On Cinco de Mayo James filmed Sockeye's office party, he shot 6 minutes of footage in around 9 different clips. Yesterday he and Laura asked me to edit the video to put on Sockeye's blog. I sat in the East edit room at a desk behind James; he told me the basic layout and keyboard shortcuts of Final Cut Pro, and  set me off on my own to make the initial edit. It was super helpful both watching James edit, and being able to ask him questions as I worked. After about an hour I had put together a 2 minute edit of the piece that I was pretty happy with. When I showed it to james, he said "Good, now cut off about 1:30 and it'l be great". I thought he was crazy, it was hard enough getting it down to 2 minutes, let alone 30 seconds. After another couple hours of making small changes and being very selective of what shots to keep, I got the piece down to 50 seconds. Its amazing how much of a difference you can make in a piece by simply cutting off all the fat from the beginning and end of clips, even if it is only a fraction of a second. In choosing how to cut footage you can completely change the tone and pace of a movie. This project started out as a few long clips, but with a lot of editing, became dynamic and fast paced.   Working on an edit is a lot like writing a paper; it is much easier to do if you split into different drafts. Until yesterday I had only edited in a single step, but I learned that if you force yourself to create new drafts and keep revising you will come out with a exponentially better final product. Imagine that. In one day I figured out my way around the basics of Final cut; there's a lot tot say for the dive-in-head-first method.

Heres the link to the video: Cinco de Mayo 

Photo gallery: 

Clips

Initial edit

Sequence 2, lots of fat, note the length of the different cuts

Final 50 second edit with music