The creative use of space

[Shawn Miller]

[Mark Suszko] “Powerpoint slides from clients are the bane of my existence: every client acts as if they’re going to be charged by the individual slide, so they overload them until they look like the hood of a NASCAR racer, or they cram thirty columns of Excel Spreadsheet into one slide. You have to hold them by the hand and almost force them to break down their bullet points and ideas over more slides, so that the typography is large enough to read and understand, with enough clear space around it to frame it.”

All of this! I’m still having these same conversations with people after 15 years.

[Mark Suszko] “And back to the edit: even in something as short as a “vine” video, you need to play with beats of time to make the story or joke work… you’re working in a micro time scale, but the issues of timing in making the story work are the same.”

Absolutely! This is especially true for me when cutting interviews and promos. I still spend time cutting audio, re-ordering music and timing pauses so that splashes and break beats underscore talking points, just like I did a decade ago – the only difference is that these videos are now one to three minutes long, instead of six to 10 minutes… that, and people want a lot more b-roll and graphics than they did before.

Shawn

[Simon Ubsdell]

Really interesting post. And I like that you bring up architecture.

Architecture is a metaphor that I find myself using a lot for editing, perhaps because we don’t actually have a dedicated language in the film world for what we are talking about here.

I found myself talking about “space” in my original post, and of course I didn’t actually mean space except metaphorically.

The architecture of editing, unlike the other visual arts, is such that “space” is in fact time.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki