Once Upon a Timeline

It’s one of the age-old questions an editor asks themselves at some point in their career… should I go in-house at a production company, broadcaster, or studio. Or should I throw caution to the wind and jump into a freelance lifestyle?

What happens when we spend hours cutting a sequence, we think we’ve done a great job but then the client comes in and doesn’t like it at all? An every day occurrence in a pro edit suite.

On this week’s show I’ll be talking about a mindset that is hugely important in long form. Creative actions and the creative reactions that happen on our timeline as a result.

On this week’s show I’ll be talking about sequence archetypes/scene modelling. The benefits we gain as editors in analysing and categorising as many different scenes and sequences in other people’s work as possible, is incredibly useful. It widens our abilities and makes us better editors.

And we’re back. Did you miss us? We missed you! We’re kicking off Season Four of Once Upon a Timeline with an in depth discussion around the checks and balances of sequence quality. There’s so many creative skills we need to apply to any one scene or sequence and it can be daunting trying to remember them all before we hand a cut over to our client for approval.

We can learn an enormous amount about editing from listening to editors. But we can also learn an enormous amount from listening to the creative people we work with every single day, the people who employ us... directors.

As editors we spend most of our careers talking to just one person... a director. The quality of that communication and how we craft that relationship is often the difference between a successful or unsuccessful career. And so it makes perfect sense to try and understand the thought process of these important creative people in our lives.

This week we're talking subtly! After an editor has mastered all of the more obvious fundamental skills of building scenes they are then forced to wade through the thousands of shades of grey, the shades that can show exactly where they are in creative maturity. One such shade is the art of Narrative Sprinkling.

This week we're going a bit left field. There is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics known as The Observer Effect. It states that a situation is often changed by observing it. The fascinating thing is that applying it to certain aspects of filmmaking can make us better editors.

One of the most well trodden paths in the editing world is to start off in short form promo content and then move onto longer form projects. It's a difficult journey as clients won't trust us with the larger budgets that long form requires until we've proven we can work to briefs, communicate well in the edit suite and deliver on time.