Don’t call it a comeback - the Trim editor says he never gave up on music videos. But a new burst of activity in 2022 led to his first Best Editing nomination at the UKMVAs in nine years. David Knight met the man they call Vid to find out more, and hear words of wisdom from one of the masters of the craft of editing.

Vid Price admits that although he did not stop editing music videos, there was a point when the projects were becoming so few and far between, it was looking like he had. “Since 2004, I’ve edited at least one music video every year,” he explains. “But some years I was down to just the single video.”

This was hardly surprising, considering the demands from commercials and latterly, longform TV, upon the time of the editor, based at Trim Editing in East London. His commercial work includes ads for Nike, Samsung, Adidas and Amnesty - and he also worked on Amazon’s ‘drill musical’ TV drama Jungle.

But there came a point where Vid Price felt it was time to change things up, and make a conscious effort to return to the medium where he originally built his reputation. And last year he did just that.

"When you're working on commercials a lot, you can just go from one to the next, so you end up not having room for music videos," says Price. "So I decided to be more tactical and carve out some time, about three months, where I wouldn't do anything other than music videos."

In 2022, Vid edited seven videos, working largely with a new generation of talented directors, including Maxim Kelly, Jocelyn Anquetil and Hugh Mulhern. As a result he won a nomination for Best Editing in a Video at the UK Music Video Awards last October for Black Midi’s Eat Men Eat, directed by Kelly. It was his fifth Best Editing nomination at the UKMVAs overall - and his first since 2013. He also edited Kelly-directed videos for Belief - also nominated at last year's UKMVAs - and The Murder Capital.

I decided to carve out some time, to just work on music videos.

I met with Vid at the Trim offices towards the end of 2022, where our catch-up on the past year soon became a wider discussion on his career as a whole. That inevitably transported us back to a time when British music video production was in one of its periodic states of flux, regenerating itself with a new wave of talent - the late Noughties and early 2010s. He was working with several up and coming directors who went on to have stellar careers in commercials and beyond. His recollections of the work with those directors (and others) amounts to a masterclass of the art of music video editing.

Vid also paid tribute to two people, who played crucial roles in him having a career in the first place – both legends in their fields, who are sadly no longer with us: director Ringan Ledwidge and editor Nicholas Wayman Harris. 

Ledwidge, who died in 2021, came from the same part of the world as Vid - Eastbourne on the South Coast - and was making his first important steps in the business when their paths crossed, at the start of the 2000s. Then Wayman Harris, who passed away towards the end of last year, became his first boss in the business. 

"I was at film school [at Arts Institute, Bournemouth], and I was into editing - but coming from a working class background with no connections to the industry, I had no real idea what I was going to do next," he recalls. "Then I met someone, a friend of my then-girlfriend's mum, who had a son doing stuff like me. She said: ‘I'll get him to give you a call.’ He did call, and it turned out to be Ringan."

Vid went on to shadow Ledwidge on his latest project - the video for Travis's Coming Around. This also involved him sitting in on the edit, where the young director was working with Rich Orrick, at Wayman Harris's company NWH. 

"Maybe it was because we came from similar backgrounds – I don’t think he had any prior connections to the industry either - but Ringan was just so generous. I was so green it was almost embarrassing, but he showed me everything, which included the whole process of him cutting with Rich, and doing the grade."

The young director's generosity extended to financial help, with him writing a cheque to help Vid finish a student film. When he returned to London to show Ledwidge the finished film, he also dropped a copy at NWH, and discovered the company was looking to hire a new runner. "I was interviewed and got the job," he recalls. "So I quit film school to join NWH." 

You need to work harder on the jobs where you haven't got as much cool material to work with.

That meant him starting his career working for an editor who's credits included videos for Radiohead, U2, Björk, Blur, Oasis, The Verve and several Depeche Mode videos directed by Anton Corbijn. And as Vid points out, Wayman Harris was equally comfortable working on mainstream pop videos.

"On the one hand Nick would do something like Bjork's Pagan Poetry for Nick Knight, working in that world. But then he would be editing a pop video for an act on Simon Cowell’s label. It was a bizarre mix, but I learned as much watching him cut those jobs for pop acts. You actually need to work harder on those jobs, where you haven't got as much cool material to work with. You had to instill that through the edit."

Nick Wayman Harris died in October last year. "It was a shock, as he kept it quiet that he had cancer," says Vid, who has now created a playlist on YouTube of Wayman Harris's best work in music videos. 

"It did make me realise, especially when Ringan passed away, that I just need to kind of get back to it more regularly – the thing I fell in love with doing right at the beginning through Ringan and through Nicholas," he says.   

