As an Editor of low-budget feature films, you will have a lot of conversations with Producers about their upcoming projects. They will usually turn the subject pretty quickly to schedules, with the intention of discussing how long you (and they) think it might take to edit the film. So what should you say? A Common…
Category: Concepts
The Importance of Understanding the Director’s Vision
As well as being a film nerd, I’m a sports nerd too. As a long-time fan of the NFL and the other sport also known as football, I’m fascinated by what makes a good team good, and a bad team not good. I don’t mean just the players, but the organisation as a whole. It’s…
How to Edit a Film Trailer
There are different ways to edit a film trailer, depending on the film and the material you have available. Doing something distinctive and interesting is always to be encouraged, but here’s how I approach putting together a “conventional” trailer. Who Cuts Trailers? Trailers are generally not edited by those who are working directly on the…
Using a Three-Act Structure for Non-Narrative Projects
There are a lot of non-filmmaking fields that talk about “narrative”, or “telling your story”. Companies are encouraged to get into the business of story-telling in order to sell themselves to customers, but what are the story-telling skills that you as a professional storyteller can apply, and how can you use a three-act structure to…
How and Why do Film Editors Externalize the Internal?
Most mainstream films are akin to spectating on sport. If you’re watching as a neutral, and not rooting for anyone, then you’re never quite as engaged as are you when you’re cheering on a team, or backing the underdog. The way a film is edited has a lot of influence over whether or not a…
Tony Tost and the Principles of Dramatic Writing
I always say that film editors and writers are bedfellows. Although our tools are different – words that conjure images and sound for writers, actual images and sound for editors – we’re all trying to do the same thing: engage an audience in a story. TV writer and showrunner Tony Tost (Damnation, The Terror) has…
Information and Emotion
Of all the things I learned in film school, this concept is probably the one I think about the most often. It covers what you could argue are the two primary tasks of the Editor: shaping information, and shaping emotion. Information A narrative film is, to some extent, pieces of information strung out one after…
What does a Film Editor ACTUALLY Do?
I’ve spent a long time (probably too long), trying to figure out how best to describe exactly what it is that a Film Editor does, in a way that feels simple and obvious. I get the impression that it’s seen by many people, both inside and outside the industry, as a “technical”, button-pushing job. This…