Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brooke Sebold. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Brooke thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I currently work as a filmmaker and editor, but for the purposes of this question I’m going to focus on the craft of editing because, unlike directing, editing is largely an invisible role that rarely gets the spotlight in interviews, and so I don’t get to talk about it much.
I discovered editing in college, staying up late into the night cutting my own projects and losing all concept of time. After I graduated in 2003, I landed an internship which led to a job as an Assistant Editor at Citizen Film, a documentary production company in San Francisco that had just formed earlier that year (and is still going strong and making incredible work). There, I met my former boss, Kate Stilley, a patient and generous mentor who truly loves the post production process and shared that love with me. My first official credit was as Kate’s Assistant Editor on the educational film Let’s Get Real in 2004, directed by the late, great filmmaker and activist Debra Chasnoff.
I assisted on a dozen more projects at Citizen Film before graduating to Producer/Editor at Al Gore’s now defunct television station, CurrentTV, where I worked in the journalism department, and a short piece that I cut alongside another editing mentor of mine, Mike Shen, was nominated for an Emmy (Mogadishu Madness). I then moved to NYC to study directing at Columbia, but I never lost my love for editing, and could always be found at the computer labs late into the night, editing the short films of my friends and losing all track of time.
After receiving my MFA, I moved to Los Angeles where I joined the Editor’s Guild and soon started working as an Assistant Editor on major series like Joey Soloway’s Transparent and Ronald D. Moore’s Outlander, learning the ropes of those larger studio productions. All throughout the years, I edited documentary features (including my own, Red Without Blue) and narrative features (Alaska Is A Drag, Someone Else), episodic series (Guidance, Magical Apartment Land), nonfiction series (Brief But Spectacular), an abundance of award winning short films (Hatch, Crossing, First Match), music videos (The Spring Standards), and everything in between.
The most recent feature film I edited is a trans themed documentary called Framing Agnes, which premiered at Sundance in 2022, where it won both the NEXT Audience Award and the Special Jury Innovator Award. Framing Agnes is an experimental hybrid documentary, and in order to make that film work, I collaborated closely with brilliant director and friend Chase Joynt, to deconstruct traditional models of storytelling.
Chase and I speak about the structure of Framing Agnes as being trans itself, and this lofty intention is not something I could have accomplished at any other point in my editing career or life. Everything that came before influenced and impacted the nuance and confidence exhibited in that cut– because for me, my editing craft develops as I evolve as a human and storyteller. There’s no shortcut to living, you just have to keep learning and expanding and staying curious, and the same is true for me and my craft.
That said, there are technical skills to learn when you’re at the beginning stages, and the more time you spend doing it, the more second nature it becomes. With editing, practice allows you to find your rhythm and flow, and also, your ideal organizational systems, because when you’re sifting through hundreds of hours of footage, being able to find what you’re looking for is crucial.
As for a most essential skill, learning the art of collaboration and communication is of the utmost importance in supporting the director and their vision. It helps to have high emotional intelligence because often a director needs to vent or process, or express vulnerability around not being certain if something will work. I try to hold space for those feelings, and also to bring a positivity to the footage, whatever the challenges may be. Over time, I’ve learned the art of voicing my opinion confidently and giving reasons for my creative beliefs, but ultimately my job is to support the director’s vision and I won’t necessarily “fight” for something as readily as I might have earlier in my career. I try to remain open to differing opinions, and to experimenting with things in the edit even if I feel certain it can’t work. I love being surprised by the things I don’t know. It’s one of the things I appreciate most about editing. You have all these contained fragments of time in the form of your footage, and you don’t quite know how it will all come together, but if you trust the process (and your editor), eventually it does.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m an independent filmmaker, storyteller and editor living in Los Angeles. I fell in love with watching movies as a kid, and I fell in love with making them in college. I write, produce, direct and I also edit, in both doc and narrative spaces. In 2021, I founded See / Bold / Films, a production company dedicated to creating meaningful content that evolves culture through storytelling. I believe that sharing and learning from one another’s experiences is always at the root of empathy and change. This is just one of the many reasons I love storytelling.
Most recently, I created the video series “I Changed My Mind”, which aims to normalize what the changing mind looks like through conversations with guests who have changed their minds about a deeply-rooted belief system, leading to a paradigm shift in their lives. The series is supported by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and produced by the folks behind the Emmy nominated PBS series Brief But Spectacular.
