Elevating Your Editing - The Sky is the Limit
This is the fourth part of a series of posts for editors who want to level up their skills and/or find a new horizon to focus their creative abilities.
The first post is to establish a baseline of quality to separate yourself from amateurs.
The second is to start adding in some editorial flourish which adds that extra bit of flavor and interest to make even the most mundane edits more fun to watch.
The third is about taking control of the pacing to the point where you have the ability to manipulate sound and visuals to do what you want. It's also about getting really good at piecing together a story from disparate parts.
We're movin' on up!
Once you've gained the ability to wield your editing skills with such a masterful amount of skill, where you do you go from there? Not to sound like a kung-fu movie, but the next step is kind of where you cease to be an editor. I forget which movie it was (probably a bunch of them) where the kung fu master says something to the effect of: Once you become a master swordsman, you no longer need the sword.
Haha, okay what the heck do I mean by that?
When you first start it's mostly about the software. You have to learn how to do each and everything little thing. Through practice and lots of Googling editing becomes less about the buttons and more about the intent of an edit.
Going back to the kung fu metaphor, when you first start taking lessons you need to learn basics like how to breathe, punch, move your hips, position your feet, how long your arms are, how to relax your muscles. The editing equivalent is just figuring out how to get footage into the software and move clips around to match the music. Then learning keyboard shortcuts one by one.
Once you know how to move clips around, shave off frames, and manipulate footage, the question is no longer: "How do I cut this together?" and more "What am I trying to achieve?", "What emotion should I create?", "What message does this video need to communicate?"
Seasoned editor watching a beginner learn keyboard shortcuts.
A very advanced editor is a problem solver.
For example:
How do I make this retro first person shooter game stand out from the others which look virtually the same at first glance?
How do I make a trailer for this sequel game which is accessible to new audiences, but not so simplified that to hardcore fans it feels like it's been stripped of what they love?
How do I make a trailer which shows the experience of playing this game, when there's nothing in the game which visualizes any of the player's inputs?
How do I make a trailer for this game when there's only one finished environment and two finished animations for the character?
How do I make a trailer for a horror movie which is entirely set in the daytime?
Let's make the letterbox white instead of black! (*mind blown*)
These are problems which go well beyond "What software should I use?" or "What plugins will help me do this?"
This isn't to say every editor needs to become a creative director, but I think they'll all inevitably have their own creative input on a project. I often feel like the ideas and concepts to solve the problems are the hard part of the process, and the execution is relatively easy even if it's laborious and/or tedious.
This is in sharp contrast to the game industry where it seems like everyone has ideas, but it's really really hard to make them into real things. Maybe it's because creating assets for a game and programming them is so much more uncertain and weird than capturing footage and manipulating it in editing software.
Me before I start cutting.
There is no one path for an editor to reach some sort of transcendent level of skill. Some become creative directors, some stay as editors, and others are a mix of the two. At a certain point everyone is on a level playing field but specialize or all get a chance to tackle the same problems.
People could be an experts at:
Horror movie trailers
Game trailers which mix capture and in-engine footage
Cinematic game trailers
Comedy movie trailers
Music selection/creation for trailers
Sound design driven trailers
Down to earth dramatic trailers
Trailers for musicals
Also, some ideas are easy to conceive but hard to execute like: "Let's make a trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody which cuts together a bunch of their greatest hits" is easy to say but hard to do. But some ideas are harder to come up with, but relatively easy to execute once you have the idea like: "Let's make a trailer for Star Wars Episode II set to the sound of Darth Vader Breathing."
The less you concentrate on how to cut, the more you can think about why to cut. But the only way to get there is through lots of practice and experience. So no matter where you are on your editing journey, just keep going!
