Training Editors

[Grinner Hester]

1. 4 years of school and 15 in the field. Still learning something everyday.
2. We learn how to push the buttons but I don’t feel story-telling is somthing taught. I see it as something felt. My favorite edited pieces are done completely different than I would have done them ot rold someone to do them. Bah to conformity.

[Nina Staum]

Grinner, I definitely agree that storytelling is something that is felt rather than taught, but I’m starting to think that, for a lot of people, just feeling it isn’t enough. I’ve taught a bunch of editing workshops at the local film co-op, and it seems to me that most people have no trouble finding some sort of flow. But what does it take to convert that feeling into a well-edited piece?

Although my taste hasn’t changed much in the past 5 years, my ability to make work I’m happy with has increased substantially. Part of it is the confidence to question a script and decide what’s needed to make it a good project. Part of it is knowing your gear well enough that you can free your brain up for creative thinking. The tricky part is channeling that “feel” into the Avid, and I’m curious about how people have learned to do that.

[Tim Kolb]

I’m actually not positive I agree that the equipment has to be learned before the brain can do creative thinking…I think it’s a matter of priority.

I had a young guy just out of college come in for his second interview with his project reel and all that and we sat down and talked a bit and we were none-too-stealthily working toward me making an offer when the subject of our equipment came up. I answered his question and told him we had two Media 100 suites (this was the mid-late 90s) and he turned white… He said very quietly “oh…I learned…Avid…” I could tell he figured that would put a stop to things…repressing my urge to laugh, I added…”but…I am concerned about one thing…what sort of a car do you drive?”

He looked at me strangely and said “a Volkswagen” and I put on my best concerned look and said “well you know, editors assist on shoots quite often and we have Chrysler vans…have you ever driven a Chrysler van?”

He looked at me some more and trying to be as sincere as possible he said “well…driving is pretty much driving once you learn where the controls are…”. I smiled and said “yes, it is and in two weeks, you’ll be driving these Media 100s wondering what you were worried about.”

And he did, and in two weeks I stepped into the B suite where he was and reminded him of it.

To be perfectly honest, editing systems aren’t that difficult to learn in my opinion, -editing- IS however.

While eschewing convention is always in style, understanding how a person receives the message we put in front of them will always make your work effective. I always laugh when I work with someone who breaks the “180 rule” on a shoot and then implies that my adherence to such rules is a bit archaic. I think that the difference between “breaking” a rule and ignoring it is that you do the first one intentionally, understanding what the rule’s purpose is and breaking it to serve your vision, those who are ignorant of the 180 rule aren’t doing anything innovative…they’re just sloppy and a viewer’s directional disorientation probably won’t serve their purpose.

I see way to much emphasis on technology, stealing attention from technique in training courses these days. Your expertise in technique determines whether you create flowers or feces…the technology just helps you create more, faster…

TimK,

Kolb Syverson Communications,
Creative Cow Host,
2004-2005 NAB Post Production Conference
Premiere Pro Technical Chair,
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Person Lastly]

being an editor is about making a script more than what is scripted. i’ve been doing this for 14 years if you include the schooling. use your instincts. only break the rules when appropriate and without a trace.

i encourage those who want to get into this industry to make sure they search out work that is creatively driven. don’t get sucked into something you really don’t want to do. the harder path is the more creative path.

[Mike Cohen]

When I was working for about 2 months out of school, duping tapes mainly, I was asked to re-edit a complicated video after the original editor quit.
Trial by fire taught me the technology.

Then we hired a producer with broadcast background. For 3 years he did a paper edit on everything, then sat with me calling each cut – that taught me everything I needed to move on without him.

But like the others have said, I learn something new everyday.
Recently read “When the Shooting Stops…The Cutting Begins” by Ralph Rosenbaum. Fascinating look at film editing as a storytelling art. Regardless of technology you have to be able to take hours of material and make something out of it, something I do daily now.

Mike

[Charley King]

I started as a projectionist in a TV Station, in 1962. I was responsible for film projection, slide projection, and telops (4×5 cards with polaroid pictures and/or hot press type). In 5 months I was promoted to film director, hard job putting commercial reels together, and editing movies down to fit time frame. 3 months later I became chief projectionist and was given the job of editing a documentary on film. I edited the opening sequence using a stop watch to figure the music rythmn and did that edit during a cartoon show which I changed reels every 7-8 minutes, a litttle hard concentration. I edited the remainder of the documentary physically reading the sound track visually. I didn’t know how to use a sound reader, so I would put it on a projector hear what was said figure edit points, then take it off the projector and pick my edit points from the optical sound track. This won my first award for editing.
I learned camera, audio, videotape operation, directing, producing during the next 5 – 7 years by doing.

