31 min listen
S1E1. The Power of Editing
ratings:
Length:
35 minutes
Released:
Jun 25, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
This art form of ours is truly remarkable in the way it can direct the emotional state of our audience. As editors we can bend and shape the blocks on our timelines in so many different ways and each one takes our viewers on a exciting visual experience.If we’re trained in the black arts of editing, if we master the hundreds of creative techniques, skills and mindsets, we can take the same raw footage and cut it in completely different ways. Pacing, structure, camera movement and cutting patterns are just some of the elements we craft to produce wildly different outcomes for any project.To illustrate how powerful this art form can be take a look at these two rough cuts I constructed. They are built from the exact same raw footage but I’ve edited them in two completely different ways. And as you can easily notice, this has created two completely different emotional states for the viewer.Cinematic Documentary CutIn this fist version I imagined that I was cutting in a high end documentary style. My pretend director would want a considered, artistic and cinematic feel to the sequence. With that in mind I kept the pacing slow, left out any observational style camerawork, chose symmetrical shots and scored it all with an emotional and artistic music track.Entertainment Show CutIn this second version I pretended that my client was an entertainment or reality TV show. They would want a quicker and lighter cutting style that gave a more playful emotional feeling for the audience. I therefore included much more of the observational camerawork, a tongue in cheek music track and used simple cutting techniques like cutting the B roll, character action and camera movement on the beat.Same raw footage, two different outcomesOf course we could go on forever in choosing different moods, structures and cutting patterns depending on what the client wanted, who the audience was and what we wanted to make them feel. But these two rough cuts really highlight the fact that how we decide to make the audience feel can change no matter what raw footage were given. And that is power.An editor trained in creative skills like these can take any genre, from online content and corporate promos to reality TV and documentary, and make them many times more effective and powerful for their viewers.
Released:
Jun 25, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (65)
S1E4. How To Give Perfect Editing Feedback: One of the many aspects of being a successful editor is to give feedback to our client. How we phrase that and what language to use can make the difference between a one off contract or a career long client. In this week's episode Paddy outlines how to communicate the perfect feedback. by Once Upon a Timeline