What can a music video with over a BILLION views teach us about video editing?

Plenty.

As of this writing, the music video for “Uptown Funk” (Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars) is the 7^th most watched video on Youtube of all time.

The song spent 14 consecutive weeks at #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

In January 2015, “Uptown Funk” streamed a record 2.34 million times in a single week in the UK.

Back across the pond, it set a new record for the highest number of streams in one week in the US – 4.8 million of them.

In a week.

If you haven’t both heard the song and seen the video, stop whatever you’re doing and watch it here, right now.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, watch it again.

You know you want to.

Now that the song’s hook has firmly embedded itself in your brain, here are some thoughts on the video’s editorial style that you can apply to your own editing.

Wanna watch the video again?

Yes, you should do that. I’ll wait here.

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And we’re back.

Before we get into it, avoid the trap of thinking “this stuff only applies to music videos,” because these ideas have direct application to everything from the driest, most clinical corporate video to the most lavishly budgeted, self-loving-auteur-driven feature film.

Check it out:

1. PRACTICE FUNCTIONAL VS. BEAT-DRIVEN CUT POINTS

FUNCTIONAL: The video’s cutting leans heavily on the classic functional music vid style – snappy yet invisible cuts that are driven by the actions within the shots themselves. Continue reading Four groovy ways to Uptown Funkify your editing →

It’s true. Everybody wants a Rockstar.

If you edit video for pay, you may have seen people requesting something like this:

Hey there, Awesome People!! We’re looking for a total Rockstar Editor who will bring your creativity, positive attitude, and willingness to work for substandard rates without complaining!!

For this Totally Awesome job, you must have multiple major network credits in docu-drama series that follow pharmaceutical sales reps in the Yukon who have six fingers on each hand and moonlight as strippers on the weekends!!

Please FedEx 11 letters of recommendation along with your current resume printed on genuine Egyptian parchment paper to me at 12345 City Blvd, Suite 101, Big City, State!! If you do not have the above qualifications, please do not apply or leave Non-Awesome comments here!! Team players only!!!

Ok, so I’m kidding.

Just barely.

If you see requests like that, they are likely jobs that you want to avoid like the Egyptian Plague. (See previous post “This little known video editing secret can keep you from going NUTS.”)

Truth is… producers, directors, or clients who pay money for video editing talent usually do want Rockstar talent, whether they use that word or not.

They want to know that they’re getting someone who can deliver the right stuff in the right timeframe, preferably making the process as painless and/or Awesome!! as possible.

So how do we pull that off? How do we editors develop a reputation for being Rockstars… in the genuine “I would work with this guy/gal any day of the week!” way?

Here’s just one of the many ways to make that happen: Continue reading How to be a Rockstar Editor: develop split personalities (in the smart way, not the creepy way) →

Do you edit video and value your mental sanity?

Good, me too.

Check this out, because this is important.

Here at The Power Edit, we’re all about the parts of editing that go beyond the button pushing and all the software and techie stuff.

Everyone else talks about that, and that’s fine.

But here’s what so few people actually talk about:

The creative and mental side of editing, and how to tell great stories in a truly powerful way – in a way that’s relatable to the 99.8% of the world who don’t cut $300M studio blockbusters.

So along the mental side of things, here’s a not so well known fact:

Whether you edit for pay or for free, your mental well being as an editor is hugely affected not only by the gigs you take… but even more so by the gigs you DON’T take.

Like this one.

After a hugely appreciated month off editing, with my wife and I getting used to life with our newborn son, I started a new gig this week.

I’ll talk more about it some other time, but for now, I’m just cringing in horror at this picture that’s sitting atop a stack of boxes directly outside my edit bay. Continue reading This little known video editing secret can keep you from going NUTS →

Zee Russians are always handy scapegoats for any number of things, da?

In this case, I’m talking about one particular Russian’s film editing brainstorm from the early 1900’s that has a direct effect on YOUR editing today, no matter the project or your editing experience or software.

Keep reading for the drunk baby part.

A certain Soviet filmmaker conducted a film editing experiment in the early 20^th century where he showed a shot of an expressionless man, then a shot of a bowl of soup. Back to the man, same expression.

Then a shot of a body in a casket. Back to the man, same expression.

Then to a shot of a woman in a bikini. Back to the same man, same expression.

