Edit Foundry

More and more stories are being shot by more and more people.  Everyone in the newsroom (paper, multimedia, advanced, traditional) are being asked to shoot and help out with stories.  I’m not afraid of this, I’m embracing it.  I look at it as a challenge to maintain my editing desires and blend them with video shot by amateur professionals.  Amateur professionals?  I kinda like that term.  It’s self explanatory I think.

I’m doing a series of stories for News On The Deuce.  It’s our 7pm newscast.  The shows target audience is a younger demo.  Editing for the show allows our editing staff to add music to a lot more pieces than we’d normally do for a newscast.

The series I’ve been editing a lot for is called Extreme Kellie.

Our anchor, Kellie Macmullan goes out and takes part in some great activities.  For this one, It’s Not What You Expect, Kellie skydives.

This story is a good example of using amateur professional photography.

I start the story off with a few aerial shots just to establish where the actions going to be.  You’ll notice I dropped the saturation and added a little blur on the video.  Why, just frankly cause it looks cool.

Kellie asked me to do this one as a natural sound story.  I’m experimenting with storytelling and different styles of editing with these.  I’m not going crazy with effects.  I frankly don’t think any of these stories need that.  They are extreme all by themselves.

What I am doing is having a lot of fun with music.  The first song you’re hearing is Raining Oil by Thomas Newman from the Jarhead Soundtrack.

I chose this song because I felt it created that anticipatory feeling.

Our story starts out with the man she’s going to tandem jump with getting her all set up.

Kellie is featured predominantly in these stories.  So obviously I’m going to show her a lot.  These little moments (like her facial expression above) are particularly important to help the audience understand her hesitation.

I add the owner of the skydiving company to help tell the story.

You’ll notice from [:38] and on the story uses mostly video shot by the skydiving company.

I love to sequence whatever video there is.  Sequencing regardless of who shot it still helps tell the story.  More importantly sequencing advances your story visually.

From [:40] to [:47] is a simple sequence edited to music to simply get us up off the ground and into the air.

The music I choose for this section is Hard Sun by Eddie Vedder from the Into the Wild Soundtrack.  As you probably guessed I love using music from soundtracks.  A lot of this music is written in part for storytelling.

Another sequence at [:50] to establish they are up high in the sky.

From [:53] to [1:13] is another sequence of Kellie and her instructor.  They’re getting ready to jump out of the plane.

• Sequencing, match action and no jump cuts all with amateur video.

From [1:20] to [1:35]  I’ve got shot variety, match action, mixing up wides, mediums and tights.

Yes you can still tell good stories and have good editing with amateur video.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 7:46 am Filed under Feature Editing and. 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.