Eric Nagy is an editor and sound designer, often at the same time. With projects spanning feature films — recently at a pace of one per year — as well as commercials, music videos, and art installations, he works invisibly and flexibly across genres and forms, with a level of composition and sensibility that is far more satisfying than mere efficiency.
Born in New Jersey, Nagy studied painting and sculpture at the tradition-minded Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He transitioned seamlessly, if surprisingly, to film as a direct extension of his fine art practice. Classes at PAFA didn’t teach film editing, so Nagy taught himself after-hours at his father’s work at a NJ State Police Academy, of all places. “For me, it was sculpture,” he says of his first exposure to their Grass Valley linear editing system, where officers produced training videos. “It was a very physical thing. Editing was building with blocks of image and sound.”
He has worked with Consulate for several years, but his first editing job was at a TV station in the World Trade Center, making to-the-frame analog cuts for commercial breaks for it’s TV programming. He later spent four years in Tokyo as an editor and sound designer (and even voiceover) in a language he didn’t speak fluently, with high-profile assignments such as the opening show of the Issey Miyake Design Museum 21_21. Projects like that — or the Atlantis installation with artist Marco Brambilla, for which Nagy composed an atmospheric, vintage-synth soundtrack to NASA’s last manned space shuttle — bring Nagy’s work into a classic gallery space, but that’s hardly the extent of his range.