Q & A: Kia Simon (Patreon)

Deep Look has been fortunate to have editor and motion graphics artist Kia Simon for all eight seasons of our series! She took a break from her busy schedule putting the final touches on our latest episodes to answer some of your questions. We hope you enjoy learning more about her!

Where did you learn editing?

I was a journalism major in college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, when I had my first taste of media making. I took a documentary course and fell in love with the editing process. After that, I got an internship at a media production company and worked my way into a job as an editor. I also kept making my own films over the years. Most of my work these days is actually in motion graphics, not in editorial. Deep Look is my only editorial client, but the job includes a lot of motion graphics as well.

How did you get into that job in the first place?

I had a wide variety of jobs coming up in media. One of my best jobs for learning was working at a film school in San Francisco. I was a lab tech at the Academy of Art University’s editing studio. For about 30 hours a week, I helped students troubleshoot their projects in Adobe Premiere and After Effects. Getting all that hands-on experience in problem-solving has been a big boost to my career.

How long do you usually spend editing a single episode of Deep Look?

We spend two days on every episode. The producer does a rough cut of the episode, and they often add temporary titles or notes about where they might want transitions. When we come together, that edit has already gone through one round of notes from the team. My job is to help them refine that edit, add graphics and transitions, and fix any problems in the footage. The first day, we are working with a temporary voice-over by the producer. And we often rewrite that voice-over on day one. We export our fine cut and share it with the team on [the video review platform] Wipster.io for another round of notes.

About three or four days later, we have our second edit day together. By that point, the producer has recorded the voice-over with our host Laura Klivans. So on day two, we do our final timing based on that voice-over. We refine our graphic transitions, work on color correcting the footage and address any notes that came in from the team.

I hand that day’s version off to [composer] Seth Samuel for composing music, but there might be items I need to redo after the fact. We just have to make sure we don’t change the timing. Some things that come back to me frequently are the end credits, a change on a title, or occasionally cleaning up some issue in the footage (like spots on the camera sensor or on the glass of a tank).

What editing software do you use?

I do the editing in Adobe Premiere, and the graphics and transitions in Adobe After Effects. For photo elements, I often edit or clean them up in Adobe Photoshop. We also use a few plug-ins and effects regularly: Red Giant Colorista, Adobe Lumetri, detail-preserving upscale or Red Giant’s Instant 4K, Motion Tracker and several scripts from AE Scripts, especially Ease and Wizz. I also sometimes work with our 3D animator Teodros Hailye to integrate his animations with the live action footage. My favorite example of that was for “How Your Dog's Nose Knows So Much,” when he created a 3D animation of the dog nose. I brought that into After Effects, and using layer blending modes and tracking, made it match our live-action footage.

What are your artistic influences for your existing style?

I often check out motion graphics projects on motionographer.com to see what people are creating. I love science fiction and action movies, though I have no idea if that has somehow influenced my work on Deep Look. I am very excited by the way media language is changing so quickly on YouTube. I wouldn’t say we push that envelope with Deep Look –– that’s not really the style of the show –– but I really like to watch the progression of editing/graphics style on YouTube.

What do you do in your free time?

Over the last year, it’s pretty much stay at home like everybody else. :-) I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and I keep my Goodreads up to date if you’re interested. I live with my husband (a sci-fi writer), my teen kid and my hyperactive dog. So my days include lots of dog walks.

How has your editing style changed over the eight seasons of Deep Look? Are there any new things you do now that you didn't do at the start or vice versa?

I think we experimented more at the beginning. We didn’t know what the show looked like, so we played around more.

One example is how to reveal close-ups, and show more detail. We used to sometimes put the close-up in an insert, or reveal it in a split screen. But now we almost always use a snap zoom from a wider shot to a closer shot. The producers actually call that zoom a “Kia zoom.” I think the first episode we did that for was in 2015 for “What Makes Owls So Quiet and So Deadly?” when we revealed the texture in the edges of the owl wings.

We also had some actual animated scenes in early episodes including in “The Hidden Perils of Permafrost” in 2014 and “How Do Sharks and Rays Use Electricity to Find Hidden Prey?” in 2015. But it’s been a while since we’ve done anything in that style.