I spent three hours last week on a Zoom call with a kid who was convinced he could buy his way out of a bad exposure by upgrading to a new sensor, as if a higher bit depth acts as a magic wand for poor lighting. It’s the same old song: people treat post-production like…
I spent three hours last week watching a beautifully lit documentary—the kind where the shadows actually mean something—only to have the entire experience ruined by text crawling across the bottom of the frame like a distracted insect. People seem to think that learning how to write good subtitles is about finding the flashiest font or…
I remember sitting in a cramped edit suite ten years ago, staring at a monitor while a client insisted we needed a “premium transcription service” to fix a messy dialogue track. They were convinced that throwing more money at a software subscription would solve a fundamental lack of clarity in the scene. It’s the same…
I spent most of the nineties sitting in dark suites waiting for film to develop, learning that if a shot didn’t work in the light, no amount of magic in the lab was going to save it. Now, I watch kids spend six hours a day hunting for the perfect transition plugin or a way…
Read More “Editing for Sixty Seconds Is a Different Craft” »
I remember sitting in a cramped edit suite in London, twenty years ago, staring at a monitor that refused to acknowledge a single frame of footage I’d spent twelve hours capturing. I wasn’t fighting a lack of talent or a bad sensor; I was fighting a file format that didn’t want to play nice with…
I remember sitting in a windowless edit suite in South London, staring at a sequence of shots that looked technically perfect but felt like absolute nothing. I had the highest resolution, the sharpest lenses, and enough coverage to satisfy a studio executive, yet the rhythm was dead on arrival. People tend to treat montage like…
I spent a decade watching editors try to fix broken continuity with digital wipes and flashy zooms, as if a bit of motion blur could mask the fact that the two shots didn’t belong in the same universe. It’s a common trap: you realize the coverage is thin or the pacing is dragging, so you…
Read More “Most Transitions Are Hiding a Structural Problem” »
I remember sitting in a dim edit suite in South London, twenty years ago, staring at a timeline that felt three miles long. I had shot everything—every micro-expression, every stray light flicker, every bit of beautiful, expensive coverage—and yet the story was still suffocating. I was terrified that if I trimmed a single frame, I’d…
I remember sitting in a dark suite back in ’98, staring at a sequence that felt like it was dragging its feet through wet cement. I had just spent three weeks obsessing over whether I needed a new color grading suite or a more expensive workstation to fix the “pacing issue.” It turns out, I…
I spent three weeks in a windowless edit suite back in ’04, staring at a sequence that felt like it was dragging its feet through wet concrete. I had the most expensive workstation money could buy and a hard drive full of 4K footage that looked like a dream, but the scene was dead. I…