Once Upon a Timeline

How we design our cutting patterns and what we choose to select within the music track to help us create that stylisation, is a rarely talked about skill. Most of us discover it by accident as I did one day in the mid-’90s when watching a music video of one of the tracks of the famous French dance duo, Daft Punk.

It hit me like a sledgehammer, and I’ve been using this creative principle ever since. In this week’s show I talk through and breakdown this concept for you to use, and I guarantee it’ll amaze you.

So many people suffer from it. We work in one area of editing but have always considered it a stepping stone and never the destination for our career. It’s a difficult subject to discuss and has many factors at play.

But with some thought-out strategy, some bravery and some inside knowledge of how staffing decisions are made on productions, there's no reason why we can't jump free of the curse of pigeonholing and build the career we've always wanted.

We’re also making another exciting announcement about our new Bootcamp live training, so stay tuned for that at the end of the show.
 

The life of the editing nomad has been made possible with advances in technology, communication and collaboration software allowing you access to millions of potential clients worldwide.

There has never been a better time to be an editing artist, and many of us yearn for the independence and freedom to have that rarest of combinations… a creative life and a long list of clients who want to work with us.

We discuss the forces that have made this life possible in this week’s episode and the things we can do to make it happen.

So much of our creative life is focused around time. How long will it take to cut a sequence? How many hours of raw footage do we have to wade through? What is the intended duration of the project?

Throughout the centuries, art and time have never been the greatest of bedfellows and so this week we take the bull by the horns and discuss techniques to keep the creativity high and the stress at bay.

Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s Poem If…‍

I always loved Kipling’s famous poem about a father’s advice to his son on becoming an adult. Everyone has their favourite lines but mine were always the first two…

"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,"

This inspired a calmness in me despite some stressful situations in my career.

Developing the ability to take an enormous amount of sync, stripping out 95% of it and piecing it together into a coherent narrative while still explaining all the facts is an art in itself.

In this week’s show, we talk through a technique that can help us with this difficult task that was born in ancient Greece over two thousand years ago. Aristotle’s concept of first principles.

This stacked episode also features a great Q&A section, plus a brand new competition. I hope you enjoy the show!

I talk about how a seemingly offhand comment a director made to me in one of my first documentary edits completely reshaped my view on editing and sent me on a fascinating investigation into on screen human behaviour.

Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum is applicable to so many different fields of inquiry but I saw a strong connection to a very specific part of the craft of editing… Interview Transcripts. 

It’s a deep show packed full of creative theory and I know you’ll enjoy it.

It’s another packed episode as Will dispenses yet more edit wisdom for our community. He delves deep into theories on structure, propaganda in film and what parts of the brain the art of editing requires.

He also talks us through his process in cutting his Eddie Award-winning documentary series, Five Came Back, and all the complexity it required in the edit suite. I know you’re gonna love what he has to say.

Will has been a prolific documentary editor over the last decade, cutting amazing films like the Oscar-nominated Winter on Fire, The Black Godfather, and Five Came Back.

In the first of a two-part series with the two time Eddie Award-winning editor, we discuss everything from his construction techniques, to the ethics in editing, to the emotional engagement of the audience.

Will also describes the very interesting trajectory of his career and how he got his first breaks. There’s a ton of great insight and wisdom that is both fascinating and inspiring.

After we’ve gone through the mammoth task of viewing all of our raw footage and constructing our first assemblies, we can often feel deflated by what we see on our timeline. Our construction is often overly long, repetitive and full of errors as we go into the secondary stage of refinement. It’s here that a lot of editors new to the craft fall down.

A high-end editor is a creative artist who can immediately focus in on and streamline the sequence into what its true purpose and meaning really is. I love this subject, I get asked so much about it and I think there’s a lot of very interesting creative theory to be discussed around it.

Through cultivating different memory systems in our mind we take on the creative influences of those around us, mix them with repetitive action and give ourselves the ability to sign our own artistic signature on any project that we’re working on.

But how does this all work? What are the different types of memory that we utilise on our journey? And what are the things that can either hold us back or set us free on the path to becoming a high end editing artist? Find out in this week’s episode of Once Upon a Timeline.