Transcripts
1. TRAILER: [MUSIC] Do you want to
learn how to become the world's most bad-ass editor? [FOREIGN] Be in demand by
influential brands. Yeah, Just on that. Willing to make SIG overlays, glitch transitions,
and epic sound design. Yes, I'm going to
stop you there. This isn't a course like that. This is non-technical,
so this is like how to develop the soft skills
to become a great editor. Time remapping
keyboard shortcuts. No. You'll learn the
coolest effects, and be the envy
of other editors. Nope. You will learn the
skills required to be an independent
problem-solver who maintains long-term employment. That's better. You'll learn what it
takes to be a dependable, and indispensable editor
loved by clients. [APPLAUSE] Bingo. [NOISE]
2. INTRODUCTION: Hey, I'm Basil, I'm a video dude from
Melbourne, Australia. I've been working
as a video editor professional for
about 10 years now. I started out as an assistant editor
working on sports and music documentaries and
then I transitioned to being a junior editor
and then senior editor. Now I've been out on my
own for about six years. These days I run my own
production company, which sounds bigger than it is. It's just me and a
laptop plus a bunch of talented folk that
I love to work with. Why I wanted to put
together a short course on non-technical or soft skills for editing is because I think they tend to go overlooked. They're not as sexy and
shiny as hard skills, but I think that they're just as important and maybe even more important over the long term
of your editing career. Plus, they're just more beneficial to your
day-to-day life. I'm not trying to take anything
away from hard skills, they're obviously
crucial to success, but if you want to learn
keyboard shortcuts and coloring your footage
and epic sound design, there's plenty of other
courses and tutorials out there that teach those
things amazingly well. What I'm going to be
talking about is dealing with feedback, being productive, and staying alive on
deadline as well as funkier topics like recognition and dealing with
decision fatigue, and what I call
cross-training for editing. That's it for the intro. Let's get into it. Hold
the smile. Hold the smile. Hold the smile. Hold the smile. Hold the smile. Hold the smile. Hold the smile. [MUSIC]
3. COMMUNICATION: Now me saying good communication is essential is like saying, it's important for fish
to breathe underwater, kind of a given. What do I mean by
good communication? Well, thanks for asking.
Here's what I think. [MUSIC] Clear and concise. The same rules that
apply to editing also apply to good
communication. Dot points are your best mate. Be specific, especially
at the start. Get in writing exactly
what you need to deliver, so that you and your
client are both crystal clear about the
work that needs to be done. We're talking about length, we're talking about size, we're talking about format. Do you need to do
captions or are they going to look
after captions? Does the video need a logo? If so, where? Do you need the blue logo or
do you need the white logo? For how long? I would lean
towards being too obvious. Not obnoxious, but just
state the obvious like, "Hey, just double-checking. You mean the blue logo, not the white logo? You mean in this
spot not this spot?" I sum this up by
saying clarify first, rather than change later. Communication style. Everybody that you work with, whether it be a
collaborator or a client, is going to have a
different style. Some clients need a hand
held the whole way, especially a new client that
you're working with for the first time where you
haven't developed trust. Trust takes a long time to develop and you
might need to nail a number of projects in a row before you get the
benefit of the doubt. Other people might be super
busy and getting their video done is very low
on their priority list. They might just
want you to go off and do your own thing.
That's cool too. Just suss out nice and early how your collaborator
likes to communicate. Updates. Rather
than disappearing into the video
wilderness and emerging two weeks later from
your editing cave with this perfectly polished
[NOISE] final product, I think it's actually
better to share bits and pieces of your
process along the way. Now this doesn't have
to be elaborate, it can just be as simple as
sharing a few still frames or just sharing a little nugget from an interview that you love. It might even be something funny that is not going to make
it into the final cut, but you just want to share
it because you're like, "Hey, this is cool." This lets your collaborators
know that you're in it. My advice is to keep
a log for your work and this can also be
helpful for billing. Now, this doesn't
have to be hectic and I'm definitely not
pro paperwork. It can just be as simple
as a couple of sentences. In the morning, you can be like, hey, this is what I'm
going to do today. At lunchtime it can be, worked on this, this other
section needs a lot of work. At the end of the
day, you can say, I'm really liking how this
section is coming together, especially when x says y. This can just be
a google document that you share with a
client that you update. They may check it, they may not. They may care, they may not, but it's there for them to see. This makes you
accountable to them, but it also makes you
accountable to yourself. Did you get done what you
said you were going to do? Or in a icky situation maybe
where someone challenges you for what you charge or
the time that you've build, you have a paper trail. I think that's always handy. Pre-empt bottlenecks. I often find it quite helpful to share a number of music tracks nice and early with a client
just to get their vibe. Music is so subjective. You might think
this is a banger of a track and they hate it. Getting early sign-off on music, or color treatment, or graphics that you might want to sprinkle
throughout the video, getting sign-off on these
things nice and early can really save headaches
down the track. It also just means you're not wasting your time and
your client's time. Also, another way to
pre-empt bottlenecks is by flagging things
nice and early. If you get into an interview
and the subject is talking about growing up in a specific region,
childhood experiences, I think that's
important to flag early on with a producer or
with a client to be like, hey, do we have
coverage for everything that they're talking
