Retired from newspapers and television, currently sailing Thelonious II, a 1984 Ericson 381.
I posted this long ago on a video forum, but the reprint here was lost in the hacking a few years ago. May still be of interest to those who make home movies.
Notes on Editing for Story:
People watch for the story, yet story is the least discussed issue in making videos. Creating a story is an aggressive act in which the storyteller treats the raw material of experience as mere tools. In other words, a story is more than a series of clips--it is going somewhere. The audience takes the ride to be entertained. They hope for surprise, delight, recognition and satisfaction. They fear repetition, the obvious, and the predictable.
I did this work professionally for 45 years as a screenwriter and journalist, and often I supervised other storytellers. We all learned that there’s no one way to create a story, and no method, and few “rules.” The only thing that works is the determination not to be boring and to respect the audience’s very highly tuned sense of pace, and the jealous value they secretly put on their time.
There are no rules, but here are some:
1. Forget “reality”. The captured scenes of the family hike to the waterfall aren’t reality, since everybody in the footage remembers the day differently. A story imposes its own reality. If that seems wrong, it’s how Ken Burns and James Cameron and the Bible do it.
2. Story is created in the editing. The greatest story tool is sequence. Manipulating the sequence of events builds interest, surprise and reduces the predictable.
3. A story has a beginning, middle and end, but that doesn’t mean chronological. Events in sequence tend to be predictable. Break the sequence. Start with the end, focus on the unexpected, break the clock.
4. Impose a structure. We’ve all filmed birthdays, which come with their own predictable structure. Force the birthday into a new mold: the story of visiting grandma; the story of the child’s missing tooth, the story of the problematical piñata. Tell the story within the birthday and the predictable events will fall naturally in place.
5. Shoot for the story:
--Get “before” shots establishing the event or moment. A street sign to give location, or an interview with the nervous bride before her wedding.
--Get an ending. This is easiest to forget, since we often discover when editing that our marvelous vacation footage just sort of trails off. Make a conscious effort to film a wrap-up moment, maybe just “driving away” or saying goodbye.
--Get “coverage”: meaning reverse POV and reaction shots. Reverse POV is shooting from inside the car as Mom unclips a child from a car seat, then running like a madman to get inside the house so you can shoot the door opening toward you and mom coming in. Reaction shots are for cutting away to when editing: Guests at a wedding, for example. Since with one camera you’re focused on the ceremony, film the reaction shots during lulls in the ceremony. It doesn’t matter that your shot of the whole audience looking on raptly didn’t actually happen exactly when you show it. It will all seem true in the movie.
--When shooting, tell your subjects what to say. “Tell me what the guidebook says about this waterfall.” “Explain how we had to move the party inside because of the rain.” “OK, so tell me why you and your brother never wanted to come on this vacation in the first place” (then just cut out your question). Every moviemaker loves the guest who says to the camera, “Here we are in a Winnebago in the rain in Yellowstone National Park, packed like sardines, soaking wet, drinking aquavit and a bear just ate our garbage.” But those voluntary commentaries are few, so we have to prompt for them.
--Record for sound only. A video camera pointed at a blank wall captures sound very well. So bring the camera to the restaurant and just turn it on. Put the camera on the pew next to you at the wedding. Turn the camera on when the kids are arguing in the car. The audio track can be used under other footage. The result is candid and often very funny audio that can lend interest to scenic footage or other good visuals that lack story meaning.
--Use Voiceover. When faced with an important string of clips that slow the story down, turn off the audio. Often you can talk over the silent images to very good effect.
--Careful with music. It is easily overdone. If in doubt, take a tour of YouTube.
--Take stills. They help tell the story and fit easily into video. Ask anybody with a camera, even a stranger, to email you their shots. They will never refuse.
6. Shorter is better. Forget 45-minute videos. With a 90-minute video, offer suicide pills. Twenty minutes is pushing it. Nine minutes will leave your audience grateful. Six minutes, and they’ll ask to see it again. What is the highest compliment?
