The Beginning Process of Learning How to only Keep the Best Footage that Supports the Story and Cutting The Rest
This video was extremely fun to make and a personal challenge to turn it out from planning, set-up, design, filming and editing over in 24 hours. Let me specify that this was 12 hours of planning through filming and then 12 hours to edit this short, yet highly dense with clips, video to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with the awesome *licensed Spinmaster’s Gabby’s Dollhouse toy collection (*I feel it’s important to note that I use only the licensed toy line from the tv series on Netflix- with the toy shortage and explosion of popularity of the show, it seems there is a plethora of knock-off Gabby toys available—I’m sticking with Spinmaster toys so that all the characters look like they should and the money flows in the direction of keeping the cartoon series going!).
This video is our channel’s 6th video and I am personally quite proud of this one. My first goal was to not waste time during time of the setup-process by strictly follow the story outline and film plan. I wanted to make a video with a time constraint around the two (very incredible songs: “Me Ma She Knows” by Rune Dale and “I’m Missing Ennis” by Philip Ayers--which together would only be 3 minutes and 30 seconds), and pile it with a few character storylines and extremely gorgeous footage of the decorated house. A sub-goal was to make a video that truly had zero wasted or repeated footage. It seemed like a daunting task, especially during the editing process, as I had to hack away so many truly gorgeous shots and angles. From some of the research videos I’ve watched, the suggestion is that one needs to be ruthless with cutting out anything that has no point ultimately to the entire story. The whole process felt a bit like ripping off a bandaid- initially there was a strike to the soul that I had to cut this super adorable close-up of Gabby with a giant shamrock, but then an incredible sense of relief as the video fell right into time sync with the music. Some of the cuts were easier than others, but the finished product is something of a personal improvement that is inspiring. In one of my last cuts, after completely lining up the entire three and a half minutes of film transitions to the beat of Ayers’ song, the four seconds that I removed bumped everything off. New lesson is that I am not going to line up the music until I’ve finished all my final cuts. All in all, it was a fabulous experience and I am very happy with the final product. There is more of a feel of “digestibility” to this one and I absolutely attribute that with the serious cuts I made during editing. I’m very excited to continue to apply this extremely valuable editing habit.