080: Rachel Shenton – Final Cut vs Premiere & Editing Films for Success

Just holding it there a little bit will stop it from being confining you to only being able to use a little bit if something happens in that shot, you’ve held it and something really nice happens, you’ve got that you can also use as well. So I think it’s really important to think about it while you’re doing it, thinking what would I like to have left with at the end of the day? It can give you just loads more to work with, or me, a lot more to work with having those shots that are just held just for a few seconds and just nice and clear and then it’s all thought through.

So what I do, it’s very important for me because I wasn’t there, I don’t shoot myself. It’s so important to me to have that moment of going through everything for the first time. Sometimes I’ll curl down the footage if there’s loads of it, or I’ll just make selections of what I’d like to use. Making all of the multi cams syncing everything up. So speeches, ceremony if it’s a wedding, any letters getting read all that stuff, and just laying it all out in front of me just to really get an idea of what I’ve got, how it felt, how all the footage feels, how the day felt. That’s important for me. Again, like I say, because I wasn’t there, but I think it’s also important, a lot of videographers, they’re not getting to the edit until they’ve already done six other weddings. So I think it’s a really important part of the process just to sit in front of it all and just look at it again fresh before you even think about what’s the story here? How am I going to put this together? Go through absolutely everything, trim it down.

Yeah, it’s sometimes definitely harder than others. If I’ve been booked to do a full package, I’m doing the ceremony and the speeches first anyway. So that’s always a really good chance to go through and listen for anything that might pull a little bit of a thread of a story together. And there’s always going to be those where that really doesn’t present itself immediately and you’re going through thinking, there’s not a lot I can use here. Those are the tricky ones. And I think where you’ve got to read between the lines a little bit and figure out what’s going to be the most important thing to them. And I think as a lot of filmmakers I work with, they want to go for the most emotional story. Sometimes that’s not there, sometimes that’s not the type of couple you’ve got. Sometimes it’s going to be time for a little funny best man speech or sometimes it’s going to be time for a little anecdote from the father of the bride. And I think that we shouldn’t necessarily ignore those straight away because it doesn’t tell the story we want.

It’s the story that they’ve got, that’s their lives. And so yeah, always start with, I’ll listen to the ceremony and the speeches. It’s not always really obvious. Sometimes it’s straight away, it’s like, oh okay this happened to them, this is how they met, this is what their story is, and it’s really, really easy. But when it’s less obvious, I think that’s when you’re listening to what emphasis, which vows do they have the most emphasis on, is one of them stopping halfway through to laugh at something that’s been said in the vows because that’s the couple they are and they’re like, Oh yeah, that reminds me of an in joke or something.

And it’s can be a lot more emotional that way. And you’re going back and forth and a lot of the time you can have the B-roll reflecting something that was said in the speeches and you can build a story of that couple that way and that way you’re bringing, I think a bit more flavor rather than just, oh these are the events of the day. They get constructed completely differently though. So I think when you’re doing a non-linear one, you’ve really got to go for those narrative parts. You’ve got to really listen for the story and the speeches.

If you are doing a linear edit, it doesn’t necessarily matter so much what was said, how the ceremony went, what’s going on with that day, because you’re just going to construct it chronologically and then you’re done. So in that sense it’s a lot quicker, but yeah, a lot of filmmakers prefer to go non-linear, you’re picking out the story, you’re laying all of that down on top of the music and then you’re going through and you’re constructing it very, not chronologically as well, you’re starting in the middle somewhere, you’re figuring out at what point during this seven to 10 minute film is the bride going to come down the aisle. It doesn’t have to be exactly where she did it in the day. You could have that way later.