Audiences at the time remarked at the remarkable breadth of emotion portrayed by the actor – hunger for the soup, sadness at the body in the casket, lust for the scantily clad woman.

But it was the exact same shot of the actor every single time. The differences in the actor’s “reactions” only existed in the mind of the audience by virtue of how the shots were edited together.

This is what is known to generations of film students as The Kuleshov Effect, named for its founder, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov.

Behold! Through the modern miracle of YouTube, here is the original sequence.

And here’s a cool alternate explanation of the Kuleshov Effect by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. He doesn’t call it the Kuleshov Effect, but it’s the exact same idea: Continue reading Russian Filmmaker Exploits Drunk Baby!! →

An editing fable for your consideration:

A team of executives at a major three-letter TV network give each other high fives over the continuously large viewer numbers on their hit show.

The executives draft a note to the large group of producers and editors who bring this hit show into being every week:

“Thank you so much for your hard work this season. The show has become a phenomenon thanks to everyone’s efforts, and we just can’t say ‘thank you’ enough.”

The note is delivered to the offices of said producers and editors atop a ribbon-wrapped gift basket whose contents fill an entire table in the kitchen with a princely spread of bagels, pastries, 6 tubs of cream cheese, and 4 gallon-sized cartons of piping hot coffee with real sugar, fake sugar, cream, stir sticks, the whole nine yards.

Editors #1 and #2 walk into the kitchen and read the note taped on the wall above the spread of food.

“Aww. That’s so cool!” says Editor #1 with a smile. “That doesn’t happen very often these days. They didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah,” agrees Editor #2. “We really don’t ask for much, just some acknowledgement of our work. Crazy how good that feels.”

Word of the unusual spread of goodies travels through the offices. The kitchen is soon filled with editors and producers.

Editor #3 walks in and reads the note with a snort of disdain. Continue reading A fable of bagels, coffee, and future editing success →

We’re suckers for singular moments that stand out. Floods of information wash over us, and the vast majority of it, for one reason or another, doesn’t stick.

Every once in a while, though, something does, and it leaves a mark. An impression, a reference point.

These moments usually evoke a distinct feeling or emotion in our minds.

Sometimes these singular moments leave their mark for minutes, others literally leave a mark for the rest of our lives.

Case in point:

This past Sunday, my wife and I were standing in church, singing along with the band. As of this writing, I can’t even remember which songs we sang.

Here’s what I do remember:

As the stage full of musicians came to the end of a fairly loud song with everyone playing at once, everyone stopped playing except for the keyboardist holding out one sustained chord on a synth pad… Continue reading Didgeridoo in church →

I’ve heard editors wonder at times: “Am I creative?  Really, genuinely creative? I’m not writing a screenplay, I’m not directing the shoot, I’m just the editor putting together stuff that other people handed off to me.

“Is that actual creativity?”

Consider a similar scenario.

Chantel, my wife, regularly questions whether she’s at all creative in the kitchen.

“I could never come up with these recipes on my own,” she tells me with a sad shake of her head. “I mean, how on earth do people figure out all these random ingredients to put together into a brand new thing?”

She then proceeds to examine the recipe at hand with a practiced eye.

“Are you kidding me? This says it’ll take 15 minutes to prepare. Not a chance.”

She strides over to the cabinets that hold the needed ingredients.

Saint, Minister of Propaganda and VP of Canine at The Power Edit, perks up from his position under the kitchen table to gauge his chances of scoring a snack from food falling on the floor.

“The recipe says to use half a cup. I think I’ll make that a quarter cup,” Chantel announces. She decides on an alternate ingredient to make up the extra quarter cup.

“What do you think about wine to go with this?” she asks, striding around the kitchen island to give a quick stir to the bubbling contents of a saucepan on the stove, sticking a spoon in for a quick taste.

“Hmm,” I say. “Well, what about –“

“Needs a little something more,” she mumbles distractedly before I can finish. She opens up the spice cabinet, spins the rotating platter of spice bottles until she finds just the right one. Continue reading Am I actually creative? →

Years ago, I edited a music video containing shots of the artists walking down various sidewalks and alleys until they ran into each other.  The song was a hipster-ish, minimally produced track, and I started experimenting with jump cuts of the artists walking on specific beats of the music track.  It worked pretty well, and both the director and I were happy.

