ReSyncing 2026

In a changing industry, I've decided to focus this year on making editorial into a stronger and more agile department.

Although this is not something specific to 2026 alone, the beginning and end of a year tend to highlight our awareness of change. Facilities such as Halo go into receivership or fold, and individuals who have been struggling for some time finally decide to call it a day, advertising their reluctant departure from the industry.

While mainstream news tends to focus on the film industry only when headline events occur—such as the recent sale of Warner Brothers to Netflix—those of us working day to day within the industry have known for some time that a broader sea change is underway across film and television.

Over the past 15–20 years, this “ReSyncing” has marked a fundamental shift in both how audiences access media and how that media is produced and distributed, transforming the attention economy entirely. Consumption has moved from being primarily television-based to fragmented, mobile-first streaming. At the same time, production and distribution pipelines have shortened dramatically, while new tools—from high-end cameras to advanced visual effects and multi-platform delivery—have vastly expanded what film and television can achieve. This has opened the scope of production from near-instant, one-person influencer and podcast culture all the way up to carefully considered, multi-million-pound productions such as the Marvel and Star Wars franchises and the Stranger Things series.

Looking ahead, what seems clearest to me is that the ability to work at both the higher and lower ends of the market—and to move fluidly between them depending on the project—will be an increasingly important factor. The key to bridging these two worlds will be how effectively we build and manage our teams.

Editing has always been a highly solitary profession. I can’t think of another department in film or television that is as reliant on a single individual as editorial. While this model has worked for many years, I’ve increasingly felt that this independence can become a crutch. Other departments tend to be less dependent on their head of department, which allows them to expand and adapt to whatever challenges a production presents. Editorial, by contrast, more often concentrates responsibility on one person. This limits opportunities for progression, and it also creates challenges around how the value of editorial is perceived and understood by producers—and by the wider industry.

For this reason, I’ve chosen this year to focus on new ways of thinking about how editorial departments and teams can work better together. This means enabling editors to rely more creatively on their teams, to delegate more effectively, and to expand or contract those teams as necessary to meet the demands of the work—even taking on tasks that may previously have been considered outside the remit of editorial.

To that end, I’ve set out the following goals:

Providing value—and being compensated for it
Being good value is less about how much you charge and more about clearly understanding what you bring to a production and pricing that appropriately. Identifying where my team and I can add value beyond what is traditionally expected of editorial, and deliberately building teams that can deliver that work well. This isn’t about accepting exploitation; it’s about being clear-eyed about where we can genuinely serve a production and delivering that service to a high standard.

Playing to strengths; complementing weaknesses
Being honest about where my strengths lie and where they don’t. Where I have gaps, I intend to ensure that others in the team excel. Rather than trying to do everything myself, I want to educate, trust, and rely on the people around me. The more flexibly I can delegate, the better positioned I’ll be to adapt to whatever a project demands.

Scalability: the ability to expand and contract
I aim to build teams that are agile and able to change size as a production’s needs shift. Workloads rarely stay static, and even the most carefully planned projects evolve. Being comfortable working with both small and large teams—and knowing how to pivot between them quickly—feels like an essential skill moving forward.

Being “tech-ficient”
I intend to use technology more deliberately—not for its own sake, but to remove tasks I don’t need or want to be doing. By automating or streamlining the right things, I can free up time to focus on the creative and practical areas where I add the most value.

Education and apprenticeship
We all need to be more generous with our time when it comes to training and supporting our teams. Teaching, trusting, and meaningfully delegating work should result in stronger, more adaptable teams. Beyond individual productions, I see value in sharing knowledge more widely, as a way of improving how editorial is understood and valued across the industry as a whole. The more we as a department promote the greater value prospects, the easier it will be to develop as a whole.

Guardians of the data
I firmly believe that data will become an increasingly important currency in the coming years, and that editorial sits at the most critical data junction within a production. It is the one place where pre-production, production, and post-production data coexist. I intend to take greater responsibility for this role, not as an extra task, but as recognition of a broader and more valuable function that editorial can—and should—fulfil.

I’m excited to explore these ideas further in the coming months, both in practice and here in the newsletter.

In the mean time, because it’s the new year, and to push the tenuous title link to breaking point, here is some *NSYNCing for your ReSyncing.