i have gotten in the habit of telling people that if i could do it all over again i would go into hospitality management. the truth is that i would probably be a film editor. After having worked every job in the film industry from craft service to production designer to director, I actually think editing was my favorite. it’s a lot like programming actually, long hours in a dark room in front of a screen caught in an infinite loop of tweaking and testing.
This video is my favorite bit of editing that i’ve done. here’s the backstory: Celia Pierce wanted to do an ethnographic film of DragonCon in Atlanta so she sent her RAs and a few of her Master’s students there to capture documentary video. i was going to shoot this Werewolf LARP, but when i got there they decided that i couldn’t get any footage of them, but that i could play in the LARP if i wanted. so while i was LARPing for 3 days everyone else was shooting their videos. when we got back the film student doing the editing had assembled a very jagged first cut and was insisting that there was no movie there. i disagreed and proceeding to re-log all the video (something i think every editor should do) and cut together what you see below. it was more cutting than you could possibly imagine, seriously the EDL for this was like war and peace.