The Editor IS the Audience

There’s a very specific kind of pressure that comes with adapting a story loved by fans the world over.

It’s not just the pressure of scale, budget, visual effects, or fan expectation. It’s the pressure of knowing that, for a large part of the audience, the Avatar story didn’t begin on Netflix. It began years ago when they were kids, watching an animated series that was funny, mythic, emotional, political, spiritual, and action-packed all at once.

For editor Payton Koch, that pressure was personal.

Before he ever cut a frame of Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender, Payton was already a fan of the original animated series. He grew up with it. He knew the characters, the music, the tone, the mythology, and the emotional architecture of it all.

So, when he saw that Netflix was moving forward with seasons two and three of the series, he did what any self-respecting editor/fan would do—he called his agent and said, “Get me in the room.”

That detail matters, because it says a lot about what Payton brought to the job. He didn’t come to Avatar as an outsider learning the rules of the world from scratch. He came in with what he described as an “encyclopedia of the Avatar universe” already in his head.

The lesson to take away from Payton’s experience on Avatar is this: Fandom can be an editorial asset—if you know how to use it.

Adaptation Is Not Transcription

One of the recurring challenges for Payton was how to honor the original while making the live-action version work on its own terms.

It was very clear that the Netflix series could never be a one-to-one recreation of the animated show. Nor should it be. Different medium. Different pacing. Different actors. Different structure.

But that doesn’t mean the original disappears.

For Payton, the animated series was a living reference point. He had episodes from the original series loaded into Media Composer and would go back to them while cutting. Sometimes it was to remind himself of tone. Sometimes it was to compare story function. Other times it was purely visual. He even used shots from the animated series as temp VFX—effectively treating the original as a kind of pre-vis.

That is a fascinating editorial idea. Adaptation, in that sense, becomes less about copying and more about triangulating. The editor questions: What did this moment do in the original? What does this new footage do? And where is the version that gives me the best of both?

That is a craft takeaway for any editor working on a remake. The original is a compass, not a cage. The trick is knowing when to follow it, when to reinterpret it, and when to let the new version tell you what it wants to be.

The Editor as Advocate

Because Payton knew the original so well, he felt a responsibility to speak up.

He was vocal in the process because he cared so much about doing justice to the original. But he also understood the importance of trying things, exhausting options, and not being locked into the script simply because it was the script.

That is one of the strongest, but often hardest, editing lessons to learn. At a certain point, the script is the past. The footage is the present. The job is no longer to defend what was intended. The job is to make the best possible version from what exists.

And Payton believes in taking big swings. Cut the material. Move scenes. Drop something out. Watch it without the thing everyone assumes must be in there. Nothing is gone forever. You can always put it back.

“The timeline is a safe place to be bold.”

Make It Exist First

Payton also shared a very useful window into his day-to-day process.

When dailies come in, he likes to watch everything in the morning, having read the script notes the night before. That lets him visualize the intention before he starts cutting. But his goal is not to make the scene perfect on the first pass.

His goal is to make it exist.

He referenced an image he had seen of an imperfect circle with colors bleeding outside the lines as the perfect visual representation of this concept: Make it exist first, make it perfect later.

That is a great editing mantra. The first assembly is not the final statement. It gives the editor something to react to. Something to improve. Something to sleep on.

And there is a psychological benefit to that too. Payton talked about being able to go to bed knowing there is something there, then returning in the morning with fresh eyes to refine, recut, add music, and start finding the scene’s footing. That is a lesson for editors at every level: Do not confuse the first pass with the final cut. The first pass is there so the real work can begin.

Cutting Fan Moments Without Turning Them Into Fan Art

One of Payton’s Season Two episodes, Episode 3, brings Team Avatar into Ba Sing Se, one of the most important locations in the original series. This is not just another fantasy city. Ba Sing Se carries political tension, class division, and one of the most chilling ideas in the original story: The city’s insistence that everything is fine when everything clearly is not.

That gave Payton a different kind of editorial challenge. The city had to feel like two things at once. Beautiful and controlled. Pleasant and oppressive.

He talked about the character Joo Dee, whose cheerful smile masks the darker machinery of Ba Sing Se. In the edit, that unease came from timing. Holding on her smile. Cutting to her when she is already there, as if she has been watching the whole time. Finding her lurking in the background. Letting the audience feel that something is off before anyone fully says it.

He also mentioned using a recurring sound hit when she appeared, creating a subtle editorial motif that reinforced the feeling of surveillance.

