Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546154
www.postmagazine.com 18 POST JULY/AUG 2026 EDITING SPIDER-NOIR Jennifer Barbot and Eric Kissack are two of the show's four editors. Barbot edited the pilot ("Step Into My Office"), as well as Episode 5 ("Betrayal"), while Kissack cut Episode 2 ("Tread Lightly") and Episode 6 ("Nightmare on a Gurney"). Here, they offer insight into their involvement. How did you get involved in cutting this show? Jennifer Barbot: "I came to the project because I was working with (screenwriter) Peter Craig, who I'm currently working with now. And Peter is friends with (writer) Oren (Uziel), so Peter said, 'Oh, you know, my friend Oren is looking for an editor for the series he's doing, Spider-Noir. Would you be interested?' And I said, 'Yeah, of course.' "So when I went in for the meeting, he was cool, fun, smart and really had a strong story. He knew the story that he wanted to tell, so that's always really exciting. It was a great, fun meeting." Eric Kissack: "For me, the dream of this business is making stuff with your friends. I was lucky enough to meet Oren like 20 years ago in line for a party at the Austin Film Festival, and we just hit it off and became friends. Over the years, we just sort of always talked about collaborating on different things, but it never lined up. And then on this thing, my schedule opened up. He was ready to go and the project was fantastic. And when he pitched it to me, I was like, 'This is exactly the kind of thing I want to be working on. Let's go!'" Spider-Noir is an interesting show for a number of reasons: its structure, the show's opening sequences, etc. Tell us about creating the first two episodes and what you used for inspiration? Jennifer Barbot: "It is a challenge, and that's the really fun part for me — doing the first episode because there is no sort of strict reference point. There (are) no rules, and we can kind of figure out what it's supposed to be. I can (give) my two cents into what I think it should be, or give my thoughts early on, so that's always really fun and really re- warding creatively. "We did spend a lot of time working on the opening — what we wanted to say with it, the tone we wanted to achieve. And I think we were really successful. How many times do you see a show that opens with a Sunset Boulevard kind of voice- over, but yet it's Spider-Man swinging through New York City. And then there's animation in it. And it's in black & white! It's just this very cool mashup. It was a way to tell audiences from the get go, 'This is not going to be your standard Spider-Man genre piece. This is going to be a much more interesting mashup in a lot of different ways.'" Eric Kissack: "Oren, from the beginning, always presented this show, not as a superhero show. It's a detective show about a guy who happens to have been a superhero at one point, so the touchstones for us were always, 'How do we make this mystery engaging? How do we make his character inter- esting?' This guy, who's sort of a little bit of a sad sack. You can kind of feel his weariness, his aging. Those are the things that excited us. "And then there's a fun action sequence where he's swinging around and dropping off the cars, and pulling guys out of cars. But the show has to live or die by whether you care about this guy's journey and the mystery that he's trying to unravel. So that was always our focus from the beginning — everything follows from story." How much material did you have to work with when you came on board? Jennifer Barbot: "We got we started day one with dailies. They're cutting right away, and we were at home. I was at home for definitely the begin- ning part of it from dailies. We didn't really have a chance to even see each other or meet until we got into Sony. And then we had our rooms there at Sony to meet and to chat." Eric Kissack: "I would just say Episodes 1 and 2 were shot kind of concurrently. They would shoot a scene for Episode 1, and later in the day, shoot a scene for Episode 2, so we were kind of building our episodes at the same time, but separately. And it was always this big reveal. I watched Jennifer's episode before she watched mine because that was the version that the director focused on first. It was a fun kind of exercise, and we knew we were going to do slightly different things. Then we could take the bits that were working from each other. Jennifer did a really lovely montage in the middle of her episode that I was like, 'Okay, that's an inter- esting stylistic idea that I could take pieces from.' I think if we had been given this template of, 'This is how you work. This is what the episode should be,' it would have been less interesting in the end." You mentioned Sony. Where did production and post take place? Eric Kissack: "Shot in LA, baby! It was very excit- ing. For me, I think everything should be shot in LA — or New York. I was very excited when we found out that it was shot at Sony. We had offices at Sony, but like Jennifer said, we had the option to work from home, especially while they were with production because there were weeks where they were so busy they would never have an opportu- nity to work with us, so we would just do our thing from home. Eventually, we moved to Hollywood, where we had offices. We had a big complex of offices. At our height, we had like 20 people — mu- sic editor, visual effects people, editors. That was space-for-rent outside of Sony in Hollywood. After production wrapped, we moved to Hollywood because it was more convenient for a lot of people, even though Jennifer lives right by Sony, she was probably annoyed." Jennifer Barbot: "It was right next to Sony, and I was so happy. I was like, 'Yes!' I was excited to ride my bike to work. It was so wonderful. But Oren lives on the East Side, so we ended up moving to Hollywood because it was close for Oren." Tell us about your editing setup. Was it an Avid workflow? Jennifer Barbot: "I prefer Avid — 100 percent. I just feel like it's the most sophisticated in terms of what I need to be done." Eric Kissack: "Yeah. There was so much collabora- tion built in because we needed to constantly be working with assistants, and visual effects editors, and that kind of thing, and Avid really is the gold standard when it comes to collaboration — every- one being able to access the same material and share things back and forth. And then when we were working remotely, we used a system called Jump, where the Avids are at our offices, but we sort of remotely log into them, so we can do that from home." Where is the media you are working with? Is it on a shared server? Jennifer Barbot: "We had access. We could go in and I could go and watch Eric's episode. I could look at a scene and then he could come and look at something of mine. It makes it very easy to share material. In fact, my assistant, Bart Brevé, VFX studios included Barnstorm, Cinesite, Cosa VFX, ILM and Ingenuity Studios.