Born in Burbank, California, Eric Osmond's journey in entertainment began as a television actor at 11. A USC film school graduate in 1993, he started as a director's assistant on hits like The Flintstones and Jingle All The Way. Transitioning to editorial, Eric worked as a first assistant editor (and sometimes a VFX editor) on films like Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are. His skills extended to 3D/Stereo editing on Thor and Captain America. He later became the picture editor for Cartoon Network's live action Scooby Doo movies and, in 2011, he became Illumination's lead marketing editor. In this role he has cut commercials, shorts, and other forms of short form content. Recently, Eric served as the picture editor for The Super Mario Brothers movie.

What inspired you towards a career in the entertainment industry?

Both my parents were born in Los Angeles, with their parents arriving in the 1940's.  Two of the big industries in LA at the time were aerospace and film and my family was involved in both.  My dad’s mother was a children's agent, and his dad was a propmaker for Universal.  Because my grandmother was a children's agent, it meant my dad and his brother were enrolled in tap class, fencing, diction, horseback riding, and all the usual child actor courses from a very young age.  My dad landed the role of Eddie Haskell in Leave It To Beaver in the 1950's.  The show was revived in the 1980's by Producer/Director Brian Levant (Happy Days / Mork and Mindy) and, while I wasn't a show biz kid like my dad, I was able to audition for the role of his son. Perhaps authenticity won over acting Polish since, after a few auditions, they gave the role to me.

What were some of your biggest inspirations when choosing this career path?

For the kids on the show, Universal Studios was like a playground.  We'd ride our bikes through the old west town of 6 Points Texas and explore the European buildings of Spartacus Square.  For the five years doing the show, I became fascinated with what each member of the crew did. Directing and special effects were the things that interested me the most, and we would spend hours pestering our makeup artist and getting him to show us how to make good looking black eyes and wounds.

What brought you to the world of editing?

On the final season of the TV show, we were in the newly opened Universal Orlando.  We were the first show to shoot on the lot as it had several soundstages (Parenthood was shooting on one of them).  The rest of the theme park was still a vacant lot with all the infrastructure being installed.  Like most film students, we were constantly running around with an over-the-shoulder VHS camcorder shooting everything.  We would also shoot sketches, and shorts.  For one of our "shorts" we were able to get our hands on some real editing equipment from the media arts high school across the street.  One of the students showed me how to make an edit.  I was blown away because it was a clean cut just like a real TV show!  Before this I was using one consumer VHS deck as a playback device and feeding another "record" VHS deck.  You would get wavy color streaks at every edit point. I think I stayed in the high school’s media room until 2am.

It was at that same time that I was finishing high school.  I applied to USC and was accepted to the university, but not to the film school.  Eventually I got into the Critical Studies program and petitioned for every elective to be a production course.  I took cinema 190 and made our 5 super-8 films and cut actual film.  I learned that razor blades and tape also gave you (relatively) clean edits! While at USC I made a couple 16mm films and took a special effects class which was still teaching about special effects using optical printers, but computer visual effects were starting to emerge.  Our special effects teacher allowed the class to tour his facility in North Hollywood.  He remarked how all the all the computers and servers in the building comprised 1 terabyte of storage.  That was such a mind numbingly huge number. It was the first time I had heard the term "terabyte."

After film school, Brian Levant was generous enough to hire me again, this time not as actor but as a P.A. He had been hired to direct The Flintstones for Amblin.  That was an amazing first job right out of film school.  The first Jurassic Park was wrapping up and a lot of the crew was involved in The Flintstones.  There was certainly plenty of stamping security numbers on scripts and cleaning refrigerators, but it was also an opportunity to work with remarkable filmmakers at a time when they still constructed whole towns practically as they did in the case of Bedrock.  While we did have a CG "Dino,” curtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, in many shots we were using Jim Henson puppets.  All the pre-historic cars, props, and costumes, had to be built from scratch.

Following that PA job, I became Brian's assistant at Universal. I would sit in a room with comedy writers pitching jokes and typing the ones that made the whole room burst out laughing into the script.  Once in production, we would find ourselves on sets like Jingle All the Way.  On Jingle we had a parade sequence with hundreds of extras all bundled up in winter clothes, despite it being August and 100 degrees. Production wasn't always the most comfortable situation. Then it was on to post, with air conditioning and a bit more time to think about things. 

