How to Edit Documentaries like Dodford

when it comes to editing and retention-based editing that feels like a chore it's not about speed it's about how effective you are with your Cuts I always had this prejudice against Adam Sandler you gave me context you made me feel shame how dare you I then took that image selects the back of her head changed her short hair into long hair directly after that we can cut to the real life video of her stepping on stage I don't like this but I do like this very much I'm gonna say it now on the editing podcast the yellow highlighter has to be put to bed the one creator that has been on everyone's lips this year is dotford and it's because of his refreshing modernization of the video essay format on YouTube normally people would just tell the story with their own voice over dotford actually does the work of collecting segments and sound bites across his subject's career and uses complex editing and storytelling techniques to allow the personality to tell their own story honestly the skill set that dotford has is absolutely incredible and he's one of the few who's graduated from short form and then pioneered a new format in long form that many are trying to replicate I'm so we wanted to have a conversation to find out what's going on in dolphin's mind such as how he writes and storyboards what he edits before he opens the timeline how he's using AI to create a forty thousand dollar film shoot with just twenty dollars the underutilized importance of marketing your content before you publish and the desire for creating premium content for YouTube I'm starting with an advanced editing breakdown of his most popular video the Adam Sandler paradox [Music] B was recorded by Riverside it is the best remote video recording tool for podcasts you can find out more about them later I'm not exactly sure what the hell I am I came at it as the question I wanted to solve was everyone has uh this kind of preconceived idea of Adam Sandler with his stand-up SNL and iconic movie roles under his belt the 1990s were truly Adam Sandler the reason the word paradox came up is because looking at his life and career there's been so many contradictions he's in Hollywood movies but he's also naturally self-conscious and introverted what a great outfit that is that's being with YouTube and Mommy that's the best life can get which is just interesting for a character to explore in a video like this and so I wanted to flesh that out put a spotlight on him let a whole collection of people who already knew that and felt that way about and decided that and be like aha they get validated from it which is what which is great some of us thought you were actually completely out of your mind when you cast Adam Sandler in this movie originally the whole concept of the video was uh going to be called something like Adam Sandler's comfort zone throughout the edit I think I was always trying to signify that with every cut I wanted him to look out of place I wanted to to cut to him feeling unnatural like there was a specific point where we come out of the intro and we can't Film Festival that's just an environment especially in 2002 where he just looked completely out of place it was always the motivation it's like how can we make sure that every cut is lending to the point of this video which was about showing how he's uncomfortable but he's learned how to hone his comfort zone and perfect it now because his comfort zone is so strong he has that ability to step out of it but then there was even the moment when you were doing the contrast cutting as well during that can interview it just makes me laugh go [ __ ] yourself he's funny to me why did you also be cutting towards that scene yeah I think that was that I was trying to cut to that for humor Paul Thompson's saying well I find him funny and then cutting to him just doing something drastic and crazy he just makes me laugh and then coming back to the the kind of sterile cold can interview panel I wanted to push the humor there I wanted to push exactly what Paul saw in Adam in in that moment and really make it feel like we were delving into his imagination it just makes me laugh go [ __ ] yourself he's funny to me I love that we'll we'll have a bit of contrast there to think contrast crates Focus baby hey yo that's exactly what it is yeah what was your favorite moment in Adamson documentary and how did you make that work my favorite sequence in uh the Adam Sandler Paradox is the uncut gems Montage holy [ __ ] I'm gonna come for two reasons one just because I think it's a montage that flows with a lot of emotional intensity your new film uncut gems your performance is crazy I was editing this uncut gems Montage sequence and I'm going for between three or four sources cutting back forth uh between them oh I know what is happening so I want the Celtics to cover I want the Celtics half time I wanted to it comes to this like emotional climax where we're going through um Adam Sandler's character experience all these situations with other characters who are cheating on him essentially and telling him that he's worthless your [ __ ] swimming pool you know how that makes me feel nevermind should we maybe are you serious right now I don't know I just know well I'll tell you what I know it's the dumbest [ __ ] bet I ever heard of it builds up and builds up and builds up until eventually he's slammed