In trying to prepare for this post, I looked up quotes from two editors who have produced numerous works I admire: Dede Allen (who edited Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, The Breakfast Club, The Wiz, and more) and Thelma Schoonmaker (frequent collaborator with Martin Scorsese and known for her work on movies such as Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The King of Comedy). I came across two quotes from Thelma that I found particularly relevant in describing my own path while editing HOUSE and that I think are useful for understanding the two parts of this post: processing and process.
First, processing:
“It’s hard for people to understand editing, I think. It’s absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay and you have to form it – this raw, unedited, very long footage.”
The first few times I started truly analyzing the footage from Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, I was both amazed and overwhelmed. From Chicago alone, there is nearly five hours worth of footage. From Detroit, around two hours. And from Baltimore, an hour.
This, in many ways, is great. The interviews are fantastic, the footage looks great, the sound came out better than expected (especially in Chicago, given that we shot at what was essentially a picnic/family reunion/music festival), and overall, I like to think that the content of the interviews is insightful both about house music as a genre and as a community.
The flipside, however, is that I immediately realized that no matter how much great footage there is, I am aiming for three episodes (one for each city) lasting 5 to 7 minutes in length. The only analogy I can really think of to accurately illustrate how daunting doing so can be is inspired by the above quote, but applied to making a bunch of dough for bread. Imagine you prepare 100 pounds of dough for your favorite type of bread. This is your first time making this type of bread by scratch. You planned what you wanted to make, maybe even craved this one type of bread for a few months, got together a grocery list to make sure you had everything you needed, kneaded the dough for hours until your arms got sore, realized maybe you didn’t put in as much of one ingredient as you did another (or thought you put in too much of one ingredient versus another), finally got the dough to come out (maybe a bit lumpy in some parts, but salvageable), and then you realize…your oven does not fit all 100 pounds of dough. It doesn’t even fit 10 pounds of dough. Maybe, it fits five.
If you’re like me, you still like that you have a lot of bread dough. You are a little bit sad you cannot use all the dough at once but you can use different parts of the dough to make another loaf if the first one does not quite turn out as expected. However, you are now a little bit anxious about which bits of the dough to use to make the best possible loaf of (hopefully) delicious bread once the dough is cooked.
My first few attempts at trying to figure out what would make the best “loaf” were absolutely horrendous. Frankly, I was too attached to everything which made me fear that every single piece of footage that I thought would work in one place could easily be replaced with something better. I was frustrated with myself and with the feeling of uncertainty I got every time I even looked at the footage.
Disclaimer, if you have not already noticed: editing is hard for me. It takes me a while to get into the “flow”, so to speak, of what I am actually doing, which is sitting down and trying and retrying things while also keeping in mind a bigger goal of what the end product will look like, who the “characters” are and how to develop them, and also allowing yourself enough room to simply let yourself and your work breathe. And also remembering to trust yourself. I can honestly say that for the first few months of “editing” that I did (which was more or less me opening Premiere, staring at my footage, watching it, trying to write down what threads I could pull from interviews, and getting frustrated that I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing and that I didn’t even know what I wanted to do in terms of putting everything together) was difficult. I’m someone who studies in one spot for an hour and then has to move to a different room in order to make sure I don’t lose focus. And I could barely get myself to look at one minute portions of a larger, several hour project without worrying about all 100 pounds of “dough” instead of maybe an ounce.
But again, HOUSE has been and continues to be a learning process for me. Which is where the second quote comes in and how I started to understand process being just as crucial as processing:
“Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you’re frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again.”
I did not figure this out very quickly. But when I did, it helped me to understand that editing is as much about the process of editing as it is about processing what you are editing. And I only really figured this out once I stepped back for a moment from what I was doing and came up with a new way to work through editing as a process, in a way that would work for me without sacrificing the larger vision of HOUSE.
More or less, I worked through my footage as a writer, something I am more familiar with. I carefully transcribed every interview, making note of what was and was not working for me in a given interview and what information was gained from different interviews that could benefit the themes I think the footage as whole conveys. While also keeping in mind that HOUSE isn’t just a project that I want to convey my own feelings about a genre, but the feelings of a community about something that many folks think brings people together.
Forty-five pages of interviews for one city later, I felt relieved. I could physically see what I was doing and understand what things helped this story and what things did not. And so, I started to get to work editing and breathing again. The first lump of dough wasn’t ready for the oven, but at least I wasn’t just staring at it sitting on the counter-top anymore.
Comments