That is such a precise example of what editing can do. The menace is not only in the dialogue. It’s also in when you cut. How long you hold. Whether a character enters the frame or is already there. Editing is often described as invisible, and this is one of those places where the invisible work is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Spectacle Still Has to Serve Spacing

Payton’s other Season Two episode was the finale, which he co-edited with Chester Howie. That episode is a very different beast. Where Episode 3 is about controlled unease, Episode 7 is about bringing action, emotion, character payoff, and the collapse of multiple storylines into one climactic movement.

Payton described the final battle as one of the most challenging things he’s ever cut. Part of that challenge was simple to describe yet hard to solve: The space did not really exist.

It was a full CG environment. Characters were fighting, bending, moving through a geography that had to be constructed editorially before it could be fully realized visually. Payton had to track where characters were, where they were going, when to stay wide, when to cut closer, and how to keep the audience oriented while rocks, fire, water, and bodies were flying through the scene.

His solution was to build it linearly. Start at the beginning. Track the progression. Break the sequence into chunks. Let each piece build toward the climactic moment. That is another useful takeaway: In a VFX-heavy action scene, the editor is not just cutting shots. The editor is helping invent the space.

And because so much downstream work depends on those choices, Payton prioritized action and visual effects scenes early. Dialogue scenes can be refined later with fewer dependencies, but big action sequences need to get into the pipeline. Pre-vis, temp effects, timing, turnovers, reviews—all of that takes time.

“Editorial is not waiting for visual effects. Editorial is helping visual effects know what movie they are making.”

Performance Is Still the Anchor

For all the talk about battles, CG environments, and large-scale fantasy world-building, some of Payton’s favorite material was much more intimate.

He singled out the scenes between Katara and Zuko in the finale as some of his favorite work in Season Two. That makes perfect sense. Those scenes are not just about plot. They are about recognition. Two characters from opposing sides suddenly seeing the pain in each other.

That is where a show like Avatar either works or doesn’t. The spectacle brings people in. The character work keeps them coming back.

Payton’s comments about Dallas Liu’s performance as Zuko were also telling. In cutting Zuko’s scenes with Jet and Iroh, Payton was not primarily thinking about fan-service or plot mechanics. He was following the emotional line of Zuko’s guilt, confusion, anger, and potential for good.

That is especially important in adaptation. Fans may come in with a pre-existing relationship to a character, but the editor still has to build that character moment-by-moment in this version. You cannot simply rely on what the audience already knows. You have to make them feel it again.

Authenticity Is an Editorial Responsibility

One of the things Payton had to pay special consideration to was the character, Toph.

Toph is a beloved character, but she also presents a specific challenge in live action because she is blind. Payton talked about the care that went into Miyako Cech’s performance, including work with a blindness consultant. That same care and thoughtfulness extended into editorial.

The team paid close attention to whether her eyes were tracking other characters in ways that would not feel authentic. They looked at head turns, reactions to sound, and how her physicality communicated perception. Cuts were reviewed and adjusted based on feedback from the consultant.

That is a crucial point. Authenticity does not stop when the cameras stop rolling. Editorial can protect it or accidentally undermine it. Choosing the wrong take, the wrong reaction, or the wrong eye-line can change how a performance reads. In Toph’s case, the cut had to respect both the character and the lived reality being represented.

Passion Is Not Enough—But It Helps

The easy version of this story would be: Payton loved Avatar, so he was the right editor for it. But that’s too simple.

Passion alone does not cut the scene. Passion does not solve geography in a CG battle. Passion does not balance comedy and darkness. Passion does not manage a finale with missing coverage, pickups, blue screen, live drop-ins, and multiple editorial handoffs.

Skill does that. But passion gives the skill a direction.

“Passion alone does not cut the scene. But passion gives the skill a direction.”

For Payton, being a fan meant he knew what the show was supposed to feel like. He understood the emotional temperature of the world. He knew when something felt like Avatar and when it did not. He could advocate for one-to-one visual echoes when they mattered, while still accepting that the live-action adaptation had to become its own thing.

That is the larger lesson. The best editors are not just technicians. They are translators. Advocates. First audience members. Structural problem-solvers.

And sometimes, if the project lines up just right, they are also the kid who loved the thing in the first place, now sitting in the editor’s chair trying to make sure the next generation gets to love it too.

Every Timeline Tells a Story

Payton’s work on Avatar: The Last Airbender is a reminder that editing is never just about assembling shots. It is about protecting performance, shaping emotion, solving structure, and giving the audience a way into the story. That kind of creative control depends on a toolset that allows an editor to translate their instincts onto the timeline.

Media Composer is built for that work—from first assembly to finishing, intimate character scenes, and complex VFX-heavy sequences. It gives editors the precision, flexibility, and confidence to stay focused on the story, even when the project gets bigger, faster, and more complicated.

Explore Media Composer and discover how it helps editors bring ambitious stories to life.