Unfortunately, for a while after cutting that video, I relied too heavily on idea of putting the edits right on the beats of the music.  What worked well for a hipster music video looked downright clunky in other contexts.

And time after time, amateur and professional editors alike try to “give the piece more energy” and “add some flash” by doing edits – usually a bunch of them – right on the beats of the music.  Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t.

Here’s why:

Choosing an edit point exactly on a noticeable music beat calls attention to the edit.

Which of course raises a question that goes far beyond just editing of music:

Do you want your audience to notice the edit?

Now like many questions in life, it’s difficult to answer this question with a simple “yes” or “no”.  Personally, speaking in broad strokes, I strive for my editing to be invisible, for nothing to call attention away from whatever message I want to communicate.  So in most cases, I’d say “no, I don’t want the edit to be noticeable.”

Having said that, there are times when my job as an editor is to present something in an engaging, energetic way, but the subject matter just kind of sits there and does nothing exciting.  Like a cornfield in Iowa.  In that case, I may very well want to add extra edits to the beats of the music to say “Hey, check out this cornfield.  Isn’t it cool?!”

Trust me. Cornfields are anything but riveting. I have permission to say this because I spent a good chunk of my younger years growing up in Iowa.

So yes, there will be times when you do want to call attention to your edit point by putting it directly on a music beat.  More often than not, though, you will want to keep the edit point OFF the beat… and let the ACTION in the shot do the talking.

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This is just one of my Top 5 Tips For Picking The Perfect Edit Point Every Single Time that I’ve used over and over again throughout my career editing TV here in Hollywood for some of the biggest media outlets in the world.

These ideas work on literally any project, whether you’ve been cutting for decades or mere days, no matter your editing tools.

See the instant improvement in your editing when you check them out here.

Last week sucked. Bad.

Not only were editing deadlines upon me – NBC wants two hours of TV a week from us – but for the better part of the week, I had a strained chest muscle, a random swelling in my elbow with spidery streaks of red stretching down my arm, and a temperature that peaked somewhere around 102.5. And flu symptoms that left me feeling like I got hit by a 20-ton grip truck.

Twice. In the same place.

Those who know me will attest that I barely ever get so much as a sniffle. I maybe get a little 2-day cold twice a year, and that’s about it. It’s literally been years since my temperature crossed into triple digits.

As to the chest thing, well, I’m not exactly sure how that happened. I have some ideas, but nothing for sure. That’ll just take some time to rebuild itself.

The flu – as much as it sucks, I know that it’s temporary. The achy, sensitive skin, hit-by-a-truck feeling usually goes away in a couple days or so with the fever.

But that whole swollen elbow thing with the streaks going down my arm?

That ain’t cool.

I texted an elbow selfie to my wife, and she proceeded to freak out.

I didn’t though… because I knew what it was. I’d experienced this sort of thing before.

It was a number of years ago when I was still a freewheeling bachelor. I was cutting on a really cool show with really cool people… and we put in REALLY long hours. As in every week, I as the senior editor had to pull an all-night edit, chugging 7-11 coffee and Monster drinks just to get a complete pass at an episode for the weekly network screening.

One Saturday (weekends were pretty normal on this gig too), my executive producer was in the bay with me and happened to see my leg.

“Holy ****, Jefe, what is up with your ankle?!” Continue reading Fat paycheck or trip to the ER? →

I eat the same take-out lunch every weekday when I’m editing. Come lunch hour, I pick up the phone and order what everyone at Sharky’s Woodfired Mexican Grill knows as The Usual: a half-sized Power Plate with chicken and a double serving of grilled vegetables.

Oh, Power Plate. How I love thee.

Some folks say, “Jeff, how on earth can you stand to eat the same food every day?” Easy – it keeps me mentally sharp. It’s protein and veggies with almost no processed carbohydrates… which means that nasty mid-afternoon crash that happens all the time to everyone else doesn’t happen to me.

At least not anymore… eat tortilla chips with that Power Plate, and it’s a different story – 2:30 rolls around, and I’m about to fall off my chair in the bay from sleepiness.

But eating the same lunch every day is about more than avoiding the Afternoon Carb Crash – and here’s where Steve Jobs jumps into the picture, more on him in a bit – Continue reading Editor lunch ala Steve Jobs →