I hope this post finds you all well. With the great fortune that I've had professionally over the last year; I wanted to share some of the things I have learned because I believe it can make all of us better filmmakers, artists and people. As some of you may know, my career has taken a major turn over the last year. Since last October, I have served as one of Spike Lee's editors on numerous projects including "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus," "Katt Williams: Priceless" and most recently "What Is The Triangle? A Spike Lee Orange and Blue Skies Joint." What I thought would be awesome to discuss is the ways in which you can take something that is good and turn it into something better, even great. I'm not offering a guarantee of course, but I am dropping a challenge. Will you do the things necessary to squeeze everything out of your project and yourself? This challenge isn't just for you, but myself as well. Lord knows, I need to get better with every project. Let's see where we end up. I used to believe that being great was achievable strictly on talent. You are either born with the ability to be great or you're not. I've realized in the past year that this is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. The first lesson learned is the sheer amount of labor and commitment it takes to maximize whatever it is you're working on. You can never be satisfied in the development process. You have to be meticulous and honest. Honest in the sense that if something isn't working you can't be married to it. You have to be willing to find a better solution and grind away until you find one.
One example is when I cut "Katt Williams: Priceless." Spike shot with eight cameras so the options were plenty. Being a young editor, working on my first project with so many cameras and working on a comedy special my natural tendency was to think on a macro level. What camera angle is the best for this part of the show and how long do I stay on it to help set up and deliver a joke? That makes sense right? Well, I quickly learned screening with Spike that you had to think on a Macro AND Micro level. What is going on in the corners of the frame, what is going on with the camera movement, how many times have we seen this angle in this amount of time. All of these factors mattered when making a decision on what we were going to see on the screen. It took a couple weeks repeatedly looking at the SMALL things before we arrived at a point where we exhausted all of the available footage. Looking back on it, I did a pretty good job at the beginning, but that meticulous attention to detail is what made it way better.
We all need to ask ourselves, have I done enough to make this as strong as this can be. Have I committed to it enough? Have I given myself enough TIME to see it all the way through? These are critical things we have to ask ourselves while we're thinking about visual strategies, budgets, marketing, fame and fortune. Have you thought about them enough?
Let me know what you think in the comments. I would love to hear from you all.