Even if you disagree, consider the following: most of us make numerous videos—I must have a hundred. In subsequent years they have value if people will watch them. They will watch happily the many moments you captured. They’ll like watching 5 or even ten of your old videos.
They won’t want to watch one that goes on for an hour. Why? Our families and friends are tremendously sophisticated. They watch news in which a five-minute story is enormously long. They watch “60 Minutes,” by far the best-edited magazine on television, in which the stories are less than 15 minutes long. Our audiences do not consider home video to be movies, with stars and scripts and $100 million schedules. Our home videos are much more like “news.” They cover a fleeting moment in time, which tomorrow will be a faded as a newspaper.
In the future we will want to look back at moments in our lives, not hours.
It’s the heavy burden of the storyteller to throw almost everything away, and present instead of the kitchen sink and everything in it one focused and compelling story of the past.
7. The issue of pace. If you watch "The French Connection" or "Bullitt" nowadays, what once seemed breakneck now seems slow. Tastes have changed, or expectations. In a Hitchcock movie, the car pulls up to the house. The driver gets out and walks to the house. He knocks on the door. The door opens.
Today, the car slows down and suddenly we're entering the house.
The connective tissue is just less necessary. People have seen a million hours of "film", they know the "vocabulary," and for them connections between scenes are implied.
Nobody wants a frenetic pace of jangly psychotic storytelling that sets your teeth on edge (that lasted about one year).
But you can leave a lot of stuff out.
Some editors snap their fingers as the rough cut previews, and tap their foot in 4/4 time-or some appropriate rhythm. They want the scenes to change. They want the cut to move forward with momentum. They're determined to trim or cut anything that can be taken out, no matter how much they like it. They are asking themselves: would this really be missed by somebody who never knew it was there?
There's a phrase in editing: "Let's get to the sh*t." It means that somewhere in the material are the good parts, and don't dawdle getting to them.
It's a punishing process sometimes. One of the most difficult things to hear from an objective viewer is, "Actually, you could lose that whole first part."
But the clever truth is that if you remove everything that doesn't have a real reason to be there, what's left is a story.
And it will have a nice, loping stride.
Notes on Editing for Story:
People watch for the story, yet story is the least discussed issue in making videos. Creating a story is an aggressive act in which the storyteller treats the raw material of experience as mere tools. In other words, a story is more than a series of clips--it is going somewhere. The audience takes the ride to be entertained. They hope for surprise, delight, recognition and satisfaction. They fear repetition, the obvious, and the predictable.
I did this work professionally for 45 years as a screenwriter and journalist, and often I supervised other storytellers. We all learned that there’s no one way to create a story, and no method, and few “rules.” The only thing that works is the determination not to be boring and to respect the audience’s very highly tuned sense of pace, and the jealous value they secretly put on their time.
There are no rules, but here are some:
1. Forget “reality”. The captured scenes of the family hike to the waterfall aren’t reality, since everybody in the footage remembers the day differently. A story imposes its own reality. If that seems wrong, it’s how Ken Burns and James Cameron and the Bible do it.
2. Story is created in the editing. The greatest story tool is sequence. Manipulating the sequence of events builds interest, surprise and reduces the predictable.
3. A story has a beginning, middle and end, but that doesn’t mean chronological. Events in sequence tend to be predictable. Break the sequence. Start with the end, focus on the unexpected, break the clock.
4. Impose a structure. We’ve all filmed birthdays, which come with their own predictable structure. Force the birthday into a new mold: the story of visiting grandma; the story of the child’s missing tooth, the story of the problematical piñata. Tell the story within the birthday and the predictable events will fall naturally in place.
5. Shoot for the story:
--Get “before” shots establishing the event or moment. A street sign to give location, or an interview with the nervous bride before her wedding.
--Get an ending. This is easiest to forget, since we often discover when editing that our marvelous vacation footage just sort of trails off. Make a conscious effort to film a wrap-up moment, maybe just “driving away” or saying goodbye.