into the the boot of a car and his wife is just looking at him like he's a miserable loser hate being with you I hate looking at you oh no I want the underwear sucker and if I had my way I would never see you again it's okay thank you I'll meet you right back inside it's all good now I'm really proud of that Montage because I feel like it's all it you kind of drawn into it and if I look at the retention graph it's one of the most flat Parts too but it's also something just that I know on a meta level I was it's a miracle that I even cut it I think it's the only time that I've ever edited in Flow State I was not in my office here where I normally edit I was at home with my parents editing on the kitchen table on a uncomfortable wooden chair and I was in an environment that really would not lend itself to feeling like I was immersed in the edit I was on one screen which I'm not used to got immersed in this like 60 Minutes of just complete and out of focus where I was able to construct something that I feel like I 20 you know 365 days out of the year I normally can't do but for some reason in in that one focused environment I was able to pull that Montage together and I'm really proud of it I love this because the theme one of the themes of this was outside of his comfort zone and there's you sitting on a kitchen table being uncomfortable method editing well it's the same with method acting so in the same way when I was doing boxing content I wanted to know what it felt like to get hit so I sparred and I got hit so I know how it feels you probably accidentally did method editing it got you into a flow state it honestly makes so much sense and I think it seems very effective the characters on fire don't set yourself on fire there is a limit to message editing disclaimer don't do that one of the more interesting cuts that I noticed you started a clip out of context which was Adam Sandler just kind of just doing a joke on stage next to an award hello my name is Adams Heather can I get a hell yeah and we didn't have that context and then you showed that clip again at the end and it kind of felt like it was like there was a beautiful moment for me seeing that clip again why did you bookend the entire documentary with that sequence I love going full circle in everything and you I think you'll find it recurs a lot in these videos this thing happens when we die Keanu Reeves I'd like to introduce a question at the beginning and then answer it at the end I know that the ones who love us will miss us [Music] and whether that's you know an exposition or something obvious where you actually hear the ending of a sentence or it's something bigger like in that one we are seeing the same clip play but this time at the end we have the whole emotional context we've been through his whole journey so now when you get to that a starting point again you you're there with him and you feel like you're standing on stage with him so that was one decision sometimes it's just um you know I want to start a sentence and then finish it later just so you know again you're going through the Journey with them and that word that way it's more rewarding brilliant you said that perfectly I always had this prejudice against Adam Sandler is in like I loved his like his 90s movies and I always thought that his later movies got a bit awful and I also ignored his serious role when he was doing the grown-ups and the Jack and Jill I was part of that camp of oh [ __ ] Adam Sandler he's not funny anymore he's a hack because you collected all of that footage and then were able to start telling that story you gave him the opportunity to tell a really fantastic story and it gave me perspective and it gave me empathy and so when we when we're cutting to him having a great time especially with the low moment of his dad passing so what does he do he reconnects with his friends and makes a movies of his friends and it's like oh God damn it that makes so much sense that's why he would make that movie you gave me context and now I feel bad for hating on that movie that I have never seen so you made me feel shame how dare you oh that wasn't my intentionated so Riverside's been partnered with us we're almost a year now and we wouldn't be able to create this without them we use it to record every remote interview for our show it's an absolute necessity it's been one of the most reliable tools for our workflow this is online software that records your screen your camera and audio all separately and uploads it to the cloud that means you can end up with multiple files that you can edit separately giving you full creative control in the edit it also doesn't give you bad recording quality like other video call softwares do it gives you 4K footage it looks professional as Frick also if your connection drops during the interview it doesn't matter because Riverside records locally so no footage will ever get lost more than just recording Riverside has amazing post-production tools as well to help you create your show as fast as possible Riverside generates AI transcriptions which you can use to then do text based editing on your show and if you want to introduce the guest you can pop the script in a teleprompter and off you go and lastly you can use Magic Clips basically you can automatically create shorts from your long form show right in Riverside with the click of a button you can do everything