In both my filmmaking and editing work alike, I am deeply invested in telling meaningful stories that transform our world. If you have a story like that, please share it with me! And if you’ve changed your mind about something significant in your life, I want to hear that, too.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I identify as both an artist and an activist, and those two things, my art and my activism, are often indistinguishable. As a filmmaker who is also nonbinary, my work frequently investigates gender and identity in both doc and narrative spaces. I’m also a heart-centered storyteller, and my art often reflects my optimism and hope. I believe the role of an artist is to imagine a world beyond anything we’ve seen or known, and I believe that we artists hold the vision for our future in our imaginations. It’s a profound responsibility, and I strive to tell stories that create meaningful discourse and evolve culture toward an equitable and inclusive society.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
A few years ago, I discovered a grant opportunity funding media that explores the concept of intellectual humility. The term, which is defined as a person’s capacity to change their mind given new information, was not something I’d heard of before, and yet I had an intuitive understanding of its value. I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of research around intellectual humility, and soon was inspired to create “I Changed My Mind,” a video series that aims to normalize what the changing mind looks like through conversations with guests who have changed their mind about a deeply held belief system, leading to a paradigm shift in their lives.
At the time, I was editing a series for PBS called Brief But Spectacular. I pitched my idea to the production company behind that series, and they loved it! They could sense my excitement and deep curiosity around the subject matter, and they suggested that I host. We developed the series over a handful of months and then applied for the grant through the Greater Good Science Center. We were thrilled when we received it! The momentum was palpable as we got to work. We now had the funds to produce three episodes which we would then use to pitch to platforms and ultimately find a home so that we could produce many more episodes.
We found three incredible guests, all of whom had changed their minds in diverse and expansive ways, one being legendary activist Dolores Huerta, who changed her mind about a woman’s right to abortion through her friendship with Gloria Steinem. The conversations were all thought provoking and at times emotional, with each guest encouraging viewers to consider the value of changing their minds. We were thrilled with how the episodes came together, and confident that we would find a home for this special series.
Only that’s not what happened. Despite all the excitement and momentum in our pitches and meetings, no one would take a chance and say yes on the series. Every platform we approached passed.
There’s a larger context to this story worth noting, which is to say that my industry is in a state of collapse that feels like it’s happening in tragic slow motion. Most everyone in my world is unemployed and struggling. Between last year’s writers strikes, the threat of AI, unsustainable streaming models that broke everything, major layoffs everywhere, high interest rates, and audiences flocking to TikTok for their content, the film industry is dying in real time. I have faith it will transform into something new and sustainable in the future, but for now, this is where we are.
When our last pass for “I Changed My Mind” arrived, I was devastated that our series wouldn’t materialize in the ways we had dreamed. With no clear path ahead, this is the moment when many creators would walk away. Start a new project and hope for a better result next time. The truth is that being an artist/creator/human requires knowing when to let go, and grieving those projects/ideas/relationships that never came to full fruition.
And still, despite the heartbreak of all those rejections, I couldn’t do that. Because in my heart, I still knew that our polarized world needs modeling around what the changing my mind looks like so that we can remain open to differing perspectives in our ever-changing world. That need hadn’t shifted and neither had my mission. While my industry might be in a current state of collapse, the world desperately needs these kinds of stories now, in these particularly polarizing times. So I regrouped with my collaborators at Brief But Spectacular, and with this new perspective we chose to release the pilot ourselves on our own Brief But Spectacular social media channels.
Our pilot episode features Janna, a formerly transphobic mom who changed her mind about accepting her trans son after he attempted suicide. Today, Janna dedicates her life to supporting and educating parents who are still struggling to accept their transgender kids. We released the episode during Pride month, partnering with PFLAG, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to supporting, educating, and advocating for LGBTQ+ people and those who love them. Within an hour, our posts had gone viral, eventually collecting over 550k views on TikTok and another 150k on Instagram. While we had prepared ourselves for transphobic hate and vitriol, instead our comments were filled with love and support for Janna, and reflected a need and desire for a series that explores the changing mind. By rejecting the gatekeepers and releasing the pilot ourselves, the series was connecting with viewers in all the ways we knew it would.
With the success of that release, we’re now partnering with non-profits, and working toward sponsorship opportunities and grants to keep shooting more episodes– because the world needs these stories and we’re committed to telling them. Resilience like this can be exhausting, but it’s also the price of admission for the life of an artist/activist/human.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.brookesebold.com
- Instagram: @brookesebold
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookesebold/
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/MBhtqCsq_MY?si=j2vXUEQOY8cYjll1
Image Credits
photos by: Meredith Adelaide