What's the BuZZ?

Mike Nichols - "The Edit Doctor" and Producer of Two Guys Drinking at a Bar

Mike J. Nichols is a veteran of digital editing and post-production services, now specializing in Final Cut Pro. He re-edited picture and sound, as well as color-corrected, later seasons of the HBO smash hit Sex in the City for syndication. Nichols preferred pulling dailies and creative editing to remove profanities and nudity (rather than "bleeping" or “looping”) to preserve the series' trademark humor and storytelling; it was this style that landed the job against other competition in Hollywood. His many credits and works include Editor/Post-Production Producer on E! Style's surprise hit Foody Call, which Time magazine named as one the top new food shows worth its salt. Recently, Nichols was contracted as a Post Supervisor for Automat Pictures creating workflows and overseeing and overwhelming 13 High Definition featurettes for Sony Pictures and New Line Cinema Home Video.

Nichols' also acts as a colorist and final post-production editor for many Hollywood studio DVDs and their special features, including RV (he is one of the few in Hollywood to individually produce, create and integrate the “Telestrator” technology for director Barry Sonnenfeld), Additional recent work includes Snakes on a Plane, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, The Messengers, Fracture, and Hairspray.

Nichols is quick to defend that he is a traditional creative editor that studied and produces storytelling by implementing sociology and psychology into his editing style. His base is creative storytelling through editing; the technology is merely a means.

He is perhaps most famous for creating, Star Wars – Episode 1.1, The Phantom Edit, a simple editing demonstration using the basic principals of traditional good editing that George Lucas professed in his early career. Film critic Michael Wilmington did a review of it in the Chicago Tribune stating the Phantom Edit was “…done by someone with a gift for editing”.

His film editing credits include several independent features including director Larry Holden’s award winning, My Father’s House, a recent favorite of director, Martin Scorsese.

Two Guys Drinking At A Bar is his current project/experiment and  stars comedy veterans Kevin Farley and Paul Preston in an episodic series created by Mike J. Nichols. Simple, seemingly uncomplicated comedy layered with social commentaries on media, pop culture and some seriously offbeat twists gives Two Guys Drinking At A Bar a welcome push for Internet Television that brings back memories of old school Saturday Night Live laughs. Featuring original music from Shane Tassart

The BuZZ Beat

Distribution BuZZ - John Putch

Director Mojave Phone Booth - what's been happening since the interview

Alan Chan - Director Postcards from the Future.

Alan is a visual effects Senior Technical Director at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City, CA, where he has served on project such as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Prior to Imageworks, Alan was co-founder of Station X Studios, where he has supervised projects such as Tom Clancy's Netforce as well as commercial work for Chevy Blazer, Budweiser  and Dodge Ram. 

Before that, Alan was at Digital Domain where he served as part of the Digital Ship Team on James Cameron's Titanic.

Before entering the industry as a visual effects artist, Alan served as Producer/Director for regional television in Oklahoma. Three published books on 3D animation and experience writing for a national newspaper in high school round out his talents.

His twelve-year visual effects career spans multiple Clio advertising awards for outstanding visual effects in commercials, as well as three Academy Awards, two for Best Visual Effects (Two Towers and Titanic) and another for Best Animated Short (The Chubb Chubbs). His science fiction screenplay Ark has garnered praise and awards from industry professionals.

Working with the best teams in the industry has allowed Alan to fine tune his skills and apply a critical visual component to the stories that he tells. In fact, Alan's project typically encompass a strong visual motif, which he uses to focus and shape the storyline, giving his work an epic, timeless feel.

Alan is currently in postproduction on his next directorial project Postcards from the Future, a return-to-space epic shot for large format projection with the world's only 4K digital cinema camera. Postcards From The Future  tells the 'future history' of space exploration, not through broad historical strokes, but through the personal point-of-view of one man - Sean Everman, a civilian electrical engineer contracted to help build up the moonbase.

He recently wrapped up visual effects work on Sony Pictures Animation's Open Season and is currently a Look Development Technical Director on Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf.

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