from pressing record to pressing publish right in Riverside you can sign up to Riverside for free and use the code editing podcast for 20 off the paid version back to the conversation you mentioned Danny that you try something different every time and you try to challenge yourself in some way why do you why do you do that I love a good challenge when I approached it from the beginning I I came at this differently as I normally do where I was like I'm going to challenge myself to use as as little of me in it as possible a voice over and narration try to avoid it as much as I can but in this one in the Adam Sandler dock I really pushed that as far as I could in a almost 20 minute video there's less than 90 seconds of narration I didn't show my face in it whatsoever so it's all pushing myself as much as I can to use visual storytelling and stringing Clips together as well as I can which is really hard in a similar vein to trying to not use voice over and narration I'm looking for any way uh to try and not be not take the easy route sure is looking for like ways to say a point but then not say blatantly and obviously and always think of a clever way of making the audience feel like they're coming up with it themselves what was that visual storytelling and how did you make that work finding the right Clips is always the go-to and that's that's something that comes out in the researching phase we just try and find as many sources as we can and then once I have a hundred page document of Just Blue Links and hyperlinks uh that's when I'll go through and I will structure them out and find an order see where things link I go in and I really scrutinize like on a line by line level I'm moving things around hyper analyzing why one line should go before another I'm cutting up quotes and I'm putting things in between I'm kind of writing a montage on the Google Document before it goes into the project then I'm like I said I'm just following instructions you write the montages like how does that look yeah because most people just put montage and figure out how to get it like do you like write B for B like how does that work for you yeah so I mean because I used to do that I used to just write Montage I used to put it in packets like I'll make a montage here but then you know you end up scratching your head and you're stuck there and you think but what does that mean you know and I I just tried to eliminate that we will have these sound bites as blue hyperlinks and I'll just copy and paste them and I'll write as if I'm writing an essay so you can take a script from one of my videos and read it like an essay [Music] I was with Ben he got a walk a Fame star and I went and visited him and I said we got to do a movie together right yelling in the car he cannot hear you like it's hard for me to explain this right now but like essentially the we're cutting between him and his daughter singing him and his daughter in a looking for a car parking spot in their car also coming between Adam and Ben Stiller about to fight on the grass and these three things are building up in unison [Music] yeah I was thinking that too [Music] I was disappointed in you for quid piano and then we talked to Noah and he was thinking a similar thought Adam connected to something very deeply in this guy we lucked out got to do this together and it was deep and that was you know you know it was very moving to me let's get it together [Music] and they're all cuts at the same time so essentially three things that I wanted to like uh take from the movie but they were all building up together at the same time while also giving Exposition about the the production you put the movie in italics you then put the actual movie clip in as a hyperlink and you're cutting between them at all and then also then put in the brackets probably just like the action in the movie as well that's fascinating and so like I can still see which one you cut like you do need to cut to but just seeing a montage written out like this I've never seen anything like this before this is what came naturally to me I think this is how I like to visualize it are you using like narrative structures or knowing or like tried entry methods to know how to get there to be honest no like I am not well versed in any real storytelling structures or you know Frameworks or anything and I sometimes I try and articulate it and I try and put a framework and I tie up in a ribbon see if I see if it makes sense but really it's like this subconscious it's all ways that ends up being this one person that inspires me this is the part of the story that we don't not everyone knows about these are the obstacles that they overcame that are also not necessarily a secret but uh are missing from kind of popular knowledge and so it's just that simple like 3x structure you know and one of those acts they're gonna have to be down so you can get lifted back up again so I don't overthink it it's just neces it's just always about what's the low Point how do they ever come in how did they get to the high point that's essentially the the meat and potatoes you're organically and naturally know how we should feel so if you just know it you have no idea how many editors hate you now because you have that instinct you just know I need to have a character who needs to go through some struggles to get to a goal and that's it but that case for you then what's