about in this section? The answer might be yes, the answer might be no, or the answer might be, we'll see, leave it with me. Either way, this allows your collaborator to get
the resources that you need or it allows them to make a hard decision
nice and early. You're not going to waste
any time on something that's ultimately going to end up on the cutting room floor. Most things take way
longer than you expect. That's why adding buffer to your time estimates is
always good practice. If you think it's
going to take you three days, give yourself five. If you think you're
going to be able to edit a section in 20 minutes, give yourself an hour so that
when something goes wrong, which inevitably does,
you've got some buffer. You're not sweating
bullets saying, yeah, I'll have this
for you in 20 minutes. A good rule of thumb that
I've developed for myself is 2.5 times my original estimate. If you think about
the flip side, a client is never going to be unhappy that you've
delivered early. Finally, get out in
front of things. Honesty is a core value of mind, and while it sucks so
bad to have to call a client and let them know that what you said you were going to do is not going to happen, you're not going to
be able to deliver it when you said you were, I think that it's much
better to call a client and tell them that you
are going to miss a deadline as early as possible, rather than to pray for a
miracle or to keep quiet as the deadline comes
and goes and just hope that they got busy
with something else. Deadlines can be pushed. It happens all the time. You might find there's
an extra day or two to get your
edit over the line if there's a valid reason why you need that
time extension. There's other times where
deadlines can't be pushed. In that case, I still think it's better to get in nice and early, to talk with the
client and to try and come up with an
alternate deliverable. Delivering something
in most cases is way better than
delivering nothing. Dodging emails and calls
is a sure-fire way to have those that
you're collaborating with lose faith in
your abilities. [MUSIC]
4. FEEDBACK: The worst thing you can do,
it'd be, I'm going to burn your house down [MUSIC]. Feedback. Everybody's least
favorite thing, unless it's positive feedback, but that never happens. When talking about regular, old feedback,
constructive feedback, as you put more and more
time into this game, you get better at
dealing with it. You narrow down the gap
between initial reaction, which is like I'm going
to burn your house down, to your secondary
reaction of like, thanks. I'll consider it. That gap gets
smaller and smaller. I still do think that you have that initial reaction because if you really give
[NOISE] about something, it feels a challenge. It feels like a challenge into a duel almost, which is insane. It is insane, especially when the people who are
giving you the feedback, they just want to make
the project better. Us as floor humans, we don't think that way. It's not rational the way that we initially react to feedback. So there's things that we can do to mitigate the damage
of their monkey brain. My first big tip is just buffer, is putting time and space
between when you receive feedback and when you
formerly react to it, to take the feedback
and just to sit with it for a while
as long as possible. If you can put a day into it, that can be amazing. That's just to let
all of the initial, like that's never going to work. You don't know what
you're talking about. This is crazy,
that'll never work. You need to get rid of
those very raw nerve ending reactions. You need to let them
simmer down and then start to let it bat
around the brain and go, you know what, actually
maybe that can work. Come to think of it,
that part is a bit sticky and maybe there is a
different way to do that. There's always a
different way to do it. You've just put forward one
particular way of doing it. There's countless,
there's endless, there's limitless versions, knowing that you don't have
to destroy your old version, that you can try something out. That's the mindset that
you want to get into. The other mindset is from the perspective of the
person giving you feedback. It's really easy to sit in your own feelings and how
you think about the project. You just try to put yourself in the client's shoes or the person who's giving you feedback, whoever that is, maybe
that's a friend, maybe that's a colleague, maybe that's also someone who's working on the
project with you. You need to try and put yourself in their shoes a little bit. At the very least, that's
hopefully going to help you see the project from
a different angle, from their angle, that might give you a
little bit insight. That's really hard to do, but it's important to try to do. This is not hard just
in the editing world. This is hard in real life when someone offers you feedback
and you're challenged by it, [NOISE] you're
putting my identity into crisis, but they're not. Usually it's just coming
from a place of love. Sometimes it's not, but you've got to work that out. As F. Gordon, who I love
when he's writing books, he will say thank you before
he responds to each comment. That's a gratefulness mindset, which might seem a
bit wishy-washy. It's making you think
in a different way, whether you actually write that, like thank you for
your comments, or you just say it in
your mind for each point, be like thank you for
thinking about this. Thank you for taking the time to go over this project in depth thinking about ways
you can improve it and then offer that
feedback back to me. Thank you for doing that. At the end of the
day, just remember that it's all subjective. You're just offering
your point of view. It's just your take and it's just one way of doing things. Whoever is offering
you feedback, it's their point of view
and it's there take so they're open to
trying new ways. You might like it better. If you take the client's
comments, enact them, and then the client
turns around and goes, [NOISE] that didn't quite work. It's like they figured out
what you already know, keeping all of that in
mind so you don't react, like an exposed raw nerve,
is super important. You don't want to
be the person that doesn't receive feedback well. You,want to have on the end
of your editing report card, Johnny works well with others. You want to be Johnny, that's what you want to do. A way to hack that
is just to take time to put a bit
of buffer up and then just to try things out [MUSIC].
