Brian Cavanaugh’s dream has always been to walk atop famous footsteps on the same sets used in the filming of iconic movie scenes. His job as assistant editor for the new FX series Dirt fulfills that dream. The famed Paramount Pictures backlot in Hollywood is now his office, and he walks past the set of Sunset Boulevard, every morning on his way into work.

The Paramount Pictures backlot has been home to many large and small screen projects for decades, including the FX Network's new series, Dirt. The show revolves around the lives of a popular tabloid magazine editor [Cox] and photographer [Ian Hart], and the unsuspecting Hollywood celebrities whose lives are orchestrated by this paparazzi team. Full Sail Film grad Brian Cavanaugh sits in the editor’s chair for the ambitious new project, which aired this January.

“Film editing is all about the visual story,” he explains, and Brian’s job affects almost every aspect of that story, resulting in the final project. “I switch dialog around, I move sound effects, I move scenes around, I cut out scenes and characters, I give people dialog they didn't have before, I reframe shots, I augment shots with visual effects. Nobody else on the crew can do that,” he explains.

Brian explains that an editor’s position is so powerful and widely sought because, “the editing room is the third time you make the film. First you construct the show the way you want, or as you think the director wants, then you work with the director, side by side, for weeks to bring out his vision even more, and to refine the cut. Sometimes it may be something never envisioned by the writer or director before coming into the cutting room.”

With so much cutting and reworking, it seems the editor’s work is never done, but deadlines help with that. “In television there is a very short schedule in which to tell your story. Sometimes you just wish you had more time Sometimes I think ‘maybe I should have trimmed that more right there, and right there.’ But you can't think that way,” he warns. “And like Francis Coppola said, ‘film editing is never finished, it's only abandoned.’ And you have to leave it at that.”

Brian worked his way into one of the most creative, but extremely difficult, jobs in film and television, the old fashioned way—with a lot of hard work and low-budget independent projects. “I put in a lot of hours, learned anything I could from others, and tried to build a reputation for myself,” Brian says. He came onto the Dirt postproduction team straight from the 2006 feature Say It In Russian. With only a few days notice, “[I] started on Dirt on the first day of production,” he says. “I ended up working a few late nights and weekends on Say It In Russian after working twelve hour days on Dirt."

A straight focus on his career goals is what keeps Brian motivated through the stress and long hours in the editing room. “The more specific your career goals are, the more likely you are to achieve them,” he explains. “My goal for the next year is to stay on Dirt through to the end of the season. After that, I hope to get another feature, then come back for the next season of the show.” Meanwhile, in his spare time Brian is already hard at work getting his own feature off of the ground, a micro-budget shot in high definition. “I'm hoping to shoot it soon after the season on Dirt is finished.”

Even with a primetime series and several features under his belt, Brian often still can’t believe his hard work is paying off so well. “Even these days, I say to myself ‘hey, I work on a primetime series, I work at Paramount Studios," and I don't know just when that's all going to sink in.”