The Work That Made Me: Oliver Morgan
Olly is a technical and creative editor, with over a decade of experience in the post production industry. Initially embarking on a career in the music and sound design world with a detour into longform online editing, he naturally transitioned to the friendly world of offline editing at Marshall Street Editors (MSE). Under the expert tutelage of MSE's John Mayes, Olly honed his technical and creative editing skills, which lead to working on campaigns with renowned directors, including Harmony Korine, Ben Green, and Arnie Thor Jonsson amongst others.
With a solid base in music and sound design, Olly brings a nuanced, keen appreciation for music and sound in the edit, which complements his fundamental love of good storytelling.
Olly's proficiency extends to on-set editing, where he has worked in diverse locations worldwide, from U.S. golf courses, to mountainsides in Madrid.
LBB> The ad from my childhood that stays with me…
Oliver> I have a two year-old that's completely obsessed with anything that has wheels. One bedtime recently, I was racking my brain for a car-based song I could sing to him and the only tune spinning round and round in my head was the Milky Way ‘Red car and the blue car’ ad from the 80's. I had a minor quandary whether I should sing an advert to a toddler, but before I knew it, I reeled off the whole thing word for word like I was seven again. He’s now obsessed with an advertising campaign from 1989.
LBB> The music video that made me want to get into the industry…
Oliver> We were late to the party with Sky TV back in the 90s, but when my Dad finally caved in, I would watch the music channels obsessively. It was MTV quite late at night where I first saw Chris Cunningham's video for ‘Come on my Selector’ by Squarepusher. I was a huge Squarepusher fan, so it blew my mind to think that this existed on a channel somewhere.
It's an amazingly shot seven minute, funny, dark Cunningham-esq storyline with fast breakbeats, what's not to like? This inspired me to nick my dad's old video camera and make some REALLY rubbish music videos to really bad music that I was making at the time...
LBB> The creative work that I keep revisiting…
Oliver> An album that I've gone back to repeatedly since its release is ‘In Rainbows’ by Radiohead...
It's one of those albums where I can put it on and listen from start to finish and feel like I could play it through again straight away. The ‘In Rainbows from the Basement’ film from 2008 is also great! I used to have this with my favorite films/TV, but for some reason nowadays I never have the inclination to watch anything more than once, even things I absolutely love. I think it's something to do with the ease at which you can watch everything. It's really weird...
LBB> My first professional project…
Oliver> The first project I worked on professionally was in an online assistant editor role and it was the monotonous task of de-spotting episodes of the show ‘Spooks’. This involved going through frame by frame of hour-long episodes in Avid DS, digitally removing the dirt, hair, smudges etc that was on the super 16 celluloid before it was transferred to digibeta tape. It was as tedious as it sounds.
LBB> The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…
Oliver> The Kellogg's Frosties ‘They're gonna taste great’ ad from 2006 stands out as a piece of work that made me feel pretty sick. There's a section where the overly chipper boy rhymes ‘Even ladies who wait, or a Pi-rate' which was something that really ground my gears. It was one of those things that you jump for the remote to switch it off.
LBB> The piece of work that still makes me jealous…
Oliver> The Philips Carousel ad from 2009 still stands out as something pretty special. The first time I watched it I was completely blown away. It was one of those films where you’re baffled at how things are done, so it was great when a ‘making of’ came out a bit later, letting you in on the BTS.
LBB> The creative project that changed my career…
Oliver> After doing a music degree, I was heading down a sound mixer / sound design path, but after stepping in and cutting a music video and doing the sound mix for a friends band, this made me think that the world of editing may be more fun than sitting behind a music console trying to make local screamo bands sound less cack..
This decision was pretty big, as it then led to me moving to the big smoke and essentially starting over again.
LBB> The work that I’m proudest of…
Oliver> I worked on a short film with Jonny Durgan called ‘Somewhere I've Been’, which was a script he had developed and shot around covid times, so was a very restrictive process. The rushes looked great and he’d cast some great people. It was up in the air whether it would be made so it was a great achievement to get the film finished. It was one of those projects which was a pleasure to cut!
LBB> I was involved in this, and it makes me cringe…
Oliver> When I worked in long form, there was a project I worked on called ‘Animal Fight Night’ for the American market. It was basically an archive heavy ‘wildlife’ programme where footage of different unusual animal pairings scrapping in the wild was stitched together in a very vague story arc... Think Lion vs Beaver, Bear vs Yak, Snake vs Zebra.
Classic viewing. The footage was pulled from around the world, so every different frame rate and frame size was wrangled, and the outcome was so bad. I have flashbacks of insanely long hours and massive issues throughout, so, pleasant memories...
LBB> The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…
Oliver> It was a couple of years ago, so not that recent, but it was going on location to Barcelona for a Harmony Korine BMW ad. He made ‘Kids’ which I saw when I was about 15 when I was beating myself up trying to skate, and it just kind of stayed with me for years.
It was so different to anything I had seen up to that point, where real people were cast, and the storyline was uber gritty to say the least. When he was interviewed, he always seemed like a sound bloke with some really creative ideas, and when I got to meet him, it turned out he was a really sound bloke! By far the most chilled director I've ever met.
Check out more of Oliver's work here.
