in my life (all t-shirts that I design myself). About life in NYC, one of these Ts in my collection says: We’re all trapped in this city under the illusion of success. This is precisely my opinion about the big apple. I remember I was once at Spontaneous Combustion, a famous post production company perched on a high floor at some fancy skyscraper on Madison Avenue. I go out to the fire escape duct to smoke a cigarette. I see a rooftop on a building across the street housing, of all things, a kindergarden full of children. What the fuck am I doing here? I said to myself. So I decided to move to Miami. I don’t regret a single minute of the seven years I spent in NYC but I was ready to leave.

I landed in Miami to develop and provide “creative editorial services” at Manhattan Transfer in Coconut Grove. What do I mean with creative editorial service? The total opposite of the assembly line editorial mentality that ruled the business in the past, with detached editors cranking out footage non stop 24/7 on graveyard shifts. “Creative editorial” implies concierge-style personalized care, a single editor as creative consultant and partner committed to the job at hand from inception to delivery, fees by the project (as opposed to by the hour); all in a cool, inspiring environment. Yes, a boutique mindset of fashionable lounge-style decor, designer furniture, oh-so comfortable couches, pool table, finger food, mini bar, the works. In 2005 we opened Circolo, a division of Manhattan Transfer devoted precisely to the notion of creative editorial services. After Circolo I branched out on my own, initially as a free-lancer and eventually with my own company, The Cut Club!, which I founded in 2007.

*TheCutClub.com