Cutters Studios Tokyo’s managing director Ryan McGuire takes to the stage at AdFest 2017

A year has passed since Dictionary Films Tokyo, the production arm of creative shop Cutters Studios Tokyo, launched at AdFest 2016. Dictionary’s incredible risk-taking efforts have massively paid off, illustrated best by the team’s latest achievement in leading the production of Japan’s first ever LGBT commercial.

“Dictionary’s latest spot takes its cues from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and converts its now contemporaneous dystopian energy into ultra-necessary, Ultra Love,” Executive Producer Peter Grasse explains. It comes as no surprise, then, that Japan and Dictionary Films Tokyo led the pack in Adfest’s Film Craft finalists in 2017. Representing the Cutters Studios Tokyo team at AdFest this year was Managing Director Ryan McGuire (pictured above).

McGuire took the stage to present a compelling argument for the importance of the commercial film editor. “Have you ever thought of the editor as a set of fresh eyes?”, McGuire began. “Eyes that haven’t been blurred by the to and fro of opinions during pre-production and shoot. Eyes that haven’t sparred with the client. Eyes whose job it is to edit in the bits your ad needs to thrill its audiences, like feeling, rhythm, pacing and detail? The editor is the last key storyteller on a piece of work. He or she matters.”

Like his partner Grasse, McGuire invokes the wisdom of Kubrick, who succinctly captures the editor’s place in the filmmaking process, “I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit,” he said.

The editor is the brand master, as well as the ultimate asset manager. McGuire himself has ulcerated over the tiniest details of the brand – 720 frames of the brand’s details in a 30 second ad, 144 in a 6 second YouTube bumper. Every frame counts. McGuire went through 50 versions on his last Suntory ad for Hakuhodo – every version ingraining the brand’s salient and subtle assets into the editor’s brain. This is all to make the argument that, by being faithful to your editor, one is rewarded with efficient delivery of premier content which clearly understands and executes the advertising objective.

Cutters Studios Tokyo won two awards at Adfest 2017 for Wieden + Kennedy and Nike.