Kenny

Melbourne, Victoria: When the movie Kenny was first screened at the St Kilda Film Festival in 2004, the efforts of producer/director Clayton Jacobson and film editor Sean Lander were rewarded with the film winning Best Comedy and Audience Choice awards. Since then, it has won a wealth of national film awards and was the highest grossing Australian film for 2006 alongside "Happy Feet". For Sean, who collaborated closely with Clayton on nearly all aspects of Kenny's production, Final Cut Pro was undoubtedly one of the film's central players.

The Final Cut Pro lead up
While the use of Final Cut Pro on Kenny represents a significant entry in Sean's film editing credits, his use of the software in professional editing harks back to its earliest days. "When I first started experimenting with Final Cut Pro," he says, "it was still in beta [pre-release] form. That was back in 2000, and my company at the time had already made the move to non-linear editing with three Avid suites and we were about to buy a fourth."

After seeing what Final Cut Pro could do even in its earliest days, though, Sean made a decision that marked the starting point of a total change. "We were getting quite a few relatively small editing jobs that I thought would be well worth using as Final Cut Pro test cases," he says. "So instead of commissioning a new Avid suite, I brought in a Mac and Final Cut Pro 1 – just to give it a try."

Barely a year later, Sean's giving "a try" to Final Cut Pro resulted in the sale of all his company's Avid suites in favour of the new editing software from Apple. "Even in version one of the software, it gave us all the features we needed and at less than 10 per cent of the cost it was about to cost us just to upgrade our existing suites," Sean states.