The director met Brass Knuckles cutter Villena while assisting editor and principal Chris Hafner. Together they created a series of spots including Migros "Birds," Doctors Without Borders "Borderline," Sharebuilder "World Gone Amok" and Santa Cruz "Religion."

Langenegger and Villena prefer to cut in silence. "If you can watch an edit and it can tell a story and be impactful without any audio -- just with images -- then it's gravy," says Villena. "With the sound design and the music it takes it to another level."

Or another world like that of Hitchcock's North By Northwest as depicted in "Birds" for breadmaker Migros. Moody and

cinematic, the spot opens with a distressed farmer driving a tractor. He desperately shifts gears as a flock of birds descends on him. All seems hopeless until an elderly gentleman pulls up beside him, screaming from the seat of his Moped. He speeds past the tractor revealing the fresh bread in his basket that has rendered him prey.

Villena began cutting five years ago fresh out of art school at Florida State. A friend who had shot a documentary on Cuba turned to the recent graduate for help. "We didn't know how to use the Avid," laughs Villena. "If we wanted to make a dissolve, we'd turn to page 40 of the instruction manual."

Through perseverance the self-taught editor completed the documentary and assisted on a feature written by Ethan Coen called The Naked Man. Paula Heredia became his supervising editor on the fashion documentary Unzipped and when her schedule maxed out, she began handing off projects to Villena. A commercial for DKNY led to an assisting position with Chris Hafner and the building of a reel.

Villena has since mastered superimpositions as demonstrated in Gatorade "Boxer" directed by Crescenzo Notarile. The challenge of quick cuts and image morphing gave way to the versatility praised by Langenegger.

"That was my big adjustment, trying to cut faster and tell a story faster," says Villena. "The Gatorade [spot] was my breakthrough in a sense. I freed myself up and told the story with quick cuts but made it literal as well. Instead of working with shots I was animating frames so I got very detailed."

"Borderline" is a raw portrayal of the genocide in the former Yugoslavia. The spot shows a doctor stitching up one of the wounded. His handiwork maps Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia on the skin of the afflicted as the film appears to self-destruct.

"The effect was done in telecine," explains Villena. "They did two passes to the film. The first one was straight and

they did a whole second pass where they manipulated the image in the gate as it was being telecined.

"They would shake it around and drop alcohol on it and put masking tape on gate to get little bubbles. It's very ghetto-y. That was the best way to get the effect without spending a lot of money on it."

Villena went on to cut Lil' Kim and Nelly Furtado videos with DNA's Francis Lawrence as well as Tupac's "Until the End of Time" for Hafner.

So what's his secret? "He approaches things on an esoteric level; from the inside out instead of from the outside in," according to Langenegger. "He's very sensitive and that's why he's able to go into something and work from the inside out."