So this retrospective of Vid Price's work to date in music videos - for the likes of Laura Marling, Ed Sheeran, Jessie J, George Michael and Stormzy - starts where it all began, and the first big break, while assisting Nick Wayman Harris.

MCFLY - I WANNA HOLD YOU (DIRECTOR: HOWARD GREENHALGH, 2008)

"Howard Greenhalgh worked with Nick all the time, but he was away. I was Nick's assistant. As Howard was a big director - and one of the nicest guys, I should add - me cutting that one was a big deal. Howard and his producer really had to go into bat for me to be able to cut that – as did Liz Kessler, who was McFly's commissioner at Island Records.

I’m not sure that would happen so much now. I guess I feel kind of now there's this slight evaluation in how people perceive the role of the editor, within labels. Whether it's a budget thing, I'm not sure, but it can feel like people are just happy if someone is going to cut it. Because the edit gets so little money out of the overall budget these days, I am concerned that makes it difficult for kids to come in and make a career out of it. That it shuts off an avenue for working class kids, people of different backgrounds, to come into the industry.

As for McFly video - it was a performance video, and it went great. I was on my way." 

THE GHOST OF A THOUSAND - BRIGHT LIGHTS (DIRECTOR: SHANE DAVEY, 2009)

"I started my career at same time as Shane Davey - we were at film school together – and we just did video after video. When we started we didn't really know what we were doing, to be honest. We learned together, which was great. We got all our mistakes out of the way.

We did lots of rock bands, and Shane got so good at it. We did a video for a band called Ghost of a Thousand which Shane shot himself – as DoP as well as director – on film. There was no more than like 35, 40 minutes of rushes, but it was one of the best covered music videos I've ever had.

By that point he knew how to shoot - that, for example, we didn't need to do too many wides. A wide is a wide. And even though people may not think so, performance videos need structure as much as narrative videos do. You can do that in many ways. One thing we would just do, at points where the track would kick off, we would do things like feature a long slow motion shot of the singer jumping through the air. We would try to push that as long as we could.

That was one where all the stuff we'd learned all came together, into this visceral performance video."

DELPHIC - THIS MOMENTARY (DIRECTOR: DAVE MA, 2009)
Best Editing in a Video nominee, UKMVAs 2009

"I think they already shot it and they're on their way back from Chernobyl, when we got a call. Neil Andrews, the producer I worked with, asked me: do you want to do this thing? I read the treatment, and immediately said that I would love to.

Dave's point was that the thing everyone knew about Chernobyl was the disaster. But he wanted to show what it had become, and document something like the rebirth of the area: a new generation of young people who were living there; nature coming back to life, and the scientists who were there, as well as the old people who'd never really left.

We tried everything to bring meaning to it - juxtaposition of shots, through shape and colour and movement... we made it have an internal logic.

It was a stupid deadline, as they always are, and there was something like 20 hours of footage! There was a lot of meaning behind how Dave shot it, and therefore how we cut it. He told me stories about the people he met and filmed. So it was a case of – how do we piece it together?

I think this is probably one of the best edits I've done, just in terms of how every edit connected and meant something. We tried everything to bring meaning to it. And if it wasn't through the juxtaposition of shots, it was through shape and colour and movement. That's how we made it have an internal logic, to make it feel cohesive."

LAURA MARLING - RAMBLING MAN (DIRECTORS: FRED & NICK, 2010)
Best Editing in a Video nominee, UKMVAs 2011

"This was just a straight narrative, and the different challenge with those kind of videos is that you have scenes that in a film would generally be on screen for longer. In a music video they have to work within the structure of the music.

So that opening scene you might want naturally, you might be like 50 seconds long, but the music only allows it to be 35. The music will want to move to the next part of the story or tell a different part. You're having to work within these kind of time constrictions that you wouldn't do if you were just cutting as a short film.

That's why I think music videos are really unique in that sense, and just bring a different challenge, make me more creative with the storytelling.

And this is when it’s good that I’ve not been on set with the director, or in this case, directors, Fred & Nick. It means you can be dispassionate about the footage. I don’t know if its taken two hours in the freezing cold sea, to get a shot. I don’t care. If the shot doesn’t actually work, it has to go."

DJ FRESH - GOLD DUST (DIRECTOR: BEN NEWMAN, 2010)

"It's usually much easier for the editor to 'kill your darlings' than the director. But in my experience I find the best directors are the ones who are able to let go. It wasn’t nominated for an MVA, but I think a really good example of this was Ben Newman's video for DJ Fresh’s Gold Dust. Again with Pulse – there was a whole period back then where we used to do so much work together – and that was one of my favourite videos.

