Today we’d like to introduce you to Sabrina Gimenez.
Sabrina, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I always have a hard time figuring out what my story is because for me, everything in my life is shaped by the people I meet, doing the hobbies I love or the work that I do. I’m from Las Vegas, NV, and I’m a first gen American, raised in an Argentine household. My first language is Spanish, but I learned to speak English by watching reruns of Grease and Clueless on TV. Movies saved my life, they gave me a crash course on how to function in American society when my real-life neighbors and classmates wouldn’t do the same without “othering” my family and I. I find this all very ironic because we’re the whitest Latinos ever and somehow that still created problems for us growing up.
I left Las Vegas for the University of Oregon, an even whiter state than Nevada, and found my niche within the Cinema Studies community. The film program had just opened up, so it was a great time to carve out a space for myself early on. I tried editing and loved it. Up until that point, no other activity had given my long term attention span the satisfaction of working quite like editorial. It was like, all of a sudden, everything around me disappeared and the only things that mattered were whether the story needed to be told and who’s telling it. I’m really thankful to the Cinema Studies program because they gave me the confidence to amplify the voices who traditionally haven’t been seen or heard in mainstream film, and now I can get to change that.
I moved to Los Angeles shortly after graduating the UO. I found a gig as an Assistant Editor in theatrical trailer marketing, and I edited for a few years at that same agency, but during that time I was growing my network of filmmakers all over LA, started putting feelers out there for those whose stories are getting made but needed agency-tier marketing to publicize their films. I was offering free trailers at this point to anyone who would let me cut on their films. It wasn’t that I was passionate about trailers, but it was about editing short stories that represented the fringes of society, the “others”, and if they’d let me do it in trailer-form for free (or bartering), then imagine what kind of relationship I could form with filmmakers if they trusted me with their long form storytelling. I’m fortunate that after cutting many trailers for these filmmakers, I earned some pretty incredible opportunities to edit their pilots, web series, and shorts. If it wasn’t for these filmmakers, I don’t know if film would matter to me as much as it does now.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
After I graduated college, my parents had urged me to move and make these dreams real because first gen American kids always have that pressure. I didn’t want to disappoint. My dad passed away a few months after I moved and everything sucked. I quit my internship in development and needed a job that would give me health insurance. I was in LA, alone, most of my friends were back in Oregon, and my family lived in another country. It was honestly the most depressing year of my life. I waited tables for a while in Beverly Hills, I gained back some confidence after chatting with industry folks as I would get their coffees and decided to hit the pavement running, this time as an editor. Life’s too short to not go after what you want. I wanted to edit, and I had no time to waste. It was not about being “green” or inexperienced, because I ran into those conversations quite a bit, but I realized that my drive was fueling something else entirely – my desire to meet more humans and tell their stories.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I’m a storyteller, and I do that through editing and writing. My first editorial gigs were cutting vignettes and theatrical-quality marketing content for anyone and everyone. At my agency, I edited trailers and theatrical content for Disney, Pixar, Warner Bros, Sony, and countless other studios. My passion projects were always the freelance trailers and shorts for indie films, web series, nonprofit organizations, and whatever else came along the way. Word got around that I would cut trailers for female filmmakers at a very low rate because I was just starting out, but my training was agency-level, so I was mixing and working with sound effects that were getting used in major motion picture theatrical content. I simply translated over those elements when editing smaller-scale projects for people.
After a few years of word-of-mouth jobs (which kept me plenty busy), I decided to pull back the reigns a bit and jump for bigger opportunities. Deena Adar, of Dandee Films, asked me to cut her TV pilot and advise on set during production. I was ecstatic. For the first time, I felt like someone was listening when I told them how I felt editorial shouldn’t be pushed to the edges of storytelling. We both agreed that any changes made to the script on set or in pre-production would affect my job and that I needed to be part of that conversation the whole time. Our pilot, “Baby Love”, which is about two best friends who may want to raise a baby together, was accepted into SXSW 2019 last year and screened in competition with many other incredible episodics. It was really emotional for me to see how a filmmaker like Deena Adar could make me feel valued and integral to the storytelling process, but it was really cool for me on a pragmatic level to hear people laughing along to my cut.
I don’t know what really sets me apart from others, I have lots of hobbies, and my life isn’t just about cutting film. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have as many clients or opportunities to edit if it weren’t for my hobbies. I like to volunteer with LA 4 Choice on the weekends when I can, I take dance classes several times a week and perform with LA Unbound twice a year, I’m really active in my UO Cinema Studies alumni events, I skateboard with GRL SWIRL down in Venice every other Tuesday, and I also go to a lot of therapy. All of my clients have come from one or multiple connections made in these groups. I hate the industry of networking, but I love connecting with people one-on-one while doing things we are passionate about. It breaks the tension of making everything business-related because that’s not what I’m interested in at all. I would have stayed in agency work if editing was just a job, I care about the faces and places behind the stories I get to cut, and if our hobbies can inspire us to be our best selves, I can only imagine what bringing our passions together in editorial can do for their art. That’s what inspires me to my core.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I think last year when the pilot I cut for Dandee Films’ got accepted into SXSW for their featured episodics block, it didn’t hit me until our team went up for a Q&A that the whole thing was a big a deal. I was so humbled and extremely overwhelmed that I didn’t know what to say for the longest time. I had other people hyping up my accomplishment that I was so scared to accept it was real life. I am so proud of the pilot we made and grateful that I can use my craft to create stories that amplify voices we don’t usually celebrate on screen as often as others. I want to love everything that I edit, because I’m always putting a big part of myself in that process, and getting to screen at the Alamo Drafthouse to hundreds of strangers who were laughing at the jokes I cut and celebrating female representation was the highlight of the year for me. I’m pretty sure my mom thinks this moment tops my Quinceañera by a longshot.
I guess also when my film school asked me to be their commencement speaker for the graduating class of 2018, that was kind of surreal and incredible. I didn’t think anything of it until months later when I had 4 graduates approach me in LA at an alumni event and they had shared with me how they were so unsure of moving down to pursue their careers, and hearing my story resonated with them so much that it helped erase any anxiety about not making it out here. I guess if I can somehow figure my way around the jungle of the LA Film industry, then these young film grads have nothing to worry about.
Contact Info:
- Phone: 7024190740
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @skabrina_
Image Credit:
Ericka M Young, Darren Bates, CK Nelson, Natalee Dyer
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