August 2023
David Webb is Managing Director at London edit house, Final Cut, and sound design and music company, Machine. An award-winning editor, David cut his teeth on music videos in the early 2000’s for artists including Paul McCartney, George Michael and Robbie Williams. David then moved into the world of commercials, working with some of the industry’s most prolific directors. Recent work includes the acclaimed “Raise Your Arches” campaign for McDonald’s, directed by Edgar Wright - a long-time collaborator.
Cutting music to picture is what David likes to do best, resulting in TWO consecutive Music + Sound Awards for his work on Netflix’s Sex Education. David has been an integral part of the Sex Education team, editing eight episodes over three seasons. In 2022 he was awarded the ‘Best Editing: Comedy’ accolade as part of the editing team at the Televisual Bulldog Awards and British Film Editors Cut Above Awards. His other long-form credits include ‘Criminal,’ ‘Truth Seekers,’ and more recently, ‘Litvinenko’ for ITVX, starring David Tennant.
This is an editor with a knack for discovering sync gems that transcend time!
MASA: It would be great to get a brief history of your career so far...?
DAVID: I began as a runner in VFX after answering an ad in the Guardian Media jobs supplement! I was then hired as 2nd assistant after barely 6 months schlepping around Soho. I began cutting music videos and ads at the tender age of 26, then became MD of Final Cut in 2010, switching hats from editor to MD on a daily basis ever since then. In 2013, after meeting director Jim Field Smith on a Heinz Baked Beans commercial, I finally cut my first Long Form project The Wrong Mans featuring James Corden and remembered why I became an editor in the first place. Since then I’ve collaborated with Jim on everything he’s directed, including Stag, Criminal, Litvinenko and most recently Hijack, featuring Idris Elba. Along the way I’ve also found time to work with Ben Taylor on 3 seasons of Sex Education!
MASA: So, how does an Editor end up winning Best Sync in a TV Show at The Music+Sound Awards?! You’re a top editor AND sync extraordinaire!?
DAVID: I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for music - some might call it procrastination, others research! Every editor is different, but I fall firmly into the camp that believes that sound and picture are two elements of the same discipline. My role is to find meaning and emotion through the syncopation of sound and image, whether that be sfx, dialogue or music. The audio scape to any project is just as important as the visual one, so I temp every edit with sound and music to bring it to life.
MASA: You won in 2019 for your brilliant placement of 'Asleep' by The Smiths in Season 1 of 'Sex Education'. Would be great to hear about the journey with that one.
DAVID: This was a last minute rethink! We’d spent some considerable time auditioning tracks for this scene but had settled on ‘Russian Lullaby’ by Ella Fitzgerald very early in the process. We loved it but the Fitzgerald estate in simple terms said no. The first season of Sex Ed was challenging to successfully licence tracks for as it was unproven. All anyone knew was it was a show called Sex Education and lots of artists were fearful of being associated with it. By season 3 this problem had completely gone away and everyone from Taylor Swift to the Bowie estate were keen to get tracks placed in the show.
Anyway, after music supervisor Matt Biffa landed the unwelcome news that despite imploring letters from the director and writer, ‘Russian Lullaby’ was still a no, we came up with alternatives. ‘Asleep’ was the product of a 40 minute train ride home and a hurriedly assembled Spotify list. We thought we wanted to rerecord it at first but after playing around with demos, we realised we couldn’t beat the original.
MASA: And your 2020 win for the use of Captain Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’ in Season 2. How did you arrive at that track?
DAVID: My process is always the same, I don’t have a savant’s knowledge of music or a photographic memory for every track I hear, but I do have an annoyingly long commute and a tenacity to find the right track. I auditioned loads of tracks but settled on this as it needed to serve a lot of purposes and work over a long scene. At first diegetic, then full frontal in the mix, finally ending up dreamlike and dreadful.
Director and show creator Ben Taylor hated it. It was something about the production value of the track, a bit janky let’s say, and maybe the fact that it was an annoying novelty track, but episode director Sophie Goodhart and I both thought it served the scene well. Do I listen to it when I’m at home chilling? Hell no. But did it work well for the scene? Well, we thought it did. Ben and I still argue about it, he’ll call me Captain Sensible to get a rise, but the MASA award made me invulnerable to the jibes.
MASA: And so it should! A genius sync. How did your working relationship operate with the music supervisor, Matt Biffa?
DAVID: We’d pitch tracks, then Matt would put his head in his hands and say, “that’ll be 200k”, and we’d keep suggesting our dream tracks, completely ignorant of the budget. His figures were always pretty spot on, so we just kept pitching ideas until we settled on something that met the financial constraints of the project. In extremis, Matt would come up trumps. If a track was banjaxed late in the day, he’d find us a great alternative. But we challenged him daily with esoteric selections and recordings, for which he often struggled to track down rights holders and estates.
MASA: And have you been so involved with the music on any other project?
DAVID: Yes, on every project I do. On my latest project, Hijack, I get bragging rights for selecting the title music after we all piled in with pitches and I spent a huge amount of time selecting needle drops for the episodes, not just my own but some of the others too. The opening Sam Cooke track was a rare beast in that we found no other licensed use of it. We’d pitched a whole bunch of others only to find that track featured in shed loads of other content. Maybe it’s snobby to do so, but we wanted to have at least some semblance of originality!
MASA: You’re clearly very musical and have a great ear. Did you ever consider making music your predominant focus work-wise?
DAVID: Hell no, I can’t even play the recorder! It was only after working with George Michael cutting his music video for ‘Freek,’ that the basics of musical structure finally dawned on me. After growing steadily annoyed with me for failing to understand his directions, which were pitched as beats and bars, not visual cues, he paused to teach me the fundamentals of music structure. It was one of the most embarrassing yet informative moments of my life and it’s given me the basics to cut music ever since.
MASA: Do you actively try to keep up to date with new music? Compile endless Spotify playlists? Or do you just naturally have an encyclopedic knowledge of certain musical eras??
DAVID: In simple terms, no. There’s an unwritten rule when it comes to music sync that anything contemporary you select for a scene will feel dated by the time the show airs. So typically I steer well clear of anything released in the last ten years.
MASA: And lastly, what will you be looking for when judging? To you, what makes a piece of work worthy of a Music+Sound Award?
DAVID: The perfect sync track needs to elevate the scene, it needs to be additive, have moments of perfect syncopation and vocals that either inform the narrative or play as a counterpoint.
MASA: Thanks so much David!