5. EDITORS BLOCK: Editor's block is not a thing. I didn't think we get
to do that as editors, I think you're just
scared to stop. [MUSIC] First, let's break
down what editor's block is. Historically, I guess it's
just being like a meme across however long were they
making books for centuries. Writers get to a
level of success. The well of creativity and
ideas that they have will dry up and they've had a hit and now they can't
reproduce another one. Why do you think it necessarily
translates to editing? Is that rod is at
trying to come up with something from nothing. A lot of times when
you're editing something, that new novel idea
was many moons ago and now this is the
product of where you're at. The other thing that I think
always that you don't really have a journalist block. Two things that echo with
what we do is edit is, one is a deadline. It's just go and do your head. You got to get it done. I think secondly, as
journalists and editors, we have the source material. What we have to do is start bringing it all
together and stop making sense of it to stop that momentum of putting
together the project. I guess what I want to
put forward is, say, an excuse for writer's
block is just being scared. Being scared to start, being afraid of getting
into the project. Maybe that is fear of failure. Sometimes it can be
a fear of success. From personal experience, sometimes it's just the
magnitude of the project. You can just seem
like a mountain and you don't even want
to start the climb, let alone get out of bed. You just like, it's scary. I don't know what it's
going to be like. I'm just going to stay here
where it's nice and warm. You're afraid that you're not
going to know what to do. You're afraid that it was lightning in a bottle
that you worked with the client before
and now that you are going to work with them again, and I was so happy with
what you did last time. While I want to squash the
idea of a editors block, I don't want to
squash the idea of being afraid to start or being overwhelmed with
expectations for a project. I think that's very real. I definitely know and
have been guilty of procrastination before
starting a project. If there's one takeaway that
I've learned, just start. Just get in there no matter how massive the edit mountain
may seem. Just get into it. Your brain just
instinctively gets to work. Most of the time
the editors, we're just amazing pattern
recognition machines. Often you'll get in
and you're like, man, I didn't know this is
all over the place. I don't know how this is
going to come together and all of a sudden
it's one thing, and the next thing
you are like, hey, wait, those things go together. I think at that point
you're off to the races. That's what you have to do and you pick up some
bits and pieces, you're like, this is all
junk, this is all junk. Neck minute, a little
piece of gold. Do you know there's one and two? That's like, well, actually, I can maybe make something
out of this and then a couple of hours go by
and what do you note? [MUSIC]
6. PRODUCTIVITY: I like to set a timer
on my phone for an hour and 33 minutes. I think if it's
[MUSIC] a little weird it helps stick in your brain. [MUSIC] I like to give myself three
minutes to settle down, do the shuffling
and the moving and the last checks and
stuff just before you finally get in and
do the deep work. Cal Newport deep work,
that is awesome. That's what we do as editors, get in the zone. That can be really hard to do. Put my phone on to do not
disturb mode, no distractions. Allow yourself to get in there. Give yourself a break after that amount of time to
get up, walk around, have lunch, go for a long walk, call a friend,
whatever you want to do once that time is up. It's a long time and
then it's also not. A really good day
for me editing, I think is getting through
three chunks of those. It's not going to always work, always going to be feeling the magic flowing
through your veins. But I have found that you
can hack your way into it. It comes eventually
maybe it's 15 minutes, and maybe it's half an hour, and maybe it's an hour in, but you will
eventually get there. Putting the timer on can sometimes be a reminder
for you to get up to take a break
because you get into a state of flow and you
forget what time it is. You forget to eat or
have a drink of water, or whatever it is because
you're so into it. If you that into it and
you've got the time just hit reset after an hour and a half
if you want and go again. That's always sweet if
you there, amazing. If not, take a little break and your subconscious is
going to keep working. That's fine. I think it's
the Pomodoro technique. I think that's 25
minutes on and then five minutes off,
whatever you want. The hottest part
generally starting, setting the timer is just like
you can't cheat yourself. You can't pretend that you're
working when you're not. [MUSIC]
7. WORKAROUNDS: If you nest something and
then duplicate the sequence, then I close down your
computer and do 10 star jumps, all of a sudden,
it just magically works and the error goes away. That's a workaround. [MUSIC] Editing seems to
be right with workaround. Let's say you get
an error of death. It just pops up and you're like, what? I don't get this. This makes no sense. I mean like jump online, you're like get your
black belt in Google Foo. [NOISE] You like deep like
fifth page into a forum. You've tried out like five
or six of the "correct solution" that has
that green check-mark, and you're like, that's ****,
that didn't work for me, eventually find
something that works, that is the life of an editor. So often there's better
ways to do things, but we just get really good at doing things the
way that we do it. That's a workaround in itself. There's pros and
cons to workarounds. I think that short-term
workarounds are fantastic. I think long-term, they're dumb. I don't think you should
get really good or really quick at doing something just because it's the only
way you know how. I think if you're going to
do something repetitively, I think it is worth
investing some time into learning if there's a
better way to do something. Here's a little example. When I was an assistant editor, I would prep projects
