Editor Kelly Lyon reflects on her two Emmy nominations
August 12, 2024

Editor Kelly Lyon reflects on her two Emmy nominations

Editor Kelly Lyon, ACE, received two Emmy nominations in the same category - "Outstanding Picture Editing For Variety Programming." Lyon is recognized for her work on Netflix's John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's In LA, as well as Prime Video's Tig Notaro: Hello Again.
 


While cutting John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's In LA, Lyon says she and her colleagues Sean & Ryan McIlraith collaborated remotely using Adobe Premiere Productions.
 
“Most of the pre-taped sketches were unscripted and had hours of improvised raw material,” Lyon recalls.  “To keep it all straight, I created separate selects strings for each beat of the sketch. I moved my favorite bits up to V2 and added markers to any moment that made me laugh out loud on the first viewing. I had Premiere transcribe all of the dailies and used the text window to quickly find any improvised lines I wanted to audition throughout the process.”
 
The turnaround time was relatively quick.
 
“After the first episode aired on May 3rd, John Mulaney decided he wanted to tighten up all of the pre-tapes a bit to give more airtime to the live guests and phone calls,” she recalls. “We all raced to tighten our cuts before the subsequent five episodes went live. Coming from a background at Saturday Night Live, we are used to last minute changes and we were able to deliver on time — even if just hours or minutes before going live.”
 


For Tig Notaro: Hello Again, Lyon again worked remotely, cutting within Adobe Premiere Pro.
 
“Tig is such a talented comedian known for her iconic patience on stage. I wanted to make sure the pacing of my edits complimented her unique style,” she says of the project. “I started by creating line cuts of both performances using multicam clips. I had Premiere transcribe both shows so I could easily search for jokes between the two performances using the text window. I used Tig's favorite performance as the basis for the main show, and then A/B-ed every joke between the two performances to make sure the best version made it into the final cut.  I color coded the two shows so I could easily see which joke was coming from which show.  I also visually tracked how often I was cutting to super wide theater shots by putting them up on V3.”