Skip to main content

HOW LISTENING TO JAZZ MAKES ME A BETTER VIDEO EDITOR

HOW LISTENING TO JAZZ MAKES ME A BETTER VIDEO EDITOR

As a video producer and video editor colleagues and students sometimes ask me for advice on how to become better editors or, put another way, how to improve their edting skills.

Before replying, I usually remind them that a video editor (or for that matter a film editor) can be likened to being a composer of music or a writer. Instead or notes or words our raw material is images--disparate shots of people, places, events, actions--essentially anything or anyone that can be filmed or videotaped.

Our job is to arrange these disparate images into a cohesive narrative (if you're doing a documentary, informational, or narrative piece) or (if you're doing a montage--thematic piece) to put these images into an order that evokes in your audince the feelings or ideas that you're trying to get across to them.

Having said this, for me one of the most important areas of video/film editing is pacing (or tempo). We all know that we are under pressure more and more--largely thanks to MTV style videos--to cut from shot to shot ever more and more quickly--in fact the average length of most shots in films is now about 2 seconds. I certainly don't always agree that we should be cutting away to another shot after so short a time--and of course many editors, producers, and filmmakers do not.

But either way, I find that the best way to nurture and develop my sense of pacing or tempo is to listen to jazz. Jazz, particularly Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakely,
Charlie Mingus, Art Tatum, and Wynton Marsalis (just a few of my favorites) helps free my mind from the kinds of logical and mechanical ways of thinking that I really believe limit our creativity as editors. Jazz relaxes my mind and helps me get out of the box, so to speak.

Anyway, just sharing some thoughts. More on this topic later!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blade Runners: The 1982 Version Revisited

I have seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in a theater of some kind either on 70mm, 35mm, or digitally projected twenty times altogether over the past twenty-seven years, starting with its first release in 1982. This is NOT because I am a fanatic about the film, or any film really. In fact it is rare for me to see any movie that many times. I know part of the reason is, as for most viewers, Blade Runner’s uniqueness as a movie on almost every level. But also I feel that for me it is the fact that this film, perhaps like no other, has undergone revisions by its director that impact the picture’s tone and focus and yet leave its original creative core untouched.   While the phenomenon of a popular film, or in the case of Blade Runner also a cult film, finding an afterlife in theaters is not at all unusual, especially in the last twenty years or so when so many films from the recent and distant past have been “restored” and “preserved," what makes Blade Runner unique ...

Initial Posting

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen--I am a HAL 9000 Computer....oops--only kidding! I'm Don Berry of Don Berry, LLC, a video and multimedia producer out of Hartford, CT. My goal is to offer a number of postings on the film and video industries, as well as related topics. Cheers

The Legacy of Technicolor

This blog entry is intended for the film buffs, film historians, and cinematographers in my audience. I'd like to revisit Technicolor , or more specifically the Technicolor film process—while I'll start with a quick historical recap, I really want to talk about the visual legacy and inspiration that it has left us with and how even while rarely in actual use today, Technicolor is still very much alive, in spirit if not in fact. All of you will of course will be familiar at least to some extent with the Imbibition (or sometimes referred to as Dye Transfer ) Technicolor Process which was used on hundreds of films pretty much non-stop from the mid-1930s until the mid-70s. You'll probably also recall that the Technicolor process can be divided into three distinct "periods." The initial period, from the early 1930s until about 1953 or so, involved using a specially designed camera containing three separate film emulsions all layered and synchronized to...