It was shot by Steve Annis – I think just Ben, Steve and the commissioner Caroline Clayton went out to New York and shot this thing. There were two main girls who do the synchronised skipping in the video, and they shot a couple of hours of footage of them walking around New York, just high-fiving people and stuff. It looked amazing.

But when I started to cut it, the video was a bit of a mess. There was so much going on, that quite early I said to Ben: what if we just lose that stuff of the girls walking down the streets, and they just turn up halfway through, and start skipping? And he said: okay, lets see it.

Again it was a case of doing something quite quickly to strip those shots out. And when he saw it to his credit Ben just said ‘yes, ditch it. It’s so much stronger without it.’ It made the video what it was. It’s very documentary to start with, and when the girls come in halfway through it adds a narrative. It gave that video a structure, and I think what you're always doing as an editor, is trying to find structure. And the trick is not what you put in, it's what you leave out."

THE SUBWAYS – WE DON'T NEED MONEY TO HAVE A GOOD TIME (DIRECTOR: BLAKE CLARIDGE, 2011)
Best Editing in a Video nominee, UKMVAs 2011

"The title of that track kind of just kind of says it all. That was directed by Blake Claridge who just shot a load of great vignettes, and the band have so much energy.

As an editor, you need to paint a picture of the music, draw attention to the musicality.

There are some bits in there which were planned for certain lyrics, but then there's a lot of stuff that was just random stuff, playing with the energy of the song. Again, what I think you need to do as an editor is to paint a picture of the music, draw attention to the musicality, the different instrumentation and different feelings. And it was pure fun to cut that one.

In lots of ways, these ones come together quite easily, when the song does a lot of the work for you in lots of ways, with the storytelling in there already."

ED SHEERAN - LEGO HOUSE (DIRECTOR: EMIL NAVA, 2011)

 

"I think this was the first job I did with Emil, who nailed the concept. It's such a clever video.

Firstly, obviously the casting, having Rupert Grint. He looks like Ed Sheeran. And the way that video starts, he's lip syncing to the song. So you think – celebrity casting, clever idea, this is great.

But then you get to that point about halfway through where you star to realise it’s a bit darker than that. He is not just performing in the tour bus. Actually, he's in Ed's tour bus when he shouldn't be. And the moment when he's being carted offstage and Ed and him go past, they're just wearing different coloured pastel hoodies is just brilliant."

DEVLIN FT ED SHEERAN - (ALL ALONG THE) WATCHTOWER (DIRECTOR: CORIN HARDY, 2012)

"Corin Hardy is another collaborator who I did a whole bunch of music videos with. That one was interesting in that Corin shot an incredible short film with amazing array of kind of British actors. And going against what I said about how you have to make something fit the confines of the track, this time it was a case of: what happens if you make the track fit this short film?

To their immense credit, Devlin's and Ed's teams gave us the stems to the track, and let us basically re-score that track. We built that totally in the edit, separating out the drums or the synth and looping stuff - allowing these kind of credibly dramatic scenes to play out and then bringing the music back. That was that was a lot of work and but those sort of ones just got so much licence to play with."

JESSIE J FT BIG SEAN, DIZZEE RASCAL - WILD (DIRECTOR: EMIL NAVA, 2013)
Best Editing in a Video nominee, UKMVAs 2013

"I had a feeling that would get nominated that year. If you don't know a huge amount about editing, you can look at it and think - that's well edited. In a way, it's quite an obvious one."

OLLY MURS – HAND ON MY HEART (DIRECTOR: VAUGHAN ARNELL, 2013)

"Vaughan was one of those directors who I looked up to when I started. Then got the chance to work with him for quite a long time. It was like a two year masterclass. I thought I already knew a lot about music videos. I'd been nominated, like, four times. But still, you can't help but learn from someone like Vaughan, who's been there and done it.

One of my favourites was where we remade Robbie Williams’ Angels with Olly Murs. I had to take do a pre-edit where I had to recut Angels to a completely different track but try and retain the structure of that video - a really interesting process. We spent a few days doing that and then Vaughn took that and then went and basically reshot it. And he did that cameo of Robbie Williams in there - again, really clever."

GEORGE MICHAEL – LET HER DOWN EASY (DIRECTOR: VAUGHAN ARNELL, 2014)

"Then Vaughan and I did what I think was George Michael’s last ever video, for Let Her Down Easy. We did a first edit, and then as George didn't want to come into town, we went to George's house to do the changes. That was just incredible, because obviously Vaughan and George went back a long way. And there I was, sitting at his dining table with Vaughan on one side, George on the other, working on the video!

In fact, George loved the video. He only really wanted to make a couple of small changes - but they made all the difference.

He’d explain what he was singing about and why we should change something in that moment. We swapped a shot in and it just made the whole thing click. It was good before, but it was magical now. We also looped the track at the start to make the narrative work, and at the end I remembered to ask George to check the audio edit. He was so particular about everything. He said it was perfect.

