Careers in Television and Video: Film and Video Editing Concepts

Starting a career in the film, television or video industry as an editor is a universally desired position for any aspiring job seeker in this field. Here is my advice to those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed editing hopefuls. Learn other skills. How can you express yourself visually with each scene, if you do not understand the lighting fundamentals that created them? How can you edit if you do not know how to capture the scene you need with a camera? How can you edit one scene next to the other, if you do not know how they were written into a screenplay? The common misconception about editing is that this is where the creative process really happens. It depends on how you look at it. Yes, there are many artistic aspects in the post-production editing phase. Elements like creating graphics, making and using animations, creating musical ambience, integrating dimensional sound effects, and much more are tied together to create an audio and visual mood and feel. Stop me. My mouth is watering. I love editing.

While this really does happen, the truth is that all of this creativity was actually written-in months before during pre-production, in the screenplay. During production, the scenes were shot in a calculated and methodical manner similar to an assembly line. On major productions, when it finally gets down to post-production, the editor(s) is merely piecing it back together at the direction of the producer(s). The creativity at this point is in the finishing touches, but this skill is nothing to be taken lightly. I find this stage of the production the most exhilarating. It is the art of taking several creative elements and combining them into artistic expression. The edit session may be preplanned and formulated, but the final touches are what makes or breaks the project, in timing, logic and viewer interest. There is an art to editing, and before you ask which editing software is the best to use, let us put that to the side. I will get to that in another segment. However, you might get the idea about how I feel about that by continuing to read this one.