Few aspects of creative filmmaking are as shrouded in mystery as the work of the film editor. What do they do? How does it work? Film editors will usually say their art is intuitive – magic, instinctive, inexpressible. But this lecture explodes the myth that good editing is invisible, and reveals what goes on in the edit suite to save movies, tell stories and make thousands of bits of footage into coherent and compelling films. Drawing on her first-hand experience as an editor and her many years as a professional dancer, Karen Pearlman puts forward the idea that editing is a form of choreography. She shows how editors shape movement – movement of story, movement of emotion, and movement of image and sound, into moving experiences for an audience. Clips from Pearlman’s Australian Screen Editors Guild Award winning films, and quotes from her internationally distributed book on film editing, ‘Cutting Rhythms’, are woven into this story of how cuts work, where they are hidden, why they are made the way they are, and who is behind the good ideas that come out in the editing process. Karen’s dynamic lecturing style brings to life the craft of editing and reveals the secrets of the edit suite. Her lecture lifts the veil on the ‘magic’ to give insight into the art that many have called the essence of cinema, the art of film editing.