Vodafone "Cartwheel"> Work Post editor Richard Orrick moved into the gymnastics ring for Vodafone "Cartwheel" through BBH, London and shot by Rattling Stick director Ringan Ledwidge. The spot transforms the moments of everyday ennui into vibrant action by depicting a young woman wandering and lazing through a series of situations, before a short rewind and fast-forward shows her performing a stop-motion cartwheel. "It's a great idea on paper and just making sure that people got it was the biggest challenge," says long-time Ledwidge collaborator Orrick. "[It was about] working out how tricky or how far you could steer people before they just wouldn't understand what was going on." In consultation with Orrick, meticulous preparation was undertaken in the form of hundreds of animatics sketching out the 13-frame cartwheel that is the backbone of the piece, to ascertain the speed at which the frames would be shown and how often they would have to be repeated to become clear. Orrick was on set to ensure that the actress hit the correct poses, and that those transitions were smooth in the final edit. "It's almost like somebody doing a card trick for you and slowing it down so that you get it, but you're still surprised by the outcome," he concludes. EW

Burger King "Whopper Freakout"> The mundane world of the fast food server's working day is occasionally punctuated by moments of unexpected humor. Chan Hatcher, lead editor for Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, got to glean those moments of gold for Crispin Porter + Bogusky's latest campaign for Burger King, "Whopper Freakout". The seven-and-a-half minute web film and corresponding spots document the reactions of BK customers who are told that the Whopper is discontinued, or given a faux Whopper. Shot by Smuggler's Henry Alex Rubin, three editors and five assistants worked for two months, whittling down 200 hours worth of footage. "Sometimes with a commercial you try something, people like the cuts and you can downshift, but with this job everyday you'd come to work and be looking at new footage and cutting a new spot," says Hatcher. Each editor was therefore assigned chunks of footage, the best snippets of which were then collated by Hatcher to form the web film and cut-downs. So what ended up on the cutting room floor? "There was one guy in particular who flipped out to the point of it being a bit weird," laughs Hatcher. "We loved him, but we just couldn't put him in. He was using a lot of profanity and stormed out." EW

Shocking Pinks "Emily"> For the Shocking Pinks' fuzzed-out rock song "Emily", video directors Ron Winter and Ben Dickinson drew inspiration from visual artist Lucas Samaras' Autopolaroids series, gelled lighting aesthetic and fabric "Reconstructions". The duo assembled a series of treated still photographs to best illustrate the post-break up depression emoted in the tune by lead Pink Nick Harte. Winter and a team of Photoshoppers edited separate elements within hundreds of stills (shot on digital SLR) on multiple timelines, then re-edited everything in After Effects so that certain body parts or characters would move while others remained static. Combined with in-camera projections, morphing technology and dissolves, the technique heightens the video's somnambulistic mood. "Making five different girls appear on the same set of sheets took a lot of checking to see if shadows worked, if proportions worked, if the sheets faded in a way that wasn't distracting," explains Winter. The most complicated image to edit, he says, was Harte driving a car. It required five timelines: the arm, the head, a car (created entirely in post), a streetscape and a group of passing girls. "If his arms were moving, I'd make a call: cut off his arms, cut off his torso and make his neck into another neck - a better neck." KR

Thorntons "Stuck"> It's not every day that an editor admits to stretching :20 of footage to fit a :60 spot. But that's what was required for Thorntons "Stuck", to depict a frozen moment in time as a little boy ponders a personalized cake greeting at the up-market UK chocolatier. London agency SHOP turned to filmmaker Harmony Korine, who used a time-freezing editing trick in his Bonnie Prince Billy video, "No More Workhorse Blues". For that project, the Gummo director took three frames of video footage, dropped the second one and looped the remaining two, with charmingly off-kilter results. In "Stuck", Korine took the repetitive effect further by shooting test footage at 50 fps and by adding slight camera movement. Tinkering around in the editing room, Speade editor Leo Scott came up with a "rock 'n' roll" trick - a looped edit that felt smoother and more surreal than "Workhorse Blues". "There's no specific science to it," he says. "Harmony just got me to try out this technique on hundreds of shots." The technique: take five frames, play them forward, then take the same five frames, play them backward, cut and paste the two clips together into one file and voila: ice skaters, dogs and a smooching couple appear suspended in mid-action. KR