Rock star legend Eddie Van Halen became notorious for a clause in his contract forbidding the presence of brown M&Ms in the backstage candy bowl at his concerts.  Here’s the flip side of that story and why it matters.

Celebrities have had all sorts of random requirements included in their contracts over the years.  Aretha Franklin contractually insists that her hotel rooms must never be higher than the 5^th floor, and that all air vents must be taped shut.

John Kerry, when appearing for speaking engagements, requires a recumbent (not upright) exercise bike.

Though in the heyday of big hair rock and roll, Van Halen’s prohibition of brown M&Ms was particularly singled out with disgust as the classic example of rock stars run amok with infantile delusions of grandeur. Most of those critics never found out what you’re about to read. Continue reading Why brown candy matters →

A week ago today, I was in Crazy Man Mode. My team and I put on a three-hour live webcast, opening up a private meeting of our Los Angeles-based Power Edit Academy coaching group to the public. We screened Academy member edits and interacted with Power Edit friends from all around the world.

It was pretty sweet, and folks watching the livecast asked some really great questions. Here’s one of them taken from the event transcripts:

Question

How do you argue for a music cue you really think works? It can be so subjective. Sometimes producers want almost everything changed.

Answer from Jeff

You’re absolutely right. A lot of the times it comes down to “It’s their project not ours.” And a lot of the time we as editors say, “This is what I offer out of my experience and out of my gut, and if it meshes with the people who are making the decisions, fantastic. If it’s not, it’s not my piece. It’s not ultimately my responsibility.”

Now it IS my responsibility to do everything within my power to make sure that the piece is as good as humanly possible. Continue reading Defending your choices – or not →

My wife and I don’t watch many movies. I don’t watch TV either. Heck, I spend my whole day making the stuff, and the last thing I want to do is come home and turn the damn thing on.

However, on New Year’s Day, we did watch a movie. A groundbreaking, jaw-dropping, thoroughly enjoyable movie that I saw again after watching it in a movie theater for the first time 15 years ago. The dystopian science fiction thriller that showed the good guys whooping up on the bad guys while running sideways on the wall, dodging bullets like a prize fighter slipping under a ham-fisted right hook.

Much has been said about The Matrix which I won’t attempt repeating here. It has so many reasons to love it, not the least of which is the idea of reality being much more malleable than we might realize – and far different than what it seems.

Editing is exactly the same. Fluid, constantly changing, and riddled with misconceptions and lies to be avoided and bent towards the truth. Here are some of them:

LIE #1: Only the elite few are worthy of editing high-quality content.

This was true… LAST CENTURY. The tools of content creation and editing are now available to literally anyone anywhere who seeks them.

LIE #2: You have to be innately talented to edit well. It’s a gift that can’t be taught.

Wrong. Some sort of talent – overrated as it tends to be – is always helpful in any pursuit, but those who say powerful editing can’t be taught merely say so because they don’t know how to teach. Continue reading Four Lies of the Editing Matrix →

Very recently: I was sitting near a screaming baby, in the very back row of a small airplane, with no legroom, and seats that would not recline. Things that would otherwise drive me nuts, or at very least annoy me. But I was ok with all of this.

Why?

Context.

Because my wife and I were finally on our way to be with family. Our departing flight had been delayed 4 hours, and it was looking like we might be stuck overnight in O’Hare airport… on Christmas Eve. And we wouldn’t have reached our destination until halfway through Christmas Day.

Nothing against y’all, Chicago, but I’d much rather spend Christmas Day with family than with hard airport seats and a 6AM flight. Errgh.

But thankfully, when we finally touched down in Chicago, we were told 2 seats had opened up on a flight that was boarding, well, right now. Run run run run to the opposite end of the concourse, we’re the last people boarded, and shut the doors.

Whew. Just in time. But we’re on the flight, and we’ll get to where we’re going.

And that is why not even zero legroom with non-reclining seats behind a screaming baby bothered me at all.

Having just explained it, I have a decent expectation that you now know why. The shifted context changed everything for me.

In your storytelling, have you ever experienced showing something that you find incredibly powerful or significant, but other people just don’t seem to get it? The power and impact that you felt was loaded into your story just flies straight over their heads? Continue reading Explain yourself, dangit →

As editors, are we artists? Some say yes, others say no. Others say it depends on the project. Some years ago I was wading through an editing forum and found the below thoughts from a user named guanacaa58:

I think editing is directly analogous to writing. Here’s a couple of lines of writing that I consider art:

“When my love swears to me that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies.
That she might think me some untutored youth
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties”
-William Shakespeare

Here’s some writing I don’t consider art: Continue reading Is it art or not? The answer is yes. →

Thousands of choices every day. That’s our life as an editor. Constantly, constantly choosing between This and That. Weighing options of What I Want… versus What I Actually Have… What They Want, versus What I Think They Want… What I Think Is Possible versus What Is Actually Possible. Take all those, jumble them around in varying orders and balances, and you have editing.

All those choices take a toll on the editor. If you approach a typical day of editing with even a moderate amount of focus and concentration, you will end up tired.