To be honest I have never had any formal training, I learned by doing and observing others that I enjoyed working with and loved how they did things. My philosophies of editing, directing, producing, etc are a mixlture of all of those guys.

I think any of these positions are just a feeling, nothing you can learn from a book really. As to how long it takes to learn, I’m still learning, and believe I will be until I finally can’t physically do the work anymore. I have been asked many times during a production, “How long does it take to learn that?” my reply is always the same, “when I finish learning I will tell you how long it took.”

Charlie

ProductionKing Video Services
Unmarked Door Productions
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel
Las Vegas, Nevada

[Nina Staum]

That’s interesting… it’s almost like no training is the industry standard. Guess I was lucky.

[Mark Suszko]

College didn’t have much to tell me about *how* to edit, except to put some formal terms to things I was already grasping intuitively just from watching good and bad stuff on TV and in the movies and self-directed reading. In college radio I was a Dj, Producer and finally the GM, and I would do highly produced psa’s and commercials editing between audio cart machines, making Dickie-Goodman-like gag pieces for amusement. You didn’t get to do anything in the TV studio until Junior year, and color TV was reserved for Seniors and grad students. This tended to weed out the uncommitted.

The majority of profs at the time were either horribly out of date with real-world technology, experienced but burned-out pros who were phoning it in, or they were pure theoreticians that barely knew which end of a camera you point, but wanted to rap about D.W. Griffith, McLuhan, Andalusian Dog, and Potemptin for hours. If you wanted to make the most of your expensive tuition, you spent every free moment with friends in the labs doing practicum work, hands-on. And busting your butt on internships. I watched a lot of TV, always have. If something particularly moved me to an emotional response, I would tend to analyze it and deconstruct it until I felt I understood the technique and choices made. I also watched really bad TV, to see what they were doing wrong. Still do. My parents never understood my fascination for the business, even when I explained to them I was driven by the desire to reach into people’s heads and hearts and make them think and feel what I wanted them to think and feel. After years of tempering, I expanded that initial desire to include making people *understand* as well as think and feel.

I think I was born to direct and edit, because we have family audio tapes of me as a 5-year-old performing songs and telling dad where to “cut!” and “fade it out now”. When we were still less than 10 years old, we used a 110 instamatic camera and sometimes Polaroids (when finances allowed) to re-create visually, stories like “Dracula”, kind of like storyboards or comics. Dad shot lots of home movies of us as kids, so that probably reinforced things. I was an early reader, had read unabridged Treasure Island, the Illiad and the Oddessy, Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys by age five. Story telling was a big deal to me from the beginning.

I first learned editing on reel-to-reel audio tape with a splicing block, grease pencil, and tape dispenser as a teenager, and in grade school/junior high 8mm film class, making little 3-minute music videos edited roughly to time out when a wild track on cassette was played alongside it. I think my inspiration for those was The Monkees Tv episodes and Monty Python, which back then was only on it’s second run in the states;-).

In senior high in the 70’s we had a B&W TV studio with half-inch EIAJ reel-to-reel video recorders, and we learned rudimentary cutting by manually marking ins and outs with grease pencils and the mechanical footage counter and a stopwatch.

(Uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot:-))

You *were* the edit controller: you manually back-timed the decks using the stopwatch and threw a crossover record “punch-in” switch after timed pre-roll, at the edit point, praying the cut happened on the correct field so you wouldn’t get a glitch and have to try again. We had one very creative guy, did stop-motion animated cartoons like that, I think it drove him insane to spend seven weeks on two minutes, he turned to dope and wound up working at the lumber yard years later, last time I saw him. I made myself some documentaries, some bad comedy skits, and an ill-considered adaptation of a scifi short story, shot multi-take, single-cam, where each camera angle required unspooling the source tape and putting on a new one. In proper Hollywood tradition, the shoot was mostly an excuse to cast this girl I had a crush on, but I was too young to know anything about casting couches or even French kissing, much less anything more;-) It was just a way to be able to talk to her for hours with a good excuse. By the time I got up the nerve to ask her out, she turned to me and showed me an engagement ring from her boyfriend I didn’t know about.:-( That was junior/senior high.*sigh*

