I’ve recently been working on the short film Tealight with Director Matt Taylor. 
Matt Taylor is an idealist writer/director committed to telling emotionally-driven stories of discovery using his own concoction of excitement and escapism. He is known for the award-winning short August (2021), Tealight (2022), and feature films Transition (2018) and Trainset (2018).
Matt lives in the North East of England and is also a passionate educator.
Logline: An agoraphobic woman dreams of traveling the world but she must first overcome an evil darkness that haunts her.
Collaboration
Since Matt is in the UK and I am in the USA, we needed to figure a way to collaborate keeping in mind; having full access to the same timeline while file-locking, and not making things overly complicated.
Having never worked with another editor in a remote situation, I did some searching over at R/editors, and it turns out Premiere Pro has collaboration built-in.
After a quick search, I learned; Premiere has two ways to collaborate on a project. Premiere Productions, and Team Projects.
Team Projects, as I understand is a paid subscription but since the pandemic hit, Adobe has made the subscription FREE. This was nice to hear.
Premiere Productions vs. Team Projects [according to Adobe]
“Premiere Productions is designed for collaborators working on shared local storage. Team Projects is built for remote collaboration: assets can be stored locally with individual users; project files are securely stored in Creative Cloud.” ~Adobe
Setting up Premiere Productions was easy; it took less than a couple of minutes.
Matt and I set up a Premiere Production; we were able to access the project without a problem. Over the next couple of days, I made an update to a couple of scenes, and afterward, Matt wasn’t able to see the updated timeline. The problem we experienced with Premiere Productions was reopening the project. Matt wasn’t showing the updates that were made by me the collaborator.
I don’t fault Adobe for this slight hiccup, Premiere Productions has a slight learning curve to get working.
When I say ‘slight learning curve’, I really mean that I didn’t RTFM.
Leaning on the statement above from Adobe “Team Projects is built for remote collaboration: assets can be stored locally with individual users; project files are securely stored in Creative Cloud.” I decided to give Team Projects a try.
Setting up Team Projects 
Working with Premiere Pro Team Projects collaboration was quite simple and intuitive to set up [even without RTFM]:
My process:
- Create a Teams Project in Premiere Pro and invite Matt as a collaborator with an email invite.
- Set options as necessary [scratch disk, ingest settings, etc.]
- Bring the media into the project.
- That’s it! – I imported the media and existing timeline
Media management is done on the local computer so Premiere Pro Team Projects collaboration uses media from your local computer, just as if you were editing by yourself.
After setting up Team Projects, Matt and I were able to collaborate on the Tealight project without any further issues.
Project
Balancing how much you want to give away and how much the audience is intrigued by knowing just a little bit is arguably the most important aspect of telling a story. Matt’s story unwinds in front of you as the protagonist, Evelyn, played by Viven Taylor of Scotland, a person with agoraphobia who is afraid to leave environments she knows or considers to be safe fights a supernatural antagonist.
Tealight has roughly 27 scenes of Evelyn dealing with this darkness that seemingly placed itself and encompassed her life. Relentless, showing no waiver or end, Evelyn does what every superhero does, she fights.
After watching the dailies, I started to rough cut each scene and then post them on Frame.io- Matt crafted notes for each scene. I did this with each scene until I reached the end of the film. We only needed a few rounds of revisions and now the film is ready for sound, VFX, and color.
Conclusion
Working as a narrative is always a humbling and exciting experience. It’s a beautiful combination of humility, trust, craft, and experience working in harmony towards the creation of a beloved film. My work on Tealight holds a lot of secrets for those wanting to become better editors and storytellers, and I thank Matt Taylor for choosing me to be a part of his film.
You can connect with Matt Taylor with the social handles below.
Tealight The Film: Instagram.
Matt Taylor: Instagram – Twitter.
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