Focused, applied mental work is every bit as tiring as manual physical labor, in some ways even more so. And in case you’re wondering whether I’ve ever done anything other than sit on my butt for a living, the answer is yes – I helped local farmers bale and stack hay when I was in high school, and I spent my first two years in college working at a lumber yard packing semi trucks by hand in 100 degree summers with 80% humidity. I get the physical labor thing.

These days, though… at the end of a day of editing, I’m mentally drained. I’m ready to go home and begin the process of refreshing my mind and my energy for the next day’s edit. Oh, and have a life outside the edit bay too. Talk with my wife, have dinner, walk the dog.

Sadly, I don’t have a solution to eliminating editorial brain drain. It’s pretty much an occupational hazard. Having said that, here are three ideas to help minimize it and keep your creativity flowing throughout your entire edit. Continue reading How to kill editorial brain drain, part 1 of 2 →

You need to hear some things I’ve been hearing this week. I’ve been hanging with some crazy people. Authors, multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, movie moguls, you name it.
One of them, a gentleman by the name of Peter Guber, said something especially worth passing on. Now Peter Guber isn’t some random shmuck – he’s the former CEO and Chairman of Sony Pictures. He’s the current CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group and  Dick Clark Productions. Also the co-owner of the LA Dodgers. And that’s just part of his background and what he’s into now.

Here’s what he said: “When it comes to relating to audiences, it’s not about state of the art technology, it’s state of the HEART technology.”

He also said that we are not in the fill-in-the-blank business, whatever you happen to be doing. “We are in the emotional transportation business.”

At the time, he was talking about business in general. But this is coming from a genuine Hollywood movie mogul, and it applies most directly to those of us who put our hands to the shaping of stories through sound, music, and moving pictures.

How easy is it to get caught up in all the crap of planning, shooting, and editing that we forget our primary directive?

Whether they know it or not, our audience is waving their arms at us, saying “Make me FEEL something,” exactly what we’ve been discussing in our Academy sessions here in LA. The audience wants an emotional experience from what we offer them. Not just a random “eh, that was sort of cool” or “I wonder if we have any beer left in the fridge” sort of experience. Continue reading State of the huh?? →

Professional chefs have more in common with editors than you might think.

My wife was recently listening to the audiobook version of New York Times best-selling author Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential. It’s a fascinating and entertaining look into the world of chefs and high-end kitchens.

One of Bourdain’s diatribes raged against line cooks and junior chefs who graduate culinary school and try to be artists when it comes to the daily delivering of the dishes the chef has created. They constantly prepare menu items differently, when the chef knows that the customers who order those plates quite likely have ordered them before; the chef also knows that diners expect that “one amazing dish” they ordered a year ago to be exactly the same when they order it tonight.

The chef needs a Craftsman who can deliver flawless execution of the chef’s vision over and over, and the rogue sous chef or line cook who switches things up by playing Artist will most likely end up fired.

That idea fits right into the world of editing. We as editors need to be aware of the times when an editorial “recipe” has already been established that we need to maintain. We also need to know when to step outside of the “recipe” and make an offer of Art.

So how do we know when to do one and not the other? Sometimes it’s obvious; the client, director, or producer specifically tells us that they want something like X Project or to feel like such-and-such a vibe. Or they may say, “Here’s the project, do your thing however you see fit, then we’ll talk.” Continue reading Editorial cookery: Artist vs Craftsman →

One week closer to Halloween; time to discuss another character in our lineup of editorial monsters and ghouls.

Unlike Dracula the Multitasker, whose mere presence guarantees horrific outcomes, today’s editorial monster is not as black and white in its effect.

Let us cautiously consider… the Frankenbite.

If you’re not familiar with the word, it’s a combination of “soundbite” and “Frankenstein,” the novel written in 1818 by Mary Shelley about a mad scientist who stitched together a monster from pieces of various human corpses. A description that some would consider accurate when applied to Reality TV in general. But we digress.

Frankenbites come into being when, for whatever reason, content creators make a mashup of soundbites that never existed together in their original form. Sometimes in order to make a character say what the producers want to hear, editors and story producers will grab a phrase here, a word there, and cobble together a brand new thought.

Sleazy? Well… that would depend on the greater context of things. Continue reading Beware the Frankenbite →

Halloween approaches, and so does a nasty little habit that snags virtually everyone when editing. This habit is diabolical, an insidious practice that plays Dracula to your time, sucking out the very lifeblood of your edit. Mountains of research suggest that overindulging in this practice not only murders your productivity, but it could literally shrink your brain.

This sinister menace has a much more pleasingly generic name, but make no mistake… a menace by any other name is still a menace.

I’m talking about multitasking. Specifically, multitasking in your edit.

We sit down, let ideas percolate, pick a music cue here, fiddle with the fonts in a title there, and before you know, the day is gone.

“Crap. What did I actually accomplish today?” we ask ourselves in annoyance.

And Dracula the Multitasker slinks to the back corner of our edit bay, smirking at having sucked the life out of another edit session.

The unlikely antithesis to this shadowy ghoul is much less known for his editing… and much more well known for his wheels. Millions of them on Model T’s, to be exact. Continue reading Kill the Dracula habit in your edit →