for a senior editor. He was lovely. Brian, [NOISE] shout out to you baby. He would get me to
take all the media and put it into sequences. His argument was that
if he had to look at clips in a bin one-by-one, let's just say there
was 100 clips and the time it takes to
move your mouse, to go and click, to wait
for that thing to load, for it to pop up and
then to watch it. Let's say it's a big file, so it takes a long time to load. Let us say that's like three seconds and you're
doing that for 100 clips, that's 300 seconds. You're saving five minutes
just with the a 100 clips. Now let's say
that's like a 1,000 clips that you're
burning through, that's close to an hour
just waiting for [NOISE] to load. That's insane. You have that hour
of the course of a week over the
course of a project. This was like a
multi-month project that we were working on,
that [NOISE] adds up. If you're just
using a workaround once or twice, I
think that's fine. If it's like for some
reason if I nest it, the error goes away. If I copy everything
into a new sequence, the error goes away. If you need to get it done, if you need to get
something off the line, the workaround is fine. This is like an ongoing thing that's going to
plague you over time. I think take a little bit
of time now to sort it out. It's going to save
you in the long run. You might learn a thing or two, that's going to help
your overall system, maybe your overall
workflow get better. The same goes for
media management or investing in your hardware or investing in your software, maybe like shuffling
media around and having 50 hard drives. It's good now because it works and you're jumping from
project to project. But over the long term, it's probably better to invest in some file management system. That's my rant on workarounds. It's the nature of the
base. I totally get it. I use hundreds of them, but I'm also continually trying
to iron out the kings and I'm trying to get rid of
them and I'm trying to search for is there
a better way? [MUSIC]
8. DEADLINES: Let's say you're 12 hours out from a deadline and
you have to deliver a major project to a big client. No matter how organized you are or how good your
time management is, you're going to
find your head on the chopping block
and it's going to come down to a final
sprint and you are going to have to do
everything in your power to get whatever you're trying
to do over the line. When that inevitably happens, here are a few things that
you could and probably should do to stay alive
when on deadline. [MUSIC] Now I think
this advice holds up, even if you're working on
an individual project, even if it's just you
against the world. I still think having someone in the trenches with
you is a great idea. This can be physically, as in literally having someone around even if they're
doing their own work. I think that that
is super valuable. Or virtually, maybe
it's someone else who's a night owl so you know
they're going to be awake, and checking in with them
throughout the night. Having someone
else on your team, even if they're not
contributing to the project, but they're just
propping you up, I think that that is crucial. Make sure you have
someone in your corner. [MUSIC] Let your friends and family know that
you're on deadline. Set that expectation
and set that boundary. I'm pleading with
you, please do it. Just letting people know that, I'm not ignoring you,
I'm ignoring everybody. [LAUGHTER] It's too real. It's only funny
because it hurts. You might need certain people to check in on you and you might need certain other people to
leave you the **** alone. Whatever it is, just
let the people know. [MUSIC] I think this
is so practical. I've made the mistake
before of having a big claggy, deep fried, carby meal and then
hours later just being like, Oh, God. I get that post
Christmas lunch feeling of all right it's time
for me to hibernate now. My advice would
be smaller meals, let's say some lean protein if you want to get
into specifics. After each little
milestone in the project, I want to give myself something. It might be as simple as I'm
going to call a friend and have some nuts when I finish
this part of the project. If you get a snack, just small snacks
throughout the night, make it nice and consistent, keep that energy
level on the level. [MUSIC] I love a cold room just because I run hot
and I'm sweaty beast. But if you're trying to
pull off an all nighter, cool room or even a
slightly chilly room might actually be good for you. Now here's the science, or should I say pseudoscience if it's
coming out of my mouth, a warm room is going to cause
a drop in blood pressure, low blood pressure causes
fatigue and drowsiness, fatigue and drowsiness
cause sleepiness, and sleepiness is the enemy. You don't want to be doing that. You want to keep it chilly. [MUSIC] I am a master nap taker, but not everyone can nap. Some people can't nap, if they do nap, they nap for two hours, which is really not a
nap, that's a sleep. What I'll do is I'll
have a coffee nap. I'll have a coffee and then
I'll set the timer for 16 minutes because coffee takes 20 minutes to take effect. It's just a nice reboot or
refresh for your brain. Twenty minutes if you can, I know not everyone can. [MUSIC] You can do anything, you are the greatest
of all time. I think sometimes it's
important to zoom out, especially when you're in
the weeds of something, and be like, why
am I doing this? What does it all mean? Why are we here? Just zooming out a little bit bigger than the project that is absolutely killing you
at this very point in time, for me, can be really helpful. Sometimes it helps me refocus. A lot of times it's
enough for me to just to stop worrying about
the sleep factor, to be like I'll be able
to sleep in a day or so, I'll be able to
sleep down the line, but this project, this
opportunity that I have now, this can mean so much more
for me in the future. This is tapping into
something a lot bigger than just this short-term hurt
that I'm feeling right now. The way memory works, my brain is probably going to erase all of this pain anyway, and I'm not even going to
be able to remember that. I'm just going to have this
beautiful finished project at the end of it and that's all I'm going to be
