So you want to get better at editing

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.