Legos for Adults and Balance!


I love editing like I love assembling Ikea furniture. Seriously! It’s Legos for adults.

The trick with editing, I find, is to treat it like a sculpture. You keep making passes, over and over and over and over, making corrections here and there. It’s dreadful at first because it’s bulky and doesn’t resemble anything watchable. But soon you get to a point where you’re stressing over one frame staying or going.

After the 1000th watch it becomes white noise. Walk away for a while. Enough time to get out of editing mode. One day is perfect by a couple hours will do. Don’t watch it in your editing software, it’s better to see it in a movie player like QuickTime. The scene will look remarkably fresh and that ‘hard decisions’ over one frame will suddenly be easy.

With all creative endeavors you need periods of intense focus balanced by periods where you completely ignore it. I’m trying very hard to apply this fact to my own life. If you work on something all the time you’ll just stress over it, lose all the joy and become no fun to be around.

For the sake of your sanity and your friendships: Balance that shit out!

This entry was posted on March 07th, 2010 and is filed under film making, how to, master of inventions, production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.

 
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  • Eliaz Rodriguez

    Great entry. I started out with editing, love it, and recently went to writing and found that it’s pretty much the same process like you state here:
    -First draft is crap
    -Revision process is necessary
    -Stressing over little things will drive you nuts
    -Taking time away from it will help greatly

    Also in both cases getting notes or using a test audience is great. Although, probably not too early in the process because you don’t want it to affect the structure of the story you want to tell.

    A big difference in the processes would be that it’s way easier to get lazy and settle while editing, unless you really have patience and a passion for it. You do get a point to where you want to settle in writing (especially the first draft), but you have to create everything you’re working with, mix the clay before you make the sculpture- in editing you already have the clay. That make sense? People mix clay, right? I only use metaphors once a year and may have blown this one.

    Anyway, you probably already knew all that, just wanted to jump into the discussion. Great job cutting ‘Jeff Speaks Up’, we all know timing is everything in comedy, so if you don’t do it right you’ll end up with a “Run Ronnie Run” where the editing can destroy a film.

  • http://www.joeavella.com Joe Avella

    Hey Eliaz,

    Great comments! I’m not sure how clay is made. Or if you make it. Probably? Sand and water? Regardless, the analogy is not lost.

    I talk about the balance of work and creativity a lot on this blog because I struggle with it, as do you, as does everyone. I guess it’s a never ending balancing act. But part of it is walking away from your work which I find impossible. I’ll feel like the solution is on the tip of my brain and to stop now would be to lose it forever. Which is, of course, never the case.

    Yeah, editing makes or breaks it, which is another reason I give it some air. There’s earlier work I’ve cut and put up in record time, and after a few months became embarrassed I released it. What we do now can technically be with us forever, so It’s worth the extra day to ‘live with it’ :)