Piece 1: Advertisement: mmmmm Cafe. A 60-second made-for-YouTube advertisement for an imaginary café. Featuring exhaustive speed-ramping and foley work and backed by some classical goodness. This is meant to be utter food porn, with the aim of making you feel hungry at the end of it. I had never done foley work before and severely underestimated how challenging it would be. I was also challenged as this footage was not meant to be in my final edit (had to cancel plans for another ad), so had to deal with some footage that wasn’t as well planned out as I would like.

Piece 2: Narrative: The Existential Sandwich. Before this class, I had never done a conversational edit, and when we did them earlier in the semester I found out I wasn’t that great at them. So I conceived this absurd comedy sketch a la Aunty Donna or Mr. Show. This was a challenging editing process as I’m not a huge fan of directing and thus made some coverage mistakes. Despite this, I had fun pushing the limits of absurdity and hope you feel a little bit of every emotion (from mildly amused to outright uncomfortable).

Piece 3: Documentary: South Summit BTS. Came to this gig with no plan or knowledge of the band or show (I got invited to tag along with a photographer friend), but they rocked. footage of shows looks unreal (the lighting is exceptional) and I caught some of my favourite shots of all time. Despite this, the challenge was actually crafting this assortment of cool shots into some sort of story, so the drawn out intro was how I did that.

Reflection:

I came into this class because I had done a ton of editing over the last few years but am currently in a transitioning period from media being a passion to an actual freelance job. With it came a sort of imposter syndrome and confidence issue as – outside of VCE Media – I had not yet partaken in any sort of deep dive editing/videography courses. I felt whilst I had made a ton of films (and a lot of professional work in the basketball space), I had no idea what I was doing.

So has this class assuaged those doubts? Yes and no. The class certainly got me thinking about Murch’s rule of six; about the story and the rhythms of the piece (and other elements like the 2d plane I had never thought about). Most importantly, it’s about emotion, and emotion can be one of those inexplicable things. You can tidy up your match-cuts, J-cuts, L-cuts etc. but often the emotion of a piece is not due to one thing but can be a holistic result of all the planning, the background and the passion that goes into it. As such, I still feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing, but now I’m doing it more confidently and with better processes.

I’ve found great benefit in seeing and hearing people’s immediate reactions to my work in class (it’s a lot different to emailing it to a client and getting a ‘yep all good’ in response). To see that I’m able to execute a piece with a desired tone and make audiences react a certain way is reassuring. I’ve also met a couple people in the class (including you Sebastian) who I feel could become genuine long-term industry connections, and we all know how invaluable networking can be.