your rules in writing let's not talk about editing anymore let's talk about writing even though they are the same what's right what does writing mean for you then it's the part of the process that I get the most excited about because anything's possible you have full creative Reign when a new project starts I end up kind of getting a bit anxiety about it sometimes because once you close off a project and it's being on your mind for weeks and then you put it out into the world and it's suddenly you can get deflated because you I was so excited about it and then ramping up that excitement for a new project can take a bit of time but there's something that happens in the writing where you find an approach to it like some of these stories have been told a million times but we always want to do it in a way that's never been done before the documentary about Drew Barrymore the one thing that gave me that fire inside me was Adam my researcher found these two clips one of Drew Barrymore in 1997. what's the dream same one I've had since I was little to be on a farm to with lots of animals to be with someone I love and one night it'll rain and I'll know that I finally got there and the interviewer said one night it will rain what does that mean how was that got anything to do with it and she just says I love the rain and that's one clip she said in 1997 and then he found another clip of her in 2021. whenever you can go out into the rain do not miss the opportunity out of context she looks crazy she looks like she's just happy in rain but then we knew that once we had those two clips that I already knew the exact ending to the whole documentary is like we know now there that she has come to a happy place she's reached that final point of success and like about lit me up inside I was like we have to do anything what it takes to make sure that we complete this documentary just so we can get to this ending because it was perfect same one I've had since I was little to be on a farm to be with lots of animals to be with someone I love [Applause] and one night it all rained and I'll know that I finally got there one night it will rain whenever you can go out into the rain do not miss the opportunity I love the rain I just got chills man yeah you just describing that just getting me chills it also might just be the air con I've got on at a moment as well but uh yeah from finding that North Star moment how did you earn the right to get to that cut that cut to me that symbolized that she had finally reached the point that the dream had come true that she'd finally reached the point that she wanted to get to all these years and so knowing that eventually she was going to become rich or happy place that meant that we really had to dig into the the depths of when it felt like she wasn't do you recall your first experience with um I was um 10 or 11. that reward at the end where she's finally overcome all of her obstacles and she's living the life that she always wanted that's only going to have emotional satisfaction when we've been down into the The Trenches with her the whole Reddit and the whole story we're yearning for her to escape from these these dark eras when and how did you go into rehab when I was 13 my mom put me in there it guided me the whole way through I was like okay this is this is worth it look going through all of this dark era um because it's going to be the the fuel that energizes the beauty at the end hey I love the rain hey there's this edit breakdown I want to show you so I wanted to Showcase all of these editing formulas around a younger version of myself instead of this effect taking a day's worth of work I was able to make this effect in 10 minutes with envato everything from Motion Graphics to fonts to stock footage is all there in one subscription so you can cut your editing time in half the library is currently numbered like 14 million assets dude I browse that thing like Netflix once you have an Innovative subscription you can download as many assets as you want most even come with a commercial license so you can use them in your commercial work worry free and envato's Advanced Search tool helps you find whatever you need really fast and if you need a tutorial envato has that too with tuts plus it's like Disney plus buff tutorials if you want access to over 14 million assets to support your work go ahead and hit the link in the description to sign up for envato today we've talked a lot about the creative philosophies on this soul but I also still want to find out like some of the the Practical creative choices that you make in order to make these videos work whatever practical tools and ideas that you use to ensure that your story is there I think a huge thing for me that I'm learning video by video is my branding now especially that my actual voice is becoming reduced in these videos I want my editing voice to get louder and louder and louder and become more clearly dotford and so the industry Barrymore documentary I'm really pushing the idea of like 35 millimeter film I'm really pushing uh these kind of grainy mysterious Silhouettes in my any images and videos that I'm finding I want it to feel it's hard for me to articulate it but there's a real strong sense of like analog texture to the to the editing I want it to all feel like it's something that you could have watched in the 70s in the 80s I'm kind of stripping