This art form of ours is truly remarkable in the way it can direct the emotional state of our audience. As editors we can bend and shape the blocks on our timelines in so many different ways and each one takes our viewers on a exciting visual experience.
If we’re trained in the black arts of editing, if we master the hundreds of creative techniques, skills and mindsets, we can take the same raw footage and cut it in completely different ways. Pacing, structure, camera movement and cutting patterns are just some of the elements we craft to produce wildly different outcomes for any project.
To illustrate how powerful this art form can be take a look at these two rough cuts I constructed. They are built from the exact same raw footage but I’ve edited them in two completely different ways. And as you can easily notice, this has created two completely different emotional states for the viewer.
Cinematic Documentary Cut
In this fist version I imagined that I was cutting in a high end documentary style. My pretend director would want a considered, artistic and cinematic feel to the sequence. With that in mind I kept the pacing slow, left out any observational style camerawork, chose symmetrical shots and scored it all with an emotional and artistic music track.
Entertainment Show Cut
In this second version I pretended that my client was an entertainment or reality TV show. They would want a quicker and lighter cutting style that gave a more playful emotional feeling for the audience. I therefore included much more of the observational camerawork, a tongue in cheek music track and used simple cutting techniques like cutting the B roll, character action and camera movement on the beat.
Same raw footage, two different outcomes
Of course we could go on forever in choosing different moods, structures and cutting patterns depending on what the client wanted, who the audience was and what we wanted to make them feel. But these two rough cuts really highlight the fact that how we decide to make the audience feel can change no matter what raw footage were given. And that is power.
An editor trained in creative skills like these can take any genre, from online content and corporate promos to reality TV and documentary, and make them many times more effective and powerful for their viewers.
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