Inside Endless Cookie: Editor Sydney Cowper on Crafting an Indie Film with Adobe’s Creative Suite

This is part of our exclusive Sundance interview series, where we sit down with filmmakers to explore how they use technology to bring their creative visions to life.

PH: What key features made you choose Adobe for your project, and how did they enhance your storytelling?

Sydney Cowper: We used 4 pieces of Adobe software in the making of Endless Cookie: Animate, Audition,  Media Encoder, and Premiere Pro. I’m not sure that there were any extra special features that we used, the edit was pretty straightforward since all the actual animation was done within Animate,  and I cut up and edited those scenes as if they were footage.

I love the workflow of rendering out and linking to low-res proxies directly inside of Premiere which saves me a lot of time and headache setting up the media. We used a lot of Adobe’s audio editing effects to create some of the weird and wonky sounds you hear. A lot of playing with pitch shifting, EQ & reverb.  We made a very creative film by manipulating some of the more classic tools and effects that Adobe offers. I would say that the most essential aspect of Premiere for us was its very forgiving data management system which allowed us to carry out our complex workflow.  

PH: Can you describe the most challenging scene to shoot and how your setup helped you achieve it?

Sydney Cowper: We were fortunate enough that even with a quite technical workflow, we were able to use everyday tools to implement it. We used Dropbox as a server where Seth’s animation project files (Adobe Animate) and dialogue edits (Adobe Audition) lived. I could access these, and use  Animate to output the scenes (which we rendered at 4K to, in the end, be our 4k Masters that you see in the film). Using the Premiere Pro proxy creation tools we could ingest these masters,  and render them into offline proxy clips that we edited with, leaving us, at picture lock, with an edit that was already fully linked to the online clips. Since we weren’t doing any color correction on the animation, we kept the film in the premiere, brought in our final sound mix from the sound team, and delivered the film straight out of our offline project. 

PH: How do you decide what tools make it into your gear kit when working on a tight budget?

Sydney Cowper: Using high-quality tools on indie films with budget constraints can be tough. At this point, with so much of post-production being done virtually from our at-home computers, most of us have had to spring for our own software subscriptions and invest in our own physical kits. The ideal situation is to get onto a project at least once or twice that can pay a kit fee, and after a while, you break even. For anything extra, it’s good to try to be strategic with the timing and take advantage of free trials or calling in favours and connections from friends. 

PH: What advice do you have for emerging cinematographers looking to build their first essential gear kit?

Sydney Cowper: Endless Cookie is a great example of how you can edit an extremely creative film using a very minimalist setup (the Adobe suite, Dropbox + your computer). However, time is money and more importantly, time affects your work/life balance, so if you’re going to invest in one thing, let it be upgrading your hardware to be able to render things quickly. I’ve spent days bogging up my system with down-converting 6K footage into manageable offline proxies before I could even start editing. Never again. These sleek, slim computers are nice, but a better choice is to choose a machine that you can build out and upgrade your RAM and processors as you save money.