able to remember. [MUSIC] Coffee and Red Bull definitely have their place in the all nighter toolkit. They definitely
have their limits and their diminishing returns, and then after that,
they can be quite harmful to what you're
actually trying to achieve. As a coffee addict,
I can tell you after four or five cups, the effect essentially
becomes redundant. If you're like me
right now that's had one too many coffees, it becomes extremely
hard to focus, and that is what you want
to be doing in the crunch. Onto my second point, which is drink [NOISE]
a ton of water. Now, you should
probably be drinking more water than you are anyway. I don't know many
people in my life that drink anywhere
near enough water. But if you're going to
be pushing yourself mentally and physically, make sure you up
your water game. [MUSIC] I'm
susceptible, I'm human, I find it hard to stay away from lollies and candy
if they're around. Yes, you might have a little short-term uptick in energy, a little sugar spike, but of course what
goes up must come down and you're going
to have a sugar crash. My advice is stay
away from the snakes, stay away from the bears, both sugar and wildlife related. You're already up against it, don't make a sugar crash just another thing that you have
to battle your way through to get the project over the line. [MUSIC] I'm going to tell
you to take a break. I know, absolutely
revolutionary. But my slight little
challenge to you, especially on deadline,
is to take a clean break. It's probably
easier if I explain what I think a dirty break is. A dirty break is when you
get out this thing and you open up the social
media apps and then you just scroll and
scroll and scroll. All of a sudden it's been 20
minutes and you don't feel any better than you did when
you first took your break, you'll probably feel even worse. Your clean break might
involve one of these. Ever heard of these
things called books? They're fantastic. I recommend this sucker,
Brave New World. Your clean break definitely
can involve this sucker. I just want you
to use your phone rather than be used by it. This is another thing that I
think that you should do in your clean break,
involves outside. Take this thing out,
dial a number of somebody you love
and talk to them, I don't know, about anything. Talk to them about
the project or maybe talk to them about anything
outside the project. I know as much as it's so easy, It's such a crutch to
be able to just dive into your phone and
check out some memes. Getting outside and
doing some activity, talking to someone you love, you can do some squats
and listen to a podcast, you could dance to your favorite music, it
doesn't really matter. I think just being intentional about taking an actual break, a clean break rather
than a dirty scroll, scroll, scroll,
scroll, scroll break. [MUSIC]
9. DECISION FATIGUE: Decision fatigue
is a real thing. I'm not advising you do
a Steve Jobs and wear exactly the same turtleneck
everyday but being aware of this concept might
help you stop making as many bad decisions
and also protect the relationships
with clients and those regular humans
around you that love you. [MUSIC] This is a lesson that took me many
years to understand. I feel like I worked
it out myself. I didn't discover the
idea of decision fatigue. I'm just saying I discovered
it for myself in editing. As an editor,
essentially what you are is a decision maker. That's what you're doing
all day, every day. You're making hundreds, if
not thousands of decisions. Some very big-macro decisions and then heaps and heaps and heaps of micro-decisions that are just as important
as the macro. You're just making
decisions all day, every day and that takes a toll. What I started to find when
I was working day in and day out on the sport
documentaries, by the time I got home, I was just so done. I was just not helpful in
making any decisions at all. He's mage is gone. Honestly, it doesn't matter. It doesn't, who cares. That's not me. I knew something was up making decisions
all day, every day. I had just used up my quota. What would you
would say nowadays is that I had no more to give. [NOISE] I was spent, I was done just quickly
on decision fatigue, it dovetails in nicely with
the paradox of choice, which is just the overwhelm you get when there's just so
many things to choose from. As an antidote, it's like your life is the
paradox of choice. A couple of ways
I think that you can protect yourself
against this. People often talk about having, say a morning routine,
something that's regimented. I think probably
back in the day, just being addicted to
the novel and being, don't put me in a box. I always thought that
was like a crazy idea. Now that I'm old [LAUGHTER]
it's like this is lovely. It's like I know what
I'm going to do. I'm don't even have
to think about it. I just do all the things
that I like doing. If it's exercise,
if it's coffee, if it's reading something
or journaling, meditation, there's all these
groovy things but getting that done,
the building blocks, but then not having
to think about them, gets you out of the
gate really well. That's non editing. I think doing big blocks of deep work where there's
no distractions, you're fully in while you're
fresh, super important. Then maybe coming back
online later in the day, you don't want to do all your
busy work first and use up all your brain juice and then get to the end of
the day and just be, yeah, I really shouldn't have let this heavy lifting till
now because I am spent. That definitely happens all
the time. It's really hard. This is the really
hard thing to manage, but I guess that's
my third point is just being aware of it. I think if you're going into
a big cycle of editing, say you're going into
post production on a big project, a longer project, communicating with those around
you, those that you love, that you might just be a bit trash for the
next couple of weeks. They might be able to
cut you a little bit of slack or they might just give you
that little bit of buffer that you need. You finish a day of editing and your brain is just
a dried-up sponge. Don't leave any
big life decisions after 03:00 PM. Don't do it. The sun goes down, you go down, wait till you wake up. You're filled with juice and
you're ready to go again.
