GAEL CHANDLER: A Cut Above

Gael Chandler began her career at a drive-in theatre in Santa Rosa, CA as a cashier at the Star-Vue Motor Movies, where she became interested in the projection booth. There she learned base and emulsion, cement and tape splicing and other 35mm basics. Eventually, her union brothers and the town's theatre managers were persuaded to let her in the booth and the union. This meant she got to run Rocky, Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever for months, and take location assignments doing grip, electrical and craft service work. While serving as a projectionist she earned two BAs before heading to Hollywood where she began slipping through studio gates. Gael’s first job was as an assistant at a sound studio where she transferred 500 tiger growls from ¼" to 35mm on her first day. It was a good place to meet editors and led to her first assistant editor job on the TV show That’s Incredible! She spent over three decades in Los Angeles editing comedies, dramas, documentaries, features, corporate videos, and promos. Gael cut on every medium: film, tape, and digital, and trained hundreds of professionals, professors, independent filmmakers and students to operate digital editing equipment. She worked on The New Leave It to Beaver, the first show to edit on Ediflex - a groundbreaking non-linear editing system - and was nominated two years in a row for a CableACE Award for Best Editing of a Comedy Series. She also taught classes on editing history, theory, and practice to college students. Gael wrote two editions of Cut by Cut: Editing Your Film Or Video and Film Editing: Great Cuts Every Filmmaker and Movie Lover Must Know. In 2010 she retired to northern California and wrote Chronicles of Old San Francisco: Exploring the Historic City by the Bay and co-founded PictureYourBook to produce book trailers and enhanced eBooks. She continues to write plays, screenplays and short stories. Her current project is co-authoring Preaching and Editing (working title) with Homiletics professor Reverend Shauna K. Hannan, PhD.