Behind The Lens With Award-Winning Film Editor Yujie Tang
Film editing in the Golden Age of Hollywood was characterized by a person sitting in a dark room full of cigarette smoke as he or she ran film through a now obsolete upright Moviola film editing machine. Things have changed quite a bit since then. Hardly anyone smokes anymore and instead of film (for the most part) images are digitally edited on a computer in an air conditioned, comfortably lit room. However, as award-winning editor Yujie Tang will tell you, the concentrated hard work of staring at a screen for hours on end while trying to figure out the best way to cut a scene still exists.
Yujie would know because his CV is a full list of films he has edited. Many of the films he has “spliced” together went on to win top prizes in prestigious film festivals and Yujie, himself has also been awarded best editing honors, the ultimate accolade for an editor, in festivals such as, European Independent Film Awards, Indie Short Fest and New York Film Awards. He is especially known for the award-winning films Thicker Than Water and Cocoon Love both of which honored Yujie personally. He also won Best Editing Awards for the films Shallow Grave, T.J. and Old House. Recently, Yujie Tang has been working both in China and the US on projects that will potentially make a loud noise internationally. He speaks fluent English and Mandarin and nowadays that is a huge plus in the movie industry while international collaborations are a major part of almost every movie.
Yujie graduated from one of the most prestigious film schools, Chapman University Dodge College. He immersed himself in every film with an emphasis on film editing and has honed his cutting, storytelling and film pacing talents at Chapman and in his editing career after college. Some of the other films that Yujie has edited are: One Christmas Night, Savior, After School, Promised Neverland, Stolen Child, Passe, and 1st Date, among others. Yujie has an upcoming project that he is editing called Woman Seeking Women, which he is not talking too much about. We do know that it is a feature-length motion picture and that it is a comedy but that is all he is telling us about the film. We can wait until it comes out, however, because we know that if Yujie is editing it, the movie will be something to look forward to.
