Month: November 2019

Recently, I was tasked to address comments from a client on a video. It was already close to being done, however, it took longer than I expected to get their approval. I ended up sending over about 4 rough cuts within two weeks because the client wanted certain shots to be replaced within each one.

At MATTE, we use Wipster to not only keep a library of all our work and projects but to also share cuts with the clients. When a link is sent to them, they have the ability to comment directly on the video and on a certain timestamp. In this way, I knew exactly what shot they wanted replaced. At the same time, the account managers that have contact with the client are also told what changes they want to be made.

But, it came to a point where we were running out of b-roll to use. After giving them many options, they finally approved. In the end, every shot but one I replaced with did not make the final cut. They opted to completely remove the others and to extend the other clips to fill up the empty space. Although I am disappointed, it was exciting to work with a client. It was also satisfying to be able to take a video to the finish line.

As a newbie to the video/film industry, I found a webinar on LinkedIn Learning called, “Foundations of Video: The Art of Editing”. Upon coming across the course, it interested me since it was specific to post-production. The speaker, Norman Hollyn spoke about the beginnings of video editing to the editing process to different editing styles. This being a beginner webinar, I found this to be very easy to understand and follow. He not only broke down topics but he also showed examples.

 Some of the information was familiar to me such as shot types and scripts since haven taken the Intro to Film class and the Intro to Video class. However, I still did learn a lot. The key points of this webinar were: video editing is an extremely powerful process that helps bring about certain emotions from an audience and that editing is a craft by the process of arranging clips/scenes to tell a story.

During the webinar, Hollyn visits a short film where he goes through his thought process during the editing. Here, he explains the decisions he makes such as why he made a certain cut or why he arranged the scenes in a particular way. I find this to be very informative since there is an infinite number of ways to edit any type of video or film. Thus, this was interesting to see.

Later, Hollyn talks about the different genres of editing such as documentaries, comedies, music videos. He also goes into commercials which are more in line with MATTE and their work. For instance, he talks about how commercials can be cut down to 30 seconds to 15 seconds. At my internship, I did take note on some of the projects they have down where there were multiple different versions of one video—one of which may be 60 seconds, one would be 30, and another would be 15. There are many formats of a commercial and when it comes to editing, the same concepts of cutting and arranging will still apply to them.