ISE 2022 Report
This month (February) marks three years since the foundation of ISE. What started as an idea on social media has become one of the bigger guilds in the Irish film and television industry. At last count we had over one hundred members, and we are regularly receiving applications to join from people working as editors and assistant editors across all genres.
Despite the pandemic we have been busy; the committee has met regularly and discussed how we can best serve our membership. Last summer we launched a survey to analyse pay and working conditions across Ireland. The results showed that the vast majority of freelance editors had not seen an increase in payment for many years. The average daily rate had remained at €300 since around 2007. If that rate had increased in line with inflation we estimate that the daily rate would have risen to €350 in 2022. It was also clear that many editors were not charging for the use of their own equipment, even though that equipment needs maintenance, and most software now requires regular subscription payments. We are happy to say that these results have emboldened many editors to increase their rates, and those increases have been looked upon favourably by production companies.
In our continuing efforts to increase the understanding of the craft we have run a number of webinars aimed at providing information to those leaving college and entering the industry. To date we have hosted events for Assistant Editing, Drama Editing and Documentary Editing. These have been very well attended and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We intend to hold more of these types of event over the coming year, catering for both entry-level and advanced levels of experience.
Our dialogue with Screen Ireland regarding the perception of the editor’s role within the overall production has continued. We have also engaged with Screen Directors’ Guild Ireland and Screen Producers Ireland. We have discussed scheduling in post-production as well as the potential for creating opportunities for less experienced editors to work on short film projects and lower budget productions. These discussions are ongoing.
We have provided advice and guidance to a number of members on an individual basis to help them in various points of conflict in their day to day work. We remain available to members to help and advise where possible.
We will be updating our website irishscreeneditors.com in the coming months; we intend to include more information about individual members and thereby make it a more useful resource for people seeking editors. We are also planning to publish a newsletter which will be circulated every four months. This will contain a mix of interviews, reviews and other articles of interest to editors and will available to members and non-members alike.
Unfortunately our plans to hold a social night in January were capsized by the Omicron wave, but we will look to reschedule this in the coming months; these nights have proved very popular in the past, and we are long overdue a night out together!
In the coming weeks we will be issuing our membership renewals. We hope that you will join us for another year and continue to support our efforts to elevate the craft of editing and improve the lot of editors.
Finally, we would like to encourage all members to use the ISE suffix for their credits. This is an excellent way to both increase the visibility of our guild and promote the status of our members.