Michael Dixon

Michael "Mic" Dixon was the editor of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends for the pilot episode and first series. He started his career at Clearwater Features in 1981 after meeting now deceased editor Marvin Garret, who was going on holiday and needed someone to cover him while he was away. Michael obliged to the offer and was stationed as commercials editor at Clearwater for initially 3 weeks, his first 'job' would be a Cadbury's commercial, where he met David Mitton, during this, the final shot of the commercial had an issue where a shot would become out of focus when shooting, Michael managed to fix this issue and from then on was David's main editor at Clearwater. After he was taken on permanently, Mitton brought Andrea MacArthur to be his assistant/business partner. They got our own cutting room shortly after and would refurbish it, equipping it with the most expensive music system they could find and one of the first computers, an Apple 2e, to be used anywhere in film post production. Soon after Mitton would give them the roles of editors on the first series being his main commercial editing team when the series was in pre-production.

During his time as an editor he would receive rushes daily, checked and logged them. The Apple 2e computer (which featured 2 floppy disk drives) would be used to log all the scenes shot using Microsoft's Quickfire program so that they could keep track of how the episodes were building up.

He would work on Thomas for eighteen months total, David Mitton would visit the edit suite no more than 6 times. Britt Allcroft spent a lot of time with them in the suite however, especially towards the end of episode production, overseeing what they were doing. Once enough footage was received, Andrea and Michael would then put the episodes together, early in production the narration would be supplied by Andrea herself as Ringo Starr's narration wasn't recorded at the time. Later on they would work quite closely with Mike and Junior on the music, and the episodes started to come to life. Sometime during production they would spend 3 days at the Talyllyn Railway in Wales where they would record all the sound effects for the series.

When all the episodes were completed they would be then transferred to VHS tape, a VHS player would then be bought by Michael and Andrea and they would spend three weeks with Britt, Mike and Ringo at the studio in Ringo's house recording the narration. Tracks were then laid and sound mixed for all the episodes at a dubbing theatre in Soho. Following this he would grade from the original negatives and finish the films on video. An animated title sequence was planned but didn't turn up so Michael would then design the title sequence seen in the final series.

Following Thomas he left Clearwater and all entertainment and advertising film work. In 1984 he joined a delegation of film makers on a trip to the Soviet Union. On this trip he met a number of independent film makers and this led to his working in current affairs and documentaries. He also would meet his current partner on that trip. She had made a six part series for the newly formed Channel 4 TV. Between 1990 and 1995 they made 5 documentaries on the Gulf War, won the United Nations Media Award and were the first film makers to expose Gulf War Syndrome. Then then have a daughter shortly after, Xanna, who herself is currently making films.

Michael continues to work in broadcast TV, mostly on documentaries and current affairs, making a number of independent documentary features.

Trivia

 * He stated in his interview with SIF in 2011 that he was still in possession of the floppy disk used to log all scenes shot during production and the Apple 2e computer the data was created on. However, as of 2023, the computer would be sold on Ebay. Additionally, attempts to digitize Michael's disk by both FANDOM and YouTube user Monika's Train Yard and Twitter user ThomasTankMerch resulted in the production data not on the disk. Instead, a short unrelated story and game were found, likely due to the disk being unknowingly reused at some point in time.