I’ve written about how absolutely in awe I am of the editors and the editing process. The thought of wading through so much footage and then having the presence of mind to organise it into something beautiful is almost horrifying. I’m not a particularly detail-orientated person.

 

I thought about this in relation to two things: the idea in the lecture that technical skills are of diminishing importance (at least to a student interested in making media) since they’re so fast-moving; and the most-robbed film of the awards season, Boyhood.

 

Thinking about such a mammoth task led me eventually to one question: how the hell did they edit Boyhood? A film that was shot over 12 years, with rapidly changing technology and processes, is an effort in itself, but how would you go about editing it? I found an article from Filmmaker Magazine (you can read it here) that answers that question.

 

Did the technical jargon go largely over my head? Well, yes. First Assistant Editor, Mike Saenz, said, “We’d have needed to go back and retransfer tens of hours of film, and we didn’t want to do that. So we kept on, even until last year, doing things this really archaic way…” and went on to describe DV tapes and EDL lists and a panic based around camera reports and 3-perf and 4-perf, which turned out not to be a problem at all.

 

Still, in spite of my ignorance, I gathered enough from context to understand one thing: everything changes very, very quickly, and flexibility and imagination to work with it are more essential than ever. That gives me a little hope (although I know it doesn’t excuse me from learning how to use the technology in the first place).