Meet Tiffany Man of Atlanta / Hong Kong

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Man.

Hi Tiffany, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I think I first discovered my interest in film/tv during middle school, when I discovered and started watching more teen tv shows, such as Pretty Little Liars (2010). I remember how much I loved the show and still do now (even though it ended around 8 years ago now), and thinking about how fun it would be to be part of creating and filming that. I have also always loved watching and reading drama/crime thriller/mystery genres. Since then, my interest and passion in the art of film and television has come from my favorite things to watch including the Jurassic film franchise, and tv shows such as Hawaii Five O (2010-2020), Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017), Lucifer (2016-2021), Dynasty (2017-2022), and Legacies (2018-2022).

I actually started out as a ‘fan editor’ of some of these movies and shows, where people took clips of characters from these shows and would sort of make montages of them to music. I had seen fan edits for a while on social media such as Vine when it was still around, and after it closed fan editors moved on to instagram to share their edits. I loved how some of these edits could make people feel and realize things, whether about the show or for the characters or for their relationships and situations and tell a story and so I wanted to try doing the same thing. I began editing on Final Cut Pro for fun, just to experiment with editing transitions and effects, but soon moved on to editing with After Effects and learning that program through youtube tutorials and experimentation. Additionally, I also really enjoy photography and videography and have since I was young, especially when traveling.

In high school I branched out even further with these edits and decided to try editing recut trailers, to tell stories for a show, testing unexplored storylines that I felt like would have potential, or my version of trailers for a new season of a show. I decided to commit to majoring in film/television and to learn more about creating and editing, because by senior year it had been almost 5 years since I had started editing and I still loved doing it. Now, as a senior soon to graduate from university, I still very much love what I do and have collaborated with a lot of my peers in my last few years on student projects and short films, and I continue to shoot videos and photos when traveling and editing my own short reels. In the future, I’d love to be part of creating and sharing stories I’m excited and passionate about, also maybe even working in marketing and advertising, music videos, photoshoots and more – hopefully working with peers I love and industry professionals I have looked up to for a long time. I’m open to a lot of things.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It hasn’t been a completely smooth road – One of the challenges I encountered early on was not being admitted into the film program at my university in Vancouver, Canada. I was already enrolled and studying there, but I had not. yet declared my major and when I applied to film my second year I was rejected from it, so I didn’t know what to do next – Stay and be forced to pick a different major such as Criminology (something else that I was interested in), or apply to transfer elsewhere if I could get into film in a different school. In the end, I transferred schools which is how I ended up in Atlanta in the fall of 2022. Even after being accepted as a film major, I think a lot of my struggles were and still are internal. I worry a lot about uncertainties and try and think through every situation and everything that could go wrong to mentally prepare myself and then afterwards think of backup plans (if any). I worried about classes, whether I would do well in school, whether I was really cut out for this, moving to the States on my own and starting over alone again, and the future in general.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I believe I am mainly known for being an editor, but I also love cinematography, photography and fashion. I feel like loving cinematography and framing things and seeing life cinematically and being an editor connect and balance each other really well. I can go out and shoot things, like for example while traveling, and then go back to the hotel at the end of day and cut the footage together. With filming, I can also visualize how the scenes can be cut together from the script or shotlist. I love editing and am familiar with programs such as Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Avid Media Composer and Da Vinci Resolve. I also enjoy creating simple motion graphics from time to time.

I also really love music and the connection between film and imagination and music. I am a musical person and have been playing piano and clarinet since I was young, but I also listen to a lot of music and love how I can listen to a song and see visuals and imagery in my head, or how much music can make a person feel things. How important music is to a scene and evoking a type of feeling in that scene, or maybe how music and a song can tell and inspire a story. I also feel like editing and rhythm is also really connected to music.

I’m really proud of some shots I filmed recently of nature and landscape and little things I noticed when I was in Australia last month, and some things from Hawai’i in November of 2024. I love how everything turned out and being able to capture the beauty of places and marine life and see it all for myself in person brings me a lot of peace and joy and awe. I’m also proud of this sort of photoshoot I did with the Little Shop of Horrors (in NYC) playbill for fun (I have no affiliation with the production) when I went to see the show in May. I loved it and wanted to write about it and how I felt but needed photos to accompany my post, and I had a few ideas for some photos that I then creatively directed and had my friend be my camera operator to shoot them. I love how they turned out.

As for what sets me apart, or what I think is really important and what I am also proud about for myself as a person is that I’ll always give my very best for everything I do no matter what it is have always remained genuine and real with people. I think a lot of industries can involve interactions and relationships that are really transactional, where people may want something from someone or have a hidden agenda, but I guess I always want what’s real. Real relationships and friends and real connection with people, without having to second guess things. I am also really proud of interning for and working under the Legal Team of a regulatory company back home during school breaks. It was a job I never expected to have experienced but a time where I met some of the most wonderful, intelligent, generous and caring people and learned a lot and gained perspective. I not only got to experience some legal work which I enjoyed thoroughly, but also got to work on my editing skills there when creating some training videos for them.

I also care about a lot of things that are outside of just the art, things like justice (hence one of the reasons I really enjoyed interning in a legal department) and character and treating other people (and nature and animals) right and being forgiving, responsible, kind, working diligently and with integrity. Helping people is also important to me and I think that film has a great opportunity to do this in the sense that it can connect with people through relatable characters and share stories that resonate with people and make them feel things or make them feel seen.

I’m also working on and learning to try and put myself out there more to just create things whenever I have inspiration. I think when I was younger I used to care about how well my work would be received, and the amount of views or likes but now it’s more so just finding my style and what I want and to continue improving it and sharing it and letting go of everything else that I have no control over.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
It’s kind of unpredictable now. I feel like it’s going to change a lot, especially with the economy, streaming, and technology such as the further development of AI, and productions moving to different places for filming. I feel like this is old news but there have been less people going to theaters to see movies and instead watching them on streaming services and it changes how people experience films. I think of this now because there have been theaters back home that have had to close down some locations due to lack of business and I wish they didn’t have to. I think there’s something very magical about seeing a film in cinemas and the experience is completely different than watching it at home on a tv or on a laptop, iPad or even phone. I also feel like long episodic television has kind of ceased to exist, no more 4+ seasons of tv shows with more than 16 episodes. Most things last a couple seasons with 8-10 episodes that drop all at once instead of an episode per week and although it’s nice to be able to binge shows and get the whole story in one go, I remember the anticipation of waiting for a new episode each week of Pretty Little Liars, being able to theorize with others, pick out clues from episodes before the next one would drop, and live tweet as the episode would air. For me, the waiting and getting the story piece by piece over time really built that anticipation, excitement and interest.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tiffanyjpyman.weebly.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/tiffanyyman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanyjpyman/

Image Credits
photo of me holding the c300 camera was taken by my friend Janet Pan