When I was at film school, a tutor said that I had “a natural talent for editing”. Many years later and I’m still undecided on whether he was right or not. At the time I felt that I’d simply spent years (this was an MA course) learning about filmmaking and the craft of editing, and that I had no particular innate talent.
I also remember a moment early in my career where a Producer I was working with explained that an Editor he’d worked with on some other project had been able to create unexpected magic from the footage. I assumed that he was comparing my own abilities unfavourably to this other Editor!
Paddy Bird’s Inside the Edit podcast included an episode asking much the same question. He described how, very early in his career, he would speak to older, much more experienced Editors, many of whom would tell him that “You either got it or you don’t, kid”. After six months of looking at his own work, thinking that he obviously didn’t have “it”, and being demoralised by their comments, he began to wonder if they thought this because they’d never had to explain or articulate why they did what they did, and so assumed that it was simply innate.
Lessons from teaching
In teaching and tutoring editing students, and in building course content for the website, I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about the skills I believe editors need, how you can explain them, and how budding editors can acquire and develop them. However, the more that time goes on, the more I begin to wonder if there are some things that can be taught, but others that can’t.
I sometimes run workshops for students where they all edit the same material, so I see many different versions of a scene, and many different approaches to the same challenges. The same when it comes to our Shaping a Scene course. Many of them, being students, are still very much learning what to do with material, and how they can form it into a scene. Within each group though, there are usually 2-3 students whose scenes feel very different.
Obviously, a scene from a scripted drama is simply a collection of moments, shot sometimes across several hours, or even days, assembled into something that is intended to feel temporally coherent.
Most students struggle to get their scenes to move beyond simply feeling like a collection of moments, but a select few are able to create scenes which come to life. I’ve started referring to this distinction as the Frankenstein moment, where a collection of parts has its own soul.
Professional or Amateur?
I increasingly feel like the ability to do this is what separates the professionals from the amateurs.
Perhaps this is what that Producer failed to see in my work, but my tutor recognised several years later? If that was the case, what changed over that time? Did I learn to edit? Did I somehow unlock the talent that was within me? I don’t honestly know.
I’d also been thinking about Directors and Producers I’d worked with who had, and didn’t have, one crucial skill that I really don’t think it’s possible to learn. Taste. I’d define taste as an ability to identify what’s “good”. As a sort of sixth sense that tells someone whether or not something will work for a viewer.
Think of an interior design show, where the designer has the ability to create within a space a coherent aesthetic that makes us feel certain things through a combination of elements.
This is much the same as the job of a filmmaker, choosing which things to add, which to remove, and where to put them in order to create an emotional effect.
So what’s the takeaway from this? If you’re an Editor or a budding Editor, what should you be doing to learn and grow?
It’s clear that editing is a complicated job, and there is a lot of information about what the job entails and how the world of post-production works which it’s beneficial to have. Without that knowledge and understanding, whatever natural talents you have will probably fail to be utilised.
I try to teach this knowledge here on the site, on twitter, on my courses, or in my teaching work, but there are many things I can’t teach, things which you can only really learn by practicing. Think of a Tennis coach, or a Quarterback guru, teaching proper mechanics to a willing athlete. Even if they listen, and understand, it’s up to them to absorb and put this into practice.
I can teach theory about taste, rhythm, comic timing or the ability to spot opportunities in material, but it’s up to you the Editor to figure out how to synthesise them into your own work, to develop the instincts in order to tell a story in an organic way.
What should you be learning?
So, if there are things that you can’t “teach”, are there things you CAN learn, or at least develop? Is there a difference between things you can be taught and things you can only learn for yourself? Lionel Messi was a standout player as a child, but how many 9-year-olds can you confidently predict will become a professional athlete?
I think this comes back to the nature or nurture debate too. How much of a professional’s ability is down to sheer talent, and how much is down to hard work over years and decades in order to hone that talent, to build their craft?
Anybody who watches football/soccer knows that there are young players who have “all the talent in the world”, but never seem to quite make that step up and have the career everybody thought them capable of. Usually, this is put down to a lack of work ethic, or focus, and they’re accused of taking their talent for granted and getting distracted by other things.
Messi is Messi partly because of his natural talent, but also because of his hard work, his professionalism, and his drive to reach his potential. If you feel you have a natural talent for editing, or even just a desire to do it, you will have to accept at some point that making a career out of it will require years, if not decades, of dedication.
Like Paddy, you may feel that you don’t quite have “it”, but he went on to build a long and extremely successful career as an award-winning editor, so who’s to say that he did or didn’t? The only thing you can be sure of is that hard work is a prerequisite, regardless of whether you, or anybody else, think you have the natural talent to be an Editor.
So focus on the things you can develop and acquire. Find out how the industry works, learn the grammar of film and TV, understand how to build relationships with Directors, how to operate the software, how other people shape scenes and tell stories, what behavior separates the professionals from the amateurs, and know that knowledge and understanding is not a destination, but a journey of discovery.
If you want to learn more about what separates professional editors from the amateurs, check out our eBook looking at 53 Ways to Act Like a Professional Editor.