When you first decide you want film editing to be your capital “J” grownup Job, you naturally want to get better. So you study and you try to absorb as much as you can about the craft of editing. You try to learn all the terms so that you can talk to other editors. You want to do work with the best and brightest, so you collaborate and you learn how other people do things. This is all great, but at the end of the day, there’s something only you have.
Instinct. It’s not very sexy to write about it because it’s so intangible. It’s much easier to write a How To Guide for organizing your video projects (as I wrote in my last blog). But the fact of the matter is that instinct (your gut) will get you a lot farther in an art career than any technique ever will.
Why is that? “Art is the transforming experience” (Joesph Campbell). Or as Mark Twain said, "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.” Everything is a remix. "I tell students, an idea is just a new combination of existing elements. If you want more ideas or better ideas, you need to fill your brain with more elements, more stuff." Tim Siedell.
What we think of as creativity is just the combination of existing elements in new and innovative ways. Do it enough times and you’ll find yourself drawn to certain types of combinations. That becomes your style, your signature. You see the light on a person’s face in a certain way and spend your photography career chasing it. That would be a fine career in art. And it’s all motivated by your instinct. Your gut.
So it’s a balancing act. You do need to know how to appease other people (unless you don’t need to hold down a job working for other people and you can just make your own work out the gate!). But you also need to know how to follow your heart. And when you’re first starting, that just means throwing paint on the canvas until something sticks.
Here’s the golden rule. Keep all the pieces of footage, music, photos, graphics, or anything else you need all in one place together. Have a standard naming convention and process that you follow every time.
This is good for you (so that you can find things in the future) and it’s also really good for when you’re working with other people (so they can figure out what you’re doing).
Here’s my method.
Every client has a folder. Inside that folder is…
Folders for each unique project I do for the client
Inside a project folder, there’s the Premiere Pro file and then more folders… Audio, Footage, Assets, and Adobe (for the save files). These folders can be further broken down if necessary (inside audio I could have a Music folder if I’m working with a lot of audio files. Footage could have folders for A Cam and B Cam etc).
The actual Premiere Pro projects have bins broken down with Audio, Footage, and Assets (sequences live in the main folder).
You can do the same thing with any editing software. With Final Cut Pro X, the library lives in the master folder. There’s no bins for footage but I use keywords to organize my footage and audio in FCP.
"Like most writers, I don’t educate myself sequentially, but more like a hawk or eagle always circling and finding things that might have been overlooked. " Gary Synder
“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.” -Richard Ford
“Films will be shot on different cameras, with different lenses, with varying degrees of success and cinematic splendor. But all of this is icing on the cake. Sure you want your film to look and sound good (sound is often underestimated), but ultimately, nothing matters so much as authenticity, story, and access — and by being a beginner at this, you may break form in fabulous ways.” – Tracy Droz Tragos
Kraig Adams is a YouTuber I like. Here’s a quote from an interview with him that I appreciated:
Kraig went on to say that so many people are copying Casey Neistat, but if that if they just made two or three videos – one a week or one a month, even, that were entirely their own and unique – something no one has ever seen before – that’s better but it takes risk. “It’s really scary to make something that you don’t see out there as being successful. But if Casey has a couple million on a vlog where he skates on a skateboard, it makes sense to kids to try and copy that and then be successful.
We’re all living in some kind of content/attention/energy vortex known as the internet. You could give all of yourself, 24/7, for the rest of your life, and it still wouldn’t be enough for the internet. Another perspective on what he’s saying here in this quote is that what matters is what comes from you. It’s better to decide what you want to actually contribute to this world and take the time necessary to make that, rather than just trying to set a schedule you think you’re supposed to have based on other people.
All rights belong to the creators of this video. Reposting for access.
All rights belong to the creators of these videos (I did not make them).
Today I want to dig into my own method a little bit and talk about logging.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with logging (basically the process of creating a separate timeline and using markers to identify different aspects of footage for later use). It’s time-intensive but invaluable to me in the edit.
But what I find is that, the most valuable part of logging for me is the connection to writing. Logging forces me to decontextualize the massive amounts of information being conveyed in the interview and look at the physical words (I add back in the audible layer by using asterisks to mark the most emotional delivery).
Then I open a notepad in another window, and things really get rolling.
For me, there’s power in the written word. Seeing it physically helps me think about it structurally. I know what a 3 Act Structure should feel like. I understand the idea of going with the flow and using music and whatnot, but why not use the information that’s being communicated? Why not allow the emotional content of the interview to actually be revealed in a more significant and meaningful way?
It may sound like I’m waxing eloquent, and that’s because I am. Logging is just one of those things I hate to love.
"A true composer thinks about his unfinished work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do." Igor Stravinsky
There are many, many nouns for the act of looking - a glance, a glimpse, a peep - but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge.
There's a big link between trains and film. One of the first filmed objects was a train. The clickety-clack of the projector and the clickety-clack of the train are similar. There is the idea of the voyage - every voyage is a story. I wonder if film would have been invented without the train.
(read his book, In the Blink of an Eye).