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www.postmagazine.com 16 POST MAR/APR 2026 Episodes 1, 2 and 3, and also had a hand in fine tuning the series' fifth episode. After a preliminary meeting with Drama Republic executive producer Roanna Benn and show pro- ducer Jessica Taylor, Hermida was introduced to director Sally Wainwright. "I went down to Oxfordshire, where [Sally] lives…and then we just kind of spent the afternoon together, talking about the script," he recalls. "She was talking about the way she was going to shoot it, and we got on really well straight away." Anne Sopel would cut the latter half of the se- ries, as was always the plan. "If you were to do the first two episodes, and then do the next two, and then the next two, the schedule would just become very expensive," says Hermida. "So the second editor is working a couple of weeks after the first editor starts, and you're only ever a few weeks behind. You overlap and it shortens the schedule that way." During production in Hebden Bridge, Hermida spent roughly six weeks working from rented space just down the road. "I went on-set for a couple of days while they were shooting," he shares. "I was there if they needed to pick up a couple of shots, so it was use- ful to have me there because I knew what would work for the edit." After production wrapped, he moved to rented space in the Soho area of London. The show em- ployed an Avid Media Composer workflow, which is Hermida's preferred NLE. "I'm always Media Composer. I literally don't know how to use the others, so the second it stops being Media Composer, I'm in trouble," he jokes. "With Media Composer, the thing it gives you is stability. It's great for the creative. It does everything I want it to do. I did a show called The Wheel of Time for Amazon a couple of years ago. It's like a big fantasy kind of series, and we had like seven editors and 10 assistants all working within the same set of proj- ects. Media Composer is just such a tank. It can hold up to that many ins and outs, and it can deal with that amount of media. It's very stable, so that's why it's always used in big productions." He worked with a Mac-based system for Riot Women, and was usually only a day behind when it came to assembling what had been shot. "They shoot Day 1 and I come in on Day 1 and set up project, and then I edit Day 2, so I'm one day behind," he explains. "And that way, if there's a problem — a focus issue or whatever — or I feel like they've missed a shot, they're usually still on that location, so they can pick me up a shot. Whereas if I was 10 weeks behind, they'd have to rebuild the location. It could get a lot more expensive." During production, Hermida would check in with Wainwright via text and quick calls each evening. "Some directors really like that. They want to have a lot of contact," he shares. "And some prefer to just kind of be hands off and not see anything until we edit. Sally and I talked a lot, and we social- ized as well in the evening after shoots, so we were talking about what was going on. We were in con- stant contact. And then when the edit starts, she's in there every day. It was her and I for six months — the two of us — occasionally with producers in the room as well. And then she was back and forth because there were two edits. Anne was next door, so Sally was kind of between the two us." When looking at the block of the show that he helped shape, Hermida points to Episode 3 as being one of the more challenging, specifically due to a nine-minute sequence involving Beth and Kitty. The two are out to dinner at a quiet restau- rant where storylines intersect. Kitty reveals to Beth that her adopted son Tom may be the baby she gave up years ago. Beth realizes that Kitty could have only been a young teen at the time, and surmises that someone had abused her. And Kitty mentions coming across Beth's suicide note, further adding to the tension. "It's the centerpiece of the episode, certainly," says Hermida. "It was such a complicated scene, emotionally, because of what was going on for the two characters. But also, there was a lot of continuity there, because they're eating dinner. All of that's on-screen, and…when you get a scene that length, it's got different kinds of rhythms inside it. Maybe with a two-minute dialog scene, it's a single kind of rhythm to it, where you feel the arc of the conversation. But in a scene like that — where the information and the power and the emotion is kind of going back and forth between the two char- acters — you have to find the long-wave rhythm of the scene, as well as the short-wave rhythms within that. It doesn't want to feel too even-paced. It wants to feel like it's its own story in a way that you've got to know when to speed it up, when to slow it down, when to let the audience sit with the emotion of what's happening. It becomes like making a little film inside a film. So that was a real challenge. That was the thing that took us days and days and days to get that right." Visual effects for the series were rather minimal, says Hermida. They included painting out crew and equipment, re-timing a drone shot, and adding blood to the opening supermarket scene where Kitty's mouth gets cut. Hermida is now onto his next project, which, coincidently, he's editing in the same Soho space in which he cut Riot Women. He's now editing California Avenue, an upcoming BBC One televi- sion drama series from creator Hugo Blick that stars Bill Nighy, Erin Doherty, Helena Bonham Carter and Tom Burke. The show was shot with an Alexa 35 camera. Avid Media Composer was used for editorial. Production dates back to 2024.