I worked a summer job during Sophomore year at VCA Teletronics, boxing and shrink-wrapping Hollywood movies bound for these newfangled video rental stores on betaMAX and VHS. I only got glimpses of the dubbing racks and edit room there, but I swore to myself and the housewives working the line alongside me, I would someday be *making* the programs, not just wrapping them. To this day, I loathe dubbing and shipping for that reason, and avoid that job as much as I can 😉

I did college radio my first two years at Loyola. Then I moved into 3/4 inch shooting, directing, and editing in my college internship job at Continental Cablevision in Elmhurst, Illinois, where I was a line producer, cameraman, writer, and I cut news packages for a PM-Magazine-type show. I remember the edit controller used a joystick that only moved left and right, I think it may have been a Horita, it had a speed control knob on the top that made it look like a gear shift knob, with a teeny little button you had to mash with your thumb to shuttle… that thing hurt like poking yourself on a thorn, every time you shuttled…gave you a blister like a guitar string… I hated that damn thing:-P.

That internship was a great, seminal experience; (Paula Jolene Smith, I thank you for your great teaching and guidance, wherever you are now) my classmates were all working with famous celebs at the Chicago O&O stations, but because of union rules, they never touched any gear except the phone, xerox, and coffee machine, and at term’s end, they had a letter of recommendation from Bill Kurtis or Walter Jacobsen but no actual skills or reels to show for it… While I got practice on everything in the station, including stand-up reporting, editing, remote truck directing, all except the head-end MC spot and dishes, and built a nice demo reel by summer’s end.

For fun, early 80’s I would rent time on a cuts-only VHS system some rich kid owned, it allowed you to do insert editing, which I used to make my own music videos out of existing footage for contests and for fun.

I made some freelance money fresh out of college doing industrial training stuff, again, cut on the VHS system. All the hardship editing on the cranky, primitive technology gave me discipline in shooting, organizing, and editing the footage.

When I got into the job I’ve had now for almost 20 years, they’d just dumped film 2 years previous, and we all learned to edit umatic to quad and 1-inch masters, then later beta to 1-inch A/B/C/ roll with a sweet EECO Emme linear controller, beta to beta A/B roll with a Grass 141, and then NLE’s in the 90’s. Once we had A/B roll editing and frame-accurate timecode editing, I was young and single, and spent lots of spare time in the suite playing and learning, trying to fake DVE and paintbox effects because we didn’t have one. We did lots of music video editing in the 80’s for things like interstitials and crowd warmups for the Prarie State Games, state fair commercials and montages, and the like, and I learned I had a good feel for cutting to the beat or deliberately against it. MTV was really new then, and I spent much time emulating things I saw there, because clients would invariably ask to ape something from MTV for their project at one point or another. I was chided for being “chromakey boy”,that was my main go-to trick for imitating FX we didnt have.

All along, I would screen things for people, watch their reactions, and look for ways to improve based on that, not just their spoken comments. I have gotten plaques and certificates from minor local area awards over the years for some of the stuff I’ve done, but by far the most rewarding thing is watching somebody tear up or jump up and applaud or say “Oh, I GET it now!” – while watching something I cut.

Which is good, because the pay kinda sucks;-)

(OTOH, 20 years on one job is something these days).

[Tom Meegan]

“Nobody is using the 3/4 room anymore since we got beta. Come in after hours and do what you want. I’ll look at it.” PBS stations are great places to do internships or to have a work study job while in college. My thanks to many patient and kind co-workers who did more than just look at it.

As far as making a good cut

[Chaz Shukat]

I got an A.S. degree in Radio & Television Broadcasting in 1974 and a BA in Mass Communications in 1976 and learned nothing about editing. In 1979, while working in a record store (that’s what my degrees got me), a man came in with some “music video” type pieces that he wanted us to play on our big screen projection TV in the store. When I saw them (this was years before MTV), I knew this was what I wanted to do. So I went to work for him, for free at first. He had a crude, rudimentary, cut’s only 3/4″ editing system. I had total creative freedom. There was someone there to answer any questions I had about the equipment, but I basically taught myself editing. I just knew what to do. I assume it was from obsorbing what I had seen on TV and in the movies. I just knew when something worked and when it didn’t. As I progressed, I continued to teach myself new equipment (without formal training). I taught myself Avid and took classes after. Now after 25 plus years I am first beginning to “study” editing technique. I hope that doesn’t ruin my style.

Chaz S.