Editor Meg Kubrika credits a short film comparing eating disorders and horses for whetting her filmic appetite. As an art major at Kenyon College in Ohio, there were few opportunities to work with moving images - except for one class with an assignment to take a current event and a poem or song and combine them, which, along with an Equestrian background, yielded said film.

Fired up and convinced that film was the way to go, the Chicago native packed up and embarked on what in hindsight can only be called a circuitous route to her current stead as editor at the Whitehouse in Chicago.

Her first stop was London where she found herself an audience with Whitehouse editor Rick Lawley. Devastated that, lacking the appropriate papers, she couldn't be hired, Kubrika headed to LA to try her hand as a DP - until someone advised her that the best DPs were once editors. She landed a job as a runner at The Lookinglass Company, moonlighting to learn the trade, and was soon assisting. Then, as if to complete the circle, Lookinglass and the Whitehouse merged and suddenly Kubrika was assisting Rick Lawley.

Eight years later, the 30-year-old Kubrika has returned to Chicago after seven in LA, has become a full-fledged editor, and not surprisingly, no longer has DP aspirations.

Editing, says Kubrika, fuels her dual passions of music and moving images. "What I'm learning is that music has such an impact on film." Music, she says, helps inform the mood and pacing of her edits, which makes the craft a very personal one. "What's hard is when someone comes in and they're not into the emotion that's been portrayed. But I've been really lucky that people usually dig my mood," she says.

When Kubrika refers to editing as her dream job, she qualifies the statement with the caveat that the "shockingly long hours" she's endured has brought her near the brink - one particular four-day stretch of loading 60 hours of film for Rupert Sanders while still an assistant being the nadir. But being the daughter of a music engineer father and artist mother, she's benefited from the support of a family who actually understands what an editor does. That, and a boatload of passion.

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