--Get “coverage”: meaning reverse POV and reaction shots. Reverse POV is shooting from inside the car as Mom unclips a child from a car seat, then running like a madman to get inside the house so you can shoot the door opening toward you and mom coming in. Reaction shots are for cutting away to when editing: Guests at a wedding, for example. Since with one camera you’re focused on the ceremony, film the reaction shots during lulls in the ceremony. It doesn’t matter that your shot of the whole audience looking on raptly didn’t actually happen exactly when you show it. It will all seem true in the movie.
--When shooting, tell your subjects what to say. “Tell me what the guidebook says about this waterfall.” “Explain how we had to move the party inside because of the rain.” “OK, so tell me why you and your brother never wanted to come on this vacation in the first place” (then just cut out your question). Every moviemaker loves the guest who says to the camera, “Here we are in a Winnebago in the rain in Yellowstone National Park, packed like sardines, soaking wet, drinking aquavit and a bear just ate our garbage.” But those voluntary commentaries are few, so we have to prompt for them.
--Record for sound only. A video camera pointed at a blank wall captures sound very well. So bring the camera to the restaurant and just turn it on. Put the camera on the pew next to you at the wedding. Turn the camera on when the kids are arguing in the car. The audio track can be used under other footage. The result is candid and often very funny audio that can lend interest to scenic footage or other good visuals that lack story meaning.
--Use Voiceover. When faced with an important string of clips that slow the story down, turn off the audio. Often you can talk over the silent images to very good effect.
--Careful with music. It is easily overdone. If in doubt, take a tour of YouTube.
--Take stills. They help tell the story and fit easily into video. Ask anybody with a camera, even a stranger, to email you their shots. They will never refuse.
6. Shorter is better. Forget 45-minute videos. With a 90-minute video, offer suicide pills. Twenty minutes is pushing it. Nine minutes will leave your audience grateful. Six minutes, and they’ll ask to see it again. What is the highest compliment?
Even if you disagree, consider the following: most of us make numerous videos—I must have a hundred. In subsequent years they have value if people will watch them. They will watch happily the many moments you captured. They’ll like watching 5 or even ten of your old videos.
They won’t want to watch one that goes on for an hour. Why? Our families and friends are tremendously sophisticated. They watch news in which a five-minute story is enormously long. They watch “60 Minutes,” by far the best-edited magazine on television, in which the stories are less than 15 minutes long. Our audiences do not consider home video to be movies, with stars and scripts and $100 million schedules. Our home videos are much more like “news.” They cover a fleeting moment in time, which tomorrow will be a faded as a newspaper.
In the future we will want to look back at moments in our lives, not hours.
It’s the heavy burden of the storyteller to throw almost everything away, and present instead of the kitchen sink and everything in it one focused and compelling story of the past.
7. The issue of pace. If you watch "The French Connection" or "Bullitt" nowadays, what once seemed breakneck now seems slow. Tastes have changed, or expectations. In a Hitchcock movie, the car pulls up to the house. The driver gets out and walks to the house. He knocks on the door. The door opens.
Today, the car slows down and suddenly we're entering the house.
The connective tissue is just less necessary. People have seen a million hours of "film", they know the "vocabulary," and for them connections between scenes are implied.
Nobody wants a frenetic pace of jangly psychotic storytelling that sets your teeth on edge (that lasted about one year).
But you can leave a lot of stuff out.
Some editors snap their fingers as the rough cut previews, and tap their foot in 4/4 time-or some appropriate rhythm. They want the scenes to change. They want the cut to move forward with momentum. They're determined to trim or cut anything that can be taken out, no matter how much they like it. They are asking themselves: would this really be missed by somebody who never knew it was there?
There's a phrase in editing: "Let's get to the sh*t." It means that somewhere in the material are the good parts, and don't dawdle getting to them.
It's a punishing process sometimes. One of the most difficult things to hear from an objective viewer is, "Actually, you could lose that whole first part."
But the clever truth is that if you remove everything that doesn't have a real reason to be there, what's left is a story.
And it will have a nice, loping stride.