Kenny

The benefits of portability
Four years on and Sean, having sold his business and operating a more lifestyle-oriented boutique film editing studio, was brought in by Australian filmmaker Clayton Jacobson to edit Kenny. A film that portrays the stark reality of an Australian "bloke" whose career as a plumber has led him to become an almost iconic figure in the world of porta-loos, Kenny represents a project that had its own somewhat unorthodox style of editing.

Sean recounts: "A fair amount of the film's backdrops are events such as the Melbourne Cup, the International Air Show and even music concerts. While they gave us fabulous shooting opportunities, they were also short-term events, meaning we had little or no opportunity to reshoot scenes."

That pressure to get the right shots almost first time was particularly felt in 2005 when Sean and Clayton travelled to the US to film additional footage at the annual Pumper and Cleaner Environmental Expo in Nashville, as well as seek sponsorship to fund an overseas launch of the movie.

Equipped with a Mac portable computer, Sean would upload footage directly to Final Cut Pro almost as soon as it had been captured. "We had only that one opportunity to get the right scenes," he says. "We were actually sitting down at a table, playing scenes in Final Cut Pro and making on-the-spot decisions as to whether we needed to reshoot or go with what we had."

Prior to meeting with potential US-based sponsors, Sean and Clayton would sit in their hotel rooms using Final Cut Pro to make trailers they thought would appeal to the potential sponsor.

"We had taken a number of scenes with us on an Apple Mac notebookportable," Sean says. "Then we'd sit down and discuss what scenes were going to comprise the trailer we would be showing the sponsor. The ability to cut-and-paste scenes quickly then burn a DVD using the DVD Studio Pro [included as part of the Final Cut Pro Studio] gave us a huge advantage.

"Essentially, we travelled from Australia to the US with a complete film editing solution under our arms."

The iChat film editing collaboration tool
It was during the final months and weeks of editing that Sean and Clayton - both of whom were working on the film's editing - came to rely heavily on a simple yet inherently powerful application built in to Mac OS X - iChat.

According to Sean, he and Clayton would each be sitting in their own home studios working on different parts of the movie. With both of them on iChat, they were constantly using it as a primary means of collaborating on scene ideas and concepts.

"All we had to do was simply drag a Final Cut Pro scene file and drop it into an iChat session," Sean explains. "As soon as it was downloaded, whoever was receiving the file would load it into their own Final Cut Pro and we'd both play it back simultaneously and discuss it via the same iChat video-conference session.

"You simply don't have that degree of freedom and flexibility with the solutions I'd been using previously. Quite frankly, without Final Cut Pro and the ability to quite literally take it on the road and on-set, Kenny couldn't have been made."