10. DELIVERY: Nothing says amateur hour like exporting media offline
or watermarked footage. [MUSIC] At any point, you are going to
want to watch out for some amateur mistakes. Let's quickly just bash
through a couple of them. Black frames. It's going to happen
when you have a cut between two pieces of footage. [NOISE] If you're
working in Premiere Pro, you can actually
go in any one of the menu items and there's
like a detect black frame, that taps into a bigger thing which is just not watching back your exports enough times before you send them
off out into the world. Usually, this will
happen because you're in a rush
to the deadline, you want to get it out,
and you're like, ah, it's sweet, I've watched
it a bunch of times, it'll be fine, let's just get it out,
let's get it done. The thing is, even though
you've seen it heaps of times, maybe hundreds of times, you only have that one shot to make that first impression, even if it's only a draft, you can leave the
client or whoever is watching with a sour
taste in their mouth, you need to make sure that
you don't have media offline, you don't have
watermarked footage. I call that my made lucky, and I said, what are some
other amateur hour mistakes? He said, not doing like an audio mix before
you send it out. If you've only been listening to playback through headphones, maybe take your headphones
out and listen to playback through the laptop
or your computer only, or some speakers, put some [NOISE]
little headphones in. If you've only been editing
on your computer screen, maybe export and then
watch on your phone, that might be how your client or someone's going to watch it. Another cool thing I like to do, which is to treat to myself is once you get to
the export stage, watch an export back
on the big screen. If you have a TV, also
if you have a projector, even better, get some popcorn, sit back, relax and enjoy, you don't have to
go to that extreme, that's nice for a final export, but even just to
take a minute and to watch it on the big
screen is super-helpful. I can't tell you how many times I've got some people
in and be like, hey, can you watch that? Then like 10 seconds
in I'm like, [NOISE] there's something there. I don't know what that is, but when you have some eyes, like over the shoulder, you see different
things, it's weird. I don't know if your eyes
go like exploring to the edges of the screen or something, I didn't
know what happens, but I'd always pick up on like one or two things
that I'm like, oh, I need to I need to change that before that goes
out anywhere else. My made lucky also said, if you're doing a
video for a client, make sure that the final
frame is their logo, not that the final
frame is black wherever your out point is
on your export, maybe that is just one frame too far from the
end of the logo, and so you're going
to end on black, but he said he's
been in a room with a client that's showing
them the video, who they're all
watching it in finishes and instead of finishing
with their logo and then they feel good about seeing their logo and all of
their money is spent, is just a black screen. Cool if that's what
you're going for, but if you're not, then it's just like everyone's
just sitting in the dark. Cool. Little things always going to slip
through the cracks, it does happen, but a way to set yourself apart and show that you
do pay attention to detail as you should as
an editor is to take the time to watch back your exports before
you send them on. [MUSIC]
11. CROSS TRAINING: You've probably heard of
cross-training for fitness. If you're a runner,
you might pick up some weights and
pump some iron. You might go for a swim
to improve your cardio or you might go to a yoga class to get a
really good stretching. [MUSIC]. Why cross train? Well, it's a chance to give
your much worn out muscles a rest if you're using
them all the time for your main sport or activity. It can balance our
body in balances. It can add variety to worn
out routines if you're a professional and
you've been doing the same thing over
and over again. It's a chance to mix it up, and it can stop plateaus or that's at least what the
research leads me to believe. What cross training
isn't is it's not just everything that's
not your main activity. It's something that complements
your core competency. I've got a few ideas to shake
up your editing routine, and to really flex your storytelling
muscles that you mightn't have stretched
in a little while. Be a client, see what it's like on the other side of the glass. Hire an editor, so this means you'll be giving instructions rather
than interpreting them. This means that you'll be giving feedback rather than
trying to implement it. By working with another editor, you see how they operate, and you find out ways
in which they're really good and maybe areas they need
to improve and vice versa. You will figure out areas that, actually I could do a
lot better in that area. Mix up the genre.
If you've been in one lane for a long
time, get out of it. At least get out of
it for one project. If you're used to bashing
out corporate videos, maybe make a music video
for a song that you love that doesn't
have a music clip. Or if you're known as
the queen of horror, maybe try your hand at
a comedy commercial. Have a look at all of
your previous work and fill in a genre gap. Switch up the platform. Have you made three long-form
hard-heating documentaries on social injustice in a row? Congratulations.
That's awesome, but maybe try out making a TikTok. Conversely, if all you've
been doing is hitting that low hanging fruit and making clips
for social media, maybe switch it up and try
and sink your teeth into something juicy for a
newsy type media outlet. Switching up the platforms
or any shakeup that we're talking about here is a really good way to
keep things fresh. Also, it's a really good way to make sure that
your groove and you're staying in
a groove doesn't turn into being in a rut. Spice up the style. This might mean that
you're going to bust open after effects and try your
hand at some animation, or maybe you like the challenge
of telling your story only through archival
photographs. Whatever it is, just bang on some constraints
and spice it up. The constraint might be a silent video or the constraint might be
only black and white. You might want to
make a trailer for your favorite movie
or even spicier, you might want to make
a rom-com trailer for your favorite thriller. Messing with the medium. I got this idea
from Michael Lewis of The Big Short
and Moneyball fame. Michael said that creating his
long-form podcasts against the rules was literary
cross-training for writing his books. He said, "I'm a
better prose writer because I'm working
out these muscles." Telling stories in
different forms can level up your overall
storytelling ability. Instead of editing a video, you might want to
edit a podcast, or edit an article, or edit photos for
a journalism blog. You might even want
to mix a song. There's just so many options to mess around in other mediums. Design. Design a logo for
a friend's side hustle, something that
doesn't have a logo, or design an alternative logo for a company that
you already like. Much of editing is taking a big concept and boiling it
down to its core components. When you're designing a logo, you have to take into
account a company's tone, their vision, their values, what they're actually about. There are so many
choices that you have to consider when making a logo, so much has to go into this really simple
and elegant design. That's why I think it's great
cross-training for editing. Pictograms, I love pictograms. They're so simple and elegant. They're understandable
by anyone anywhere. Example of a pictogram are the little icons that you see
for sports at the Olympics. My challenge to you is
to create pictograms for sports that don't exist
at the Olympics yet, or even just for everyday activities
because why shouldn't there be a pictogram for doom
scrolling on your phone? Craft, try your hand at a
completely different art form. Woodturning and sculpture
are reductive crafts. They take a huge
chunk of raw material and sculpt it into something
functional and funky. They carve it down, they make it beautiful,
and they polish it up. Does that sound like a similar process to anything
else that you and me do? I heard this the other
day and I liked it. It said, "If you
earn with your mind, then you should relax
with your hands." That made sense to me. It's also why woodturning
and pottery or sculpture really
makes sense to me as forms of cross-training
for editing. Writing, it's time to flex
your wit and your concision. You can do this by
writing flash fiction, so that's stories of
1000 words or less. A bit legend has it that Ernest Hemingway wrote
a six-word story, for sale: baby
shoes, never worn. Extreme brevity while packing a punch is what these
short shots are all about. You don't want to
waste a single word, you want to do more with less. Whatever cross-training
tickles your fancy, it's going to improve your
overall storytelling ability. Learning about a new audience or messing around on
a new platform, any form of complementary
communication that you dive into is a really good way to spice up your editing life. Getting out of your
little editing bubble can be really exciting. It can also remind you
of why we started doing this thing in the first
place because it's super fun and it's
super creative. I think it's really
important to get outside of your editing comfort zone
because every time you do so, you build new editing muscles. Each one of these
cross-training adventures helps build up your
editing toolkit, I think. It's fun at the very least and can get you out of
a funk. Good luck. [MUSIC].
12. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Not all rabbit holes are bad, sometimes you want to
go on a deep dive, you want to swim in the ocean, that is your hero. It's just not a bad thing,
puts them floaties on, and then swim it up, Johnny. [MUSIC] Doing a deep dive on your filmmaking
idols and video heroes, I think is a really
good use of your time. You want to do what Austin Kleon describes as stealing
like an artist. Picking things you like and discarding things
that you don't like, incorporating them
into your own work, remixing them into
your own work, it can be really fun, but it also can be
really inspiring and educational to take a deep dive into the back catalog of
artists that you like. Well, some ways to
do that, obviously, you can start wherever
the 12-year-old starts their homework projects
and that's Wikipedia. Find out about them,
find out about their early work,
their career path, things that inspire them, people that inspire them, for other tangental
rabbit holes. Also getting an understanding of the thinking behind
it all is great, you get that in articles
and interviews. When it specifically
comes to editing, I think a great way is
maybe to watch something that you really like again
and again and again, and if you're an editor
and you can't do that, then you might be
in the wrong field. Instead of doing
this mindlessly, maybe try and do
it intentionally. Watch it the first time
for pure enjoyment, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Next time maybe
get ready to take some notes and take
some time codes down to come back to things that you want to
explore a little bit more. I find, if I'm watching
things on YouTube, watching it at 0.25
speed is amazing. If there's some very
intricate things that you want to break down and see what's happening within a shot or within a
certain transition, if they've done something
cool and you're like, how did they do that? Song it right down, almost frame by frame. You can work out a
lot of things and you can see a lot of cuts that get glossed over when you're watching playback
at regular speed. A great thing to do
is to try and get your hands on the
script and to see what has changed between the final script
to the final edit, seeing what they've done, and then questioning
why did they chop out 11 lines just here,
that's crazy. If you have the script, and you're following
along with the script, and then you're
watching the final version and you the scene have been moved around or
dialogues being moved around, can that give you an insight into the decisions
that have been made? It might pose more
questions than answers, but I think it's a
really good exercise. I think for an editor, maybe the ultimate and maybe the most sacred thing to see is another
editor's timeline. It's almost like seeing
the editor naked. It's quite rare that you get
the opportunity to do that. You just see the
final version and you don't get to see everything
that's gone into it. Seeing a whole timeline laid
out it's like it's super amazing and being able
to go through and see layer by layer,
that's sweet. I did this a bunch when I
was an assistant editor. I would have to open
up someone else's project there in
the middle of it. I think that's not very kosher, but an old project that
is dead and buried, kicked that thing back
into life and blow off the cobwebs and
see what went down. This practice is
going to make you a better editor for one, but it's also going
to relieve ignoring tension of how did they do that. If you can't get that
answer from the editor, then you're just going to
have to use trial and error, you're going to
have to experiment, you still have to come up with
your own ways of creating that sick effect or
transition or whatever it is. You got it, I believe in you. [MUSIC]
13. PHILOSOPHY: I think it's important to
have an editing philosophy, just like North Star. [MUSIC] If you're
just starting out, I don't think it's super
important just keep throwing spaghetti against the
wall and see if it sticks. That I think it's
really the cage, just numbers, just doing
as much as you can. But over time, I
think you've got to work out what you're all about, what makes you you. This has a lot to do with style in developing your installing. I feel a lot of the time
what I'm defined by is more like what I don't
like and what I'm not. It's like very hipster to
be like, I'm not that, oh I hate that, I
didn't do that, without actually
just being like, well this is what I stand for. What do I mean by
editing philosophy Rish, from Song Exploder
Hrishikesh Hirway, sorry Rish, allow him to bits. His podcast is just phenomenal. He is a musician, but he's just this
amazing editor as well. He does breakdowns of songs
about how they came about, so is the origin and he
also takes stems from the songs and for
each part of a song, he interviews the artist about what it means and then
why they did it that way. It's an editing masterclass
in and of itself. I heard him talk and I got to ask him once he's
editing philosophy. I bumbled along and I was like, how do you take these two
and a half hour interviews and then boil them down
to 60 minutes because I know listening with a little bit of an educated ear
that there's a lot of reshuffling and there's
a lot of cutting and Rish showing how much
of a superstar he is, he just said " Edit
with empathy." Wow, it blew my mind. Think about what makes the
subject sound the best. They've given up their time, they're sharing their story and so you want to
get that across. Sometimes people feel weird
