Editing has Started!

I’m back home from a work trip and with a very rare oasis of time from other projects over the next little bit, so I’m very hopeful that this will be a flurry of editing on the nine (nine!!) episodes I have on the go right now. They’re at various stages of readiness but I can at least get started on all of them, beginning with the episode on chickadees I’ve been going on and on about. The next few weeks, if I have any say in them, will come with a lot of postproduction updates and hopefully a couple of shoots to keep me sane.

You learn two things almost immediately on these episodes when you bring them into the edit - in a very ‘immutable laws of the universe’ way.

1 - no matter how much footage you shot and how confident you are that you got everything you could possibly need, you run out way faster than you think you will, and are constantly frustrated at past-you for not sticking it out for another hour, getting another angle, swapping lenses, finding a different way to catch the animal in question.

You get lulled into a false sense of security because, to take the chickadee for example, I did indeed get a lot of coverage in terms of sheer numbers of clips, gigabytes of footage, amount of time I have a chickadee in frame.

Imagine this but like a thousand.

But then it’s like, when you’re cutting a sequence, having 90% medium shots of a chickadee from a 400mm lens becomes much less useful. Because once you’ve used that shot once, you can’t exactly cut to what is basically the same shot, just from a different day in a different location. In the unforgiving view of the edit, it’s… ‘same shot, different day’ to coin a phrase.

Which is why when I’m shooting I need to constantly remind myself not to just keep rolling on 10 minutes of a chickadee from my 400mm, it’s swapping lenses, angles, locations, catching behaviour, action, etc etc. A lesson I never quite learn hard enough, because I keep coming back to this in the edit. 

Look! He's slightly further away!!

2 - You basically always find yourself having shot a ton of footage for one moment that winds up being 5 second long, meanwhile you’ve convinced yourself that you got enough coverage for another moment that is actually somehow a full 60 seconds and you have two shots that fit.

I somehow shot thirty minutes of this kind of stuff for the line 'it gets dark early in winter'.

This might be solvable with better planning on my part. And I do employ a lot of organizational elements in doing these - spreadsheets and checklists and blocked out scripts - but until you actually have the edit in front of you with the narration and timing of everything, you’re never able to predict exactly how much of what you’ll need.

The responsible adult thing to do is likely to do more preproduction before actually going out with a camera, mapping the episode in a radio edit to have very clear expectations about what’s needed and only then going out and getting it but… it’s a level of discipline that just can’t exist with a side project. I get the work done I can when I can, sometimes that’s writing and researching, sometimes it’s recording narration, sometimes it’s editing, sometimes it’s shooting. If I were to restrict myself to a more assembly-line process everything would take even longer because I’d be wasting opportunities for the sake of that process.

Plus, going out and shooting is my favourite part of the process, and if I was walling that off until I had a number of episodes already at radio edit, I’d go a little crazy. I need the balance.

Anyway, all that to say, I’m getting more and more comfortable with this just being a fact of doing these. The nice thing about the looser approach is I can be editing, realize I don’t have X Y or Z, and then go shoot it in the middle of the edit, which is what I imagine I’ll need to be doing with a lot of these.

Next week looks rainy and miserable - perfect to cozy up and try to get in a flow state to put together a few of these. And start to address the real elephant in the room: animation. Because that’s immutable law of the universe #3: no matter how much you want the script to be coverable with footage you’ve already shot, you find out there is way, way more content that feels like it needs animation than you expected.

Stuck in the edit? Just slap an 'animation' placeholder in and make it future-you's problem!

But maybe that’s a subject for the next update.