Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1014407
26 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2018 family was very surprised that I managed to achieve." Initially a student at the Wimbledon School of Art in London, Knight studied theatre design but was encouraged to shift gears to film by a teacher who, upon surveying the student's canvases, noted their cinematic scale. "My teacher said to me, 'You know, these look like screens — have you thought about film?'" she recalls. "I think they were tired of me spending so much on materials as well." Having moved onto Saint Martin's, Knight harbored dreams of directing, but she ultimately specialized in editing. "I was very fascinated with David Lean, and I knew that he had come from being an editor to being a director," she says. Following Saint Martin's, she worked on documentaries at Channel 4 and the BBC, breaking into features as a second assistant editor on Neil Jordan's We're No Angels (1989). Her transition to animation editing came after she encountered a classified ad soliciting applications for an unusual-sounding job. "They were looking for someone with 'cartoon room experience,'" Knight remembers. "I was like, 'Cartoon room? I don't even know what that means.' I found out that I was the only person who replied because it had been a misspelling. It should have been 'cutting room experience.'" Knight won a position in the editing room of the Steven Spielberg-led British animation studio Amblimation, where her projects included An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991) and We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993). The young assistant editor enjoyed the esprit de corps of the studio. "It was an open-plan space, so editorial was right beside the directors," she comments. "I really felt a part of it all." In the mid-1990s, Amblimation was incorporated into DreamWorks, which Spielberg formed in partnership with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. The new studio went to work to create The Prince of Egypt (1998), on which Knight served as first assistant editor. "When DreamWorks was started, Jeffrey Katzenberg came over and played us all 'Deliver Us' from The Prince of Egypt, the Hans Zimmer song," she explains. "We all signed contracts and came over. They needed to have an experienced crew together really fast. It was very scary to me, because I'd never been to America." During her time at DreamWorks, she developed a reputation as an editor who could elicit emotion Clare Knight celebrating the release of Kung Fu Panda at DreamWorks on its release day in 2008. Clare Knight posing with a life-size panda doll that she won as a child in the Texaco Art Competition in Ireland in 1971. Kung Fu Panda. DreamWorks Animation