JD Photography

This has nothing to do with Amazon. It has to do with football and the quarterback changing the play at the line of scrimmage because he didn’t like what he saw the defense doing.

Well, I had a script, I shot my footage for the script and began my editing. I realize, I don’t care for what I wrote and the footage can tell a different story I care about more.

I’ve been reading The Bare Bones Camera Course For Film and Video by Tom Schroeppel. In Chapter 10 he writes, “Start the editing process by divorcing yourself from the person who directed the program, even if that person is you. Think of him or her as some stranger whose ideas and shots you will judge strictly on their own merit. Look at the script and the pictures and sounds as if for the first time.”

In my recent project I not only directed, but I wrote the script and operated the camera. If this were a major production I know the work on script would have been handled well before production began.

In this case I called an audible when I started to edit. My original story focused on some major historical events that happened in my hometown. Several of those buildings still stand and I was able to get some great footage. Old New England churches with steeple that reach to the heavens looked amazing, and I had a great quote from John Adams about that exact church and steeple.

I’m a sucker for a good story. I feel good storytelling is lacking in our culture because so many cinematic features are about the action and stunts and VFX. Those things are cool and awesome, but give me a good old fashioned story to get me all up in my feelings. Just joking, slightly.

This has to be paramount in the editors mind. An action story will be edited differently than a romantic drama. This leads to a great point to discuss, pacing.

Sue Apfelbaum writes in her article, An Introduction to Pacing and Rhythm, published on Dissolve.com, “Movies are a time-based medium, and pacing is an essential element of your storytelling craft. Pacing is how you progress the story over time. You could present it in actual, real time — when the action taking place and the recording of it are 1:1 — or manipulate it in extreme ways, such as compressing a two-week cross-country road trip into a six-minute time-lapse short.”

Just as a dancer to music, so is an editor to a story. It’s a dance, leading the audience through visual and audio storytelling.

I watched my footage and I had to change up my story. I went with talking about the cove. There is a story I had overlooked and I had footage to be able to go along with that story. It became meaningful for me because I need to hear this story on replay and repeat.

I wrote The Cove so I could slow down. Take a few minutes in nature and unwind. The history is great, but I need to slow down and appreciate where I am before I get busy again and lose sight of the important things in life.

Even after writing a new script, I still made edits. Keeping things simple isn’t a bad thing to a beginning editor. Sometimes what the work needs is simple cuts, audio, and a story.