That was one of those moments when you think - if I never achieve anything else in my career, this proves that maybe I am okay at this."

LABRINTH - LET IT BE (DIRECTOR: US, 2014)

"It was mind-bending how Chris and Luke [directing duo Us] put that together. It starts on Labrinth in the middle of this empty warehouse, just on his own. And then the camera goes around him and it keeps going round and finding more iterations of him in all different locations within this big building.

It was all kind of basically done backwards in that they had to shoot the full set first, go from the front and running all the way through all these empty sets, right through to the end to film the last bit…

I was on the shoot for that one. Really the only time I do go on set on a music video are those technical ones where you’ve got motion control.  So during the day you're already lining it all up and then comping things out. I think by the time I just finished the shoot, I pretty much finished the edit, apart from a few little things."

STORMZY - VOSSI BOP (DIRECTOR: HENRY SCHOLFIELD, 2019)

"Henry had planned everything beforehand - so again it was in that category of a director making you look good. The first shoot day he got the first two shots, and we put those together. Stormzy came and watched that, and got really excited. Then we had a big meeting about what was going on in the rest of the video, and I then was on set for the second day of the shoot. At that stage you’re just taking stuff off the video playback, just checking that the transitions work.

Sometimes your job isn't to do a flashy edit, it's being that extra pair of eyes – and being confident enough to speak out.

Where I had to come into my own was for the very last transition. It was getting towards the end of the day, and a bit frantic. It transitions into the big reveal of all the people doing the Vossy Bop dance. I filmed the playback on my phone and Airdropped it back to my computer to quickly get it in. It looked incredible - but somehow the transition point was ten seconds too late.

So at that point, the shoot is about to wrap. And I have to stick my hand up and say ‘sorry guys, it's 10 seconds out.’ Henry then had to go to redo the choreography, so he said to me – you organise with the DP when this transition has to happen. And it had to be done. It wasn’t a video which we could just fill in that hole with something else.

So sometimes your job isn't to do a flashy edit. It’s being that extra pair of eyes – and also being confident enough to speak out and say ‘actually we’re not done.’ Not sure I would’ve done that earlier in my career."

JUNGLE (2022, DIRECTORS: JUNIOR OKOLI, CHAS APPETI)

"A few years ago I did three series of the CBBC show M.I. High - like Spooks for kids. It was super-fun, because you had everything in the one show - comedy, action, effects, everything. Then I did various bits over the years, but was mainly concentrating on commercials and music videos. Then this came in: a drill musical, for Amazon, by the directors Junior Okoli and Chas Appeti.

If I was going to do another longform job, I wanted to do one that was a bit of a risk, and I thought it was really interesting. Junior and Chas are fascinating guys – and Chas’s back catalogue of music videos is amazing. They put this whole show together – and to be fair to Amazon, they just let them get on with it.

It was a crime drama, but Junior was trying to get across a bigger point, saying something about kids who have grown up in a certain sector of society, and how their life is expected to go. And they were doing it in a format where they were using the language of music videos to tell the story, with authentic grime and drill artists.

If you haven't done drama for a while, people can be a bit nervous about hiring you. But they said – no, we want someone who hasn't come from the established background. So they took a punt on me, and I became the second editor on the show and cut two episodes. It was a really interesting project – and it also helped to bring me back to music videos again."

BLACK MIDI - EAT MEN EAT (DIRECTOR: MAXIM KELLY, 2022)
Best Editing in a Video nominee, UKMVAs 2022

"Taking a break from commercials last year to edit music videos is the reason why I got to work with Maxim Kelly - who I love working with. Maxim has a similar outlook to me, in that we look at something during the edit and think - okay, that's working, but what happens if we switch it up? Can we get more tension, and make the audience think a bit more about what this is? Which is what happened with this video.

Maxim had his story, and was really clear on what he was going for. Then on the day of the shoot, things changed ever so slightly, as they always do. So then we had to slightly rework the story in the edit. We did a first pass on the video and it worked.

But then we changed things, and we moved what originally at the start of the film to the end, pretty much. By doing that, it just raised a lot more questions about what's actually happening and who has the upper hand in that video, between camp mates and the captain figure. It just completely changed the feel.

The trick, I often find, is not getting too precious about the work. And there’s something about working quite fast. So when you are experimenting, it's best not to think about it too much. Do it in ten minutes and see how it feels, but not worry if it doesn't totally work yet.

This was very much a collaboration in that respect. Maxim is just great, he's really open. He always comes with an idea, and the two of us had the same thoughts about moving things around."

• Vid Price is based at Trim Editing. Watch more of his work here.

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