Amidst my very first internship, I was eager to learn anything and practice under the watchful eye of bossman, Sam. I think it was on my first week of work that he had an online conference where he shared his experience and approach of working in the charming arts industry of Kuching. He had it all recorded, both on an external camera and on Zoom, and handed it over for me to cut to a reasonable Youtube video length of about 8 minutes.
Sounds absolutely easy and fun, right?
Over 2 hours of material summarised within 8 minutes is madness. It’s not textual summaries that we practiced and absolutely resented in high school, I know because I transcribed the many minutes of his sharing and edited it on paper before performing the surgeries on the audio-visual media. The result of that? Yes, I managed to summarise it. However, the flow and tone of content was brutally thrown out of the window. It was distracting to see the jump cuts and awkward tonal changes even though everything had looked great on paper.
So lesson 1 learnt : paper continuity does not mean conversational continuity.
Having cut out a mass amount of content for a shorter and sweeter essence, I proceeded to seek continuity within the summarised content. However, I was still not freed from the duration constraint. I needed to cut more time. Hence, I proceeded to cut ALL the um’s and ah’s that Sam tends to use (maybe a little too much). It was dragging the time on and sounded a little repetitive so it had to go. After half an hour of endless half second cuts, I had become very familiar with the visual sonic wave of those verbal expressions. I scrolled all the way to the beginning and pressed the play button.
Lo and behold : more jump cuts and tonal discontinuity!
I was pissed, I had been looking at the same thing for days and it looks and sounds more and more like an absolute mess.
So lesson 2 learnt : maybe keep some of the stutters if you don't want the video to come across as a word salad.
I have low-key given up on the sound as I moved on to give the visuals more variety instead of a thousand jump cuts of Sam from the same angle. Sourcing visuals was time-consuming. It included many Google searches and stock footage website scrolling. And when I added some in for trial, it turned out disastrous. I showed it to Sam and we agreed that excessive stock image and footage wasn't the way to go. So then I proceeded to look through all the company's old projects to rip certain footage for this video as it focuses on Sam's career throughout the years. There was plenty to look at and I think I actually did go through everything to pick and choose.
Lesson 3 : editing really takes a great deal of time sifting through materials that you mostly will not end up using.
For fun's sake, I decided to shake up the title sequence of the company logo with a semi stop-motion version of it. So I went up to Youtube to learn some tricks (not unlike how I learn all my other editing tricks) and had several attempts to make the circle as round as it can be. I sent it to Sam and
Till this day, I'm not sure what his genuine reaction to it was.
Lesson 4 : amuse yourself with fresh new editing tricks if the basic ones start to get frustrating.
2 weeks had passed, my mind is fried from going through the same sounds and images on repeat. I think my friends are ready to sever ties with me at this point after I forced it on them every few nights through video call screen sharings just to get fresh perspectives that eventually went stale. I handed it over to Sam who cleaned it up with fresher perspective and years of editing experience.
If anybody asks who 'Jess the Intern' is in the video description, it's not me ;)
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