Brian's editors were the nicest people and I loved hearing their stories. They showed me how to make academy leaders, and do assistant editor tasks, and I would stay in the cutting room doing them until the wee hours of the morning.  I thought, after seeing all areas of production from development to post, there was something awfully attractive about editing.  It's where all the hard work comes together and feels like a movie in my estimation and, if that weren't enough, there's usually air conditioning. I managed to find enough non-union jobs to meet the union requirements and joined local 700. I took additional extension classes on the specific job of assistant film editor, and avid editor.  These were less general film classes, but focused on the actual the day-to-day tasks required to do the job of assistant editor.

In your career’s lifetime, you’ve done your fair share of both children’s and more mature media. Are there any stark differences in the editing process when it comes to your films aimed towards younger demographics (Mario, Scooby Doo, Lizzie McGuire, etc) and the ones aimed towards older audiences (Big Momma’s House, Thor)?

I think the material itself dictates the tone.  The overall process is generally the same but the specific approach to organizing material, and creating the cut can vary depending on the type of project it is.  It can even vary within a single movie based on the type of scene it is (dialogue driven, action, montage).  I even discovered, when cutting my vacation videos or family events, new ways better suited to organize for a unique type of project.

In terms of process changing depending on the material, I noticed this most when I began in animation cutting storyboards. Cutting animatics or story reels can be very freeing (and perhaps terrifying at first) when you realize you can control EVERYTHING. You can control how long a shot lasts, how long before an actor looks over, you can add split screens and change the expression of just one character.  You pick the voice performance. At times you can request different setups or staging. Since there is no production sound, you are doing this in silence since you must lay in each cloth rub or footstep along with sound design and temp music.  The goal is to try every trick you can think of to get it to play like a movie in this early state.

Animation also tends to be in flux much longer than live action.  You also must know that it is going to continue to evolve as it gets re-written, as actors bring their take to the material, as shots change length going from storyboards to layout, or layout to animation.

Your latest project was the Super Mario Bros. Movie. Mario is a franchise we all have some sort of childhood memory with—how did it feel knowing you were working on a franchise that meant so much to so many people? Do you have any special memories of the Mario games that enticed you towards the project?

It certainly feels like a tremendous responsibility to be working on something loved by so many, but I was fortunate to be working with terrific filmmakers / Mario fans in every department all trying to elevate the project.

Coincidentally, one of my USC cinema 190 films was about a kid playing the original brothers while a bean bag chair comes to life (a chance to play with super-8 stop motion), I think the final shot was the kid swallowed by the bean bag chair, á la “The Blob”, while Mario is eaten by a Goomba on the TV screen. 

Do you have any favorite moments from the Mario editing process?

Illumination is based in Santa Monica, but the Animation Studio is in Paris, so the project meant moving to Paris for 15 months. I had never been there before, so that was a big change.  I'm quite used the LA culture of driving places, so I got an electric skateboard and put on big tires to handle the cobblestone, and that became my daily commute to the office. At that office, it was great to be able to work directly with different departments and see what they were working on and, to a lesser extent, how they did what they did.  Our editorial team was comprised of terrific editors and assistants working in Los Angeles, Paris, and London.

When we finally released the trailer, or ran early screenings, it was great fun to have people so excited for the film. It was energizing to have something you had been working on for such a long time being discussed and enjoyed by others. That continued as the film was marketed for release. There were some impressive promotional installations in New York, Dubai, China, Paris, Brazil, and around the world.  Something that was global to begin with was (briefly) personal for me, and then became global again.

During your time at USC, was there a particular message or lesson that really stuck with you—even to this day?

I believe we had a sound design teacher who said, "see a shark… hear a shark."  It's a good approach.

Any fun anecdotes from your time at SCA you’d like to share?

While at USC, I think my favorite time was working on our 16mm film one summer.  At the time we had "the bullpen" which was a room full of moviolas.  We would advise on each other's cuts, and the machines would clank away into the night.  Then came the excitement of being able to screen our films in a real theater.

What advice would you offer to those hoping to break into the industry?

I would think, regardless of the industry, if you are passionate about something you are going to be pursuing it because you don't really have a choice.  You are going to be learning, studying, trying things because it fascinates you. I’m interested in all kinds of strange, unrelated things like aviation, design, construction, 3D modeling, and 3D printing. I particularly enjoy when something I'm really focused on at any given moment crosses into my work life in some unexpected way.

Grayson Abdalla