in front of a camera. Who would know? It doesn't come out right. Maybe they're nervous, maybe their brain's going a million miles an hour and
it doesn't come out properly. It's our job as editors
to mold that to make sure you're
thinking and you're editing from the right place. That really rock with me and
that has stayed with me. I just have one other example
and that's Ken Burns. He's the godfather
of documentary. The Ken Burns effective
pictures and it zooms in, it's called the
Ken Burns effect. That's how you know you're the big daddy because there's a whole effect
named after you. Isn't there Basil effect? This doesn't exist,
maybe one day. Above his editing workstations, is a neon sign that says,
"it's complicated." I think that that's so perfect. If it was simple, if it was easy, then we would be out of a job. The whole reason why we're doing this is because
it's complicated. His it's complicated, it is very different from mine, it's complicated, but
it's still rings true. That's just two of my favorite
editing philosophies. I'm still trying to
work out what mine is. It's okay if you
don't have yours, or you haven't even
thought about yours, and it might be
worth researching other people's North Stars, this is the reason why we do what we do [MUSIC].
14. RECOGNITION: No one's walking out
of a movie going, oh my God that's
amazing editing. Did you see that?
She just with this, that amazing editing that is never happened in the
history of the world. [MUSIC] If you're all
about the recognition, then editing is
probably not for you. When editing is amazing, you don't notice it,
that's the thing. You only really notice
editing when it's bad or when it's really over the top and you can make
an argument for both, that neither one is ideal. I'm not saying it goes
unnoticed by everybody. People in the know, know, when you get really insightful, lovely feedback, save
from someone who recognizes what you've done doesn't mean a lot
when it happens. In fact, didn't nobody
in the general public has a favorite editor that they can rattle off a bunch of
famous directors and actors, even though you would not
have any of those movies with that super
talented editors, it's just the nature
of the beast. You shouldn't let
that get you down. You can still get high
praise when someone recognizes what you do and how amazing it is when you
take a flaming pile of hot tub and make
it into something magical that doesn't
go unnoticed. You have just proved
yourself to be invaluable that's the position
that I think you want to get to as an editor. You want to become indispensable
and you want to be thought of as part
of that dream team. That you have directors
and cinematographers, and then you want to be
part of that being, well, we're not going to
do this project without insert editor here. Hopefully that can be you, even if you don't make films, if you're just making videos, if you just editing stuff
that you've shot yourself, this is still applicable. So often, what we
attribute to a good video, a lot of the time
is great editing. It just goes unnoticed. Steal my best bud who
I make videos with. We just have a lot of
in jokes which has come over time and now
we can laugh at it. At the time it's painful. A couple of these
quick examples. We worked with some talent
who was pretty trashed, so we just knew it was going
to be a nightmare in posts. We cut the **** out of it. I remember showing it to
the client and they were, "Oh my God what an amazing
speaker they are?" It's just have to laugh because
you don't want to throw the talent under the bus and you don't want to get
all high and mighty and be, yeah, he took hours of work
to get it to that point. It's just something that we
laugh and now being like, if you only knew. Another example of
that, is by watching a video back with a client, the client pauses the video
and turns to us and was, when the Lyric said, it's time to begin and then the race started,
how lucky is that? The thought wasn't
that we had spend so much time to pick
the song for one, and then to scrub through
hours of footage really getting into the
intricacies of the edit. The thought was
that's really lucky. That's a little thing that
we've taken and we flip around when we put
in so much work to make sure something is
seamless and it goes unnoticed and so often I'll just turn to deal and I'll be,
how lucky is that? That's just a little
in joke for us to be, hey, I see you, I see what you've done there. Maybe with the watching IQ of the audiences
going up and up and up, folks might be able
to realize that is amazing editing,
it's great pacing. We might get there,
make sure you sharing out to other
editors and be, I see you, I see what
you're doing there. I liked it. I loved it. Keep it up. [MUSIC]
15. OUTRO: [MUSIC] Folks, you did it. You learned all about
the soft skills that make an editor indispensable.
Here's the rub. Soft skills are really
hard to develop. Some might come
easier than others. Some might be quite natural because that's the way
human nature works. But whether you suck or you rock at being an
excellent communicator, navigating feedback
like a ninja, crashing productivity
like an AI robot, smashing through editor's block, ironing out workarounds,
staying alive on deadline, factoring in decision fatigue, dominating the delivery process, or building up your
editing muscles, internalizing your editing
heroes or falling in love with the intrinsic
value of beautiful editing, it's working and
you're going to have a long and prosperous
editing career so you've got plenty
of time to practice. Good luck developing
those skills. Thank you for your time,
and happy editing.
Basil Gerard, Video & Podcasts
