Once Upon a Timeline

In this episode I talk through a trick that I picked up and adapted from what was going to be my then career... acting. This mental technique allowed me to conquer the very problem of watching something so many times over and not become burnt out by the footage. It’s a really interesting subject and I dive deep into the history and psychology around it in this week’s show.

In part two of this fascinating interview, Eddie tells us how he communicates with directors and creates the perfect environment for creative collaboration. He also talks about many of the films that taught him the intricacies of pace and timing as well as how to edit archive footage. And his insights into how we should make ourselves incredibly valuable on any production are extremely useful.

Yet again, listening to an editing artist who has risen to the very top of their genre is very inspiring and I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of it.

From humble beginnings on the south coast of England, Eddie has built a career ladder that has placed him at the very top of Hollywood. I recently caught up with him as he was finishing off the much anticipated Top Gun: Maverick. Listening to his story, his advice for young editors and his overwhelming love for editing was an absolute joy.

In this first in a two part series Eddie talks through how he rose from quick turn around sports news programs and low budget movies all the way up to sharing an edit suite with Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer. He tells us about his drive to succeed, his meticulous creative process and how he cultivates relationships with some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

This week’s discussion on Once Upon a Timeline is all about one of the most fascinating areas of our craft, human behaviour. As editors, we’re often thought of as arm chair psychologists. One of the skills we need to nurture is the ability to select, streamline and re-construct the perfect human emotions in any sequence for maximum effect.

Knowing how human beings communicate outside of their speech and placing these moments at key points in a scene is often the thing that separates the keen amateur from the truly great professional editor. 

In this week’s episode I talk through how we should analyse human behaviour on screen and repackage it for our audience.

You’ll learn:

• How different genres select human behaviour.
• Why behaviour analysis is absolutely essential.
• What we look for when repackaging specific emotions.
• The three big headlines in body language theory.
• How to communicate our value to people who don’t know what editing is.

There are a long list of communication and psychological based skills that are absolutely essential for a successful career in editing. Front and centre amongst them is the ability to give perfect feedback to our clients.

This is a fascinating subject as we start to get into the psychology of the edit suite and all of the skills outside of our creative talent that determine the success of our careers.

In this week’s episode I talk through the whole psychology of feedback and best to communicate it with our clients. You’ll learn:

• Why good feedback is essential.
• The type of language we need to use.
• The necessity of justification to a client.
• What type of opinions directors and producers respond to.
• The exact structure of perfect feedback.

This week I thought that it would be great to talk through some editing theory from the point of view of one of the unsung creative roles in our industry. The self shooter, the videographer, the online content creator, the all in one filmmaker. This creative artist is everywhere, filming, interviewing, producing, recording sound, directing and of course editing.

They’re creating content for online platforms, corporate production companies, lifestyle brands, news stories, online documentaries, marketing content and website promos. The list is endless as there’s so much content to be made out there and these amazing creative artists are really leading the charge from the ground up in the new wave of filmmaking.

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.

In 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.

In 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.

Of 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.