Endless Cookie, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver investigate their differing identities in Endless Cookie, an “animated hangout film” that chronicles their lives from 1980s Toronto to present-day remote Shamattawa. Peter’s Indigeneity and Seth’s whiteness are contrasted and contextualized, yet their fraternal bond is never scrutinized.
Editor Sydney Cowper discusses cutting the project, shedding insight on the film’s lengthy production, how piano lessons helped shape her craft and the “truly validating” feeling of signing onto this project. 
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Cowper: I had worked with a couple of the producers several times in the past as an assistant editor. We had a complex workflow, and the needs for the first half of the job was a lot of technical stuff. Round tripping between different software and rebuilding the sound edit in the timeline to match what Seth, the director, had animated.  The year before I came on board for Endless Cookie, I had done something similar with a live action film, so, along with my creative abilities as an editor, I had a good technical background that was necessary for the project as well.
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?
Cowper: This film is a lot of things. It’s fast paced and it’s slower and thoughtful. It’s funny and its touching. It’s ridiculous and it’s serious. My goal was to find the balance and flow amidst a film who’s structure was born out of the concept of things being disjointed and interrupted with side stories and tangents. I wanted to preserve Pete’s, (our storyteller) voice, his literal voice, which is very slow at times, while also keeping the story moving along pacing wise. We needed a through line to help keep the story’s theme and main plot at the centre of the audience’s minds, while we were pulling them through time from the 1980s to present to the future and back again, from Northern Winnipeg to the heart of Kensington Market in Toronto to conceptual dream worlds.  We needed tools and transitions to ease us in and out of all these different storylines in a way that made sense.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Cowper: We started with storyboards, then Seth started animating, and then once we had everything in the timeline as actual moving scenes, we started seeing what was worth keeping and what wasn’t, the stories that weren’t part of the main story line had to be good enough to warrant taking up time in the film. We held a feedback screening and figured out where the sticking points were, and then we actually made new storyboards (since so much had already changed), stuck them to the wall and completely re-worked the film further. The beauty of animation is that if something was missing from a scene, Seth could just draw it in. So we had an unlimited ability to be creative and add scenes and change things up. A lot of transitions and the entire Tepee building story line that we revisit often in the film was something we came up with as a tool to help ground the audience in the real world of our characters between all the time spent in different decades and realities.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Cowper: I went to film school and somehow landed my first feature film gig before I even graduated (I worked on set in my spare time and made a good connection). So I was thrust into editing live action right for the get go, which is what I wanted. I cut more short films than I can count, with a feature film sprinkled in every once in a while, and supplemented my income with working as a daily grip/electric on set a few times a month. Eventually, after making enough contacts and getting enough experience, I didn’t need to work on set and was editing full time. After about four years I decided I wanted to understand the more technical side of editing, so I started assistant editing in the DGC, met a lot of very talented people, and learned more than I even knew was possible. I started my transition back to picture editing four years after that and feel so grateful for my time spent assistant editing. I am a much more capable editor for it. Endless Cookie is the first Animate film I’ve ever cut, I primarily edit live action feature films.
The influences that affect my work are mostly music. I studied piano for 12 years, am one of those people that is always singing, and I go to sleep with songs looping in my head every night. When I was a kid, my piano teacher would tell me to imagine a movie to go along with the music, and we’d go through each change in the music and decide what story the music was telling us. I sort of instinctively took that and turned it around when I started editing films. Now I always look for the scene’s natural time signature/metronome based on what’s going on, and I cut the scene as if it’s a piece of music or a dance. It’s subtle, it doesn’t necessarily show through as musical in the end product, but that’s my main influence.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Cowper: We chose to use Adobe Premiere Pro for the edit.  The reason is that the animation was done in Adobe Animate, and a lot of the original dialogue edits that Seth created as sound beds to animate to, were created in Adobe Audition.  It made the most sense for us to keep everything within the Adobe family with the hopes that it would make our complicated workflow a little smoother.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Cowper: Individual scenes weren’t quite difficult to cut, as anytime we had an issue, Seth could redraw the scene and fix it, or change things around to show whatever we wanted to show. Weaving a scene together wasn’t hard, but weaving all the scenes into the final film was the difficult task. As I mentioned before there’s beauty in the ability to have the creative freedom that animation allows you, but it also makes it difficult when you don’t have to live within the confines of live action footage. We spent a lot of time talking and brain storming, trying things and throwing things out. 
Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?
Cowper: For me, this experience really drives home the idea of what a passion project really is. This project was three years long for me, and even longer for Seth by several more years. People had babies and got married, I moved twice, and Endless Cookie was still going. There’s something truly validating about having trusted my instincts when I signed onto the project, having a feeling that something really special was being made, and hanging in there with everyone on the team from start to finish while we figured out the story.  To know that we were all right to do so is equal parts relieving and empowering.