The Post New York Alliance (PNYA) has announced its next Post Break webinar session, called “And the Award Goes to…” As the title implies, it will feature post-production professionals from some of the year’s most celebrated films to ask them questions like: What is it like to work on a project that’s generating Oscar buzz? Did they know from the start that the project was special? What career benefits come from association with a film that wins an Academy Award or other top honor?
Panelists for this edition of Post Break will include Rita Walsh, Associate Producer/Post Production Supervisor on Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a winner of 28 creative awards; Skip Lievsay, Re-Recording Mixer on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a nominee for five Academy Awards; Francis Power, Post-Production Supervisor on Judas and the Black Messiah, nominated for six Oscars; and Blair McClendon, Editor for The Assistant, a winner of four festival awards and a New York Film Critics Award. Eli Lederberg will moderate.
The session is scheduled for Thursday, April 8th at 4:00pm EDT, and you can REGISTER HERE.
Following the webinar, attendees will have an opportunity to join small, virtual breakout groups for discussion and networking.
Panelists
Rita Walsh is an award-winning producer and post specialist whose recent credits include co-producer on Kitty Green’s The Assistant, associate producer/post supervisor on Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and producer on Rodd Rathjen’s Buoyancy. She produced Jessica Leski’s festival hit I Used to Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story and was associate producer/post supervisor on Kitty Green’s Netflix Original Casting Jonbenet. She also has production credits on Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown Murders, Jane Campion’s Bright Star, and Adam Elliot’s Mary & Max among others from her native Australia. Since 2019, she has worked between New York and Melbourne.
Skip Lievsay is one of the most accomplished sound technicians in the film industry today having worked on more than 180 feature films. He is an 8-time Academy Award-nominee and won the Oscar in 2014 for Best Sound Mixing for Gravity. He worked with the Coen brothers on several films, including Inside Llewyn Davis, No Country for Old Men and Blood Simple. His credits with Martin Scorsese include The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, Age of Innocence and Casino; and with Spike Lee include Do The Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Mo’Better Blues and Crooklyn. Other notable credits include True Grit, The Silence of the Lambs, The Color of Money, Matewan, Passion Fish, Y tu Mama Tambien and New World.
Francis Power is a graduate of Columbia University where he had Andrew Sarris as an instructor and production advisor. Over the past 12 years, he has worked as a post-production supervisor on feature, TV and documentary projects including Judas and the Black Messiah, Lost Girls and Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese; and as archival producer on the Fran Lebowitz Netflix series Pretend It’s a City. Power also serves as a consultant to the Film Foundation, to preserve and restore motion picture history, and The Harold Hunter Foundation, to help underserved youth realize their full potential and harness the power of skateboarding to transform lives.
Blair McClendon is an editor, filmmaker, and writer. He was a Contributing Editor for the 2017 Sundance Documentary Edit and Story labs and winner of the Sundance Short Film Jury Award for Editing with the film LAPS. His work has screened at Cannes, Tribeca, TIFF and other festivals around the world. He was recently an editor on The Assistant, which premiered at Telluride. His writing has been published in n+1, The New Republic and the New York Times.
Moderator
Eli Lederberg is a recent graduate of Parsons School of Design. While in college, he had internships at A24, MATTE Projects and other New York post-production companies. He is currently a post-production assistant on the Amazon Studios series Outer Range.
Sound recordings of past Post Break sessions are available here, and past Post Break sessions in video blog format are available here.
