24 Decisions / Second

Let’s see…how do I make editing interesting? It’s organizational-tedium, largely internal, and the difference between a good and sloppy edit can come down to the frame. It takes a mountain of decisions just to get to the fun part. 

Film editing taught me how to make decisions, or at least some types. 

It’s actually kind of soothing. Distributing all the audio, footage, and art from a shoot into labeled bins is a semi-autopilot task loaded with gratifying key commands. It’s one of the few steps of the edit where I can listen to music, and in the end, I can access the entire project at a glance. 

Production is magical, fleeting, dynamic; post-production is controlled down to the frame. Every second presents 24 forks in the road.

Meticulous organization accelerates decision making; it also enhances it. I edit in fear of overlooking the perfect shot, especially when I did the shooting. Organizing b-roll into bite-sized bins narrows down the scope,  assists comparisons, and lets me quickly find the footage I’m looking for. 

My process has evolved considerably since the days of transcribing interviews on to hand-written, time-stamped notecards. Now I make video notecards called “subclips”, labeled by person, subject, and a brief description. This coding allows me to quickly file away each subclip by topic, while identifying strong opens and closes. 

Editing movie footage involves comparing takes, reactions, and angles. Each scene has a bin containing sub-bins numbered according to the shooting script. Each numbered bin is nested by angle and character bins for each take.

Organization, along with an arsenal of powerful key-commands, makes constructing narratives a pleasure, allows me to quickly address feedback from my clients, and fully exploits the footage. And that enhances the fun of crafting a story with light and sound.

Professional editing is invisible. The experience is all that remains.