away from contemporary modern editing techniques I'm trying to eliminate that I'm going to say it now on the editing podcast it's time for all of us to accept it I have only recently come to this decision and I put my hands up that I was a firm user of this technique but I think the yellow highlighter has to be put to bed and those paper strips rips there's paper rips as well I love also the stars that you do what is the motive between for that feeling and that branding that you make it's a couple of things one is if you are taking a a video like that if I'm finding an interview Crypt from the 80s and the 90s or whatever and then I'm putting that on a TV that's in the 90s that makes it feel more real that makes it feel like you're you were there at the time you're sitting down and you're watching it happen live and it feels like you're more immersed in that moment of the story which I think it's a really subliminal thing uh as opposed to just having it with you know the black borders on the edge I love that I love doing this and I've started working with it myself and the best way I can segue into this is we can all see that mid-journey look would you welcome please Drew Barrymore how are we using mid journey to also tell your story but it's still putting that dot for sheen on it yeah Mitch only essentially this like tool that you can input a prompt and it will give you a bunch of really high quality AI generated images when you say that sentence and it can put a funny uh feeling in anyone's tummy there are a few creative instances where it's been perfect for me because I always want to approach these documentaries as if okay if we were shooting this for real if we had a film set and we were able to shoot reconstructions what would we shoot that ability now where I don't need any of that I can just write a prompt and it will give me all these ideas and I can take something even if it's just like an idea and then run with it that's been liberating and but also there's something about mid-journey is that it does have that kind of uncanny vibe to it a lot of the time and I really lent into that that's something that I've pushed I don't want to hide away from it I don't want to make it look like it's real but this has to be I'm leaning into that that uncanny valley type of thing so industry Barrymore documentary there's a sequence where she is in the nightclub she's like 10 11 12 13 years old um getting drunk for the first time taking Coke for the first time and using mid journey I could prompt all these low angle shots of in a nightclub with all these adults surrounding her looking at her laughing at her which already when it comes straight out of my journey they look strange and a little bit out of place and people aren't the eye lines aren't looking right and you're naturally put off by it but then I can take that into after effects and I can do a whole bunch of compositing that's when I throw all my film grain effects and I do a bunch of chromatic aberration and make it feel like it's from that era and so it ends up feeling like this real refined cohesive style throughout the film which oh yeah I really like so make sure to use mid-journey for all your drunk and tripping on stuff that's what I got most documentaries words have to go out and probably film that scene but you were able to recreate it in your home that's a really exciting idea where this type of new narrative technique is now even more accessible if you were to shoot that that's a 10 20 40 50 000 sequence but you were able to make that I guess in an afternoon for this the monthly subscription it's great it's great I think that's kind of been my whole attitude as a Creator from the start you know that's why I'm so big on the idea of a bedroom filmmaker because there's nothing really holding you back and I always say this is like if you want to tell stories at the highest quality you can't you just have to put the time in to do it yourself and that's how I've got here is how I've accelerated onto the editing podcast more faster than I deserve oh you do you deserve to be here you're the most requested guest Danny I feel that imposter syndrome in you and I'm gonna have to tell you to shut that down not in our house that's right Daniel I love you able to read one of your prompts on mid-journey to make one of those images would you welcome please Drew Barrymore in the beginning of the Drew Barrymore documentary one of the very first shots is her coming out on stage on her very first late night talk show event at seven years old and she's wearing this pink dress and a pink ribbon in her hair in mid-journey I wanted to prompt an image of her standing behind the stage curtains about to go on stage and this will look behind her head we are in her world about to you know into stardom and so in my journey I prompted the back of a little blonde girl's head behind stage curtain about to go on stage wide shot cinematography 1980s 35 millimeter film symmetrical framing Center framing 16x9 aspect ratio mid Journey V5 it prompted this image which is a wonderful shot from which looks like it could be shot in the 1980s on 35 millimeter film but it's not wearing a pink dress and it's not wearing a pink ribbon so I then took that image and and threw that in Photoshop beta which now has a new generative AI tool which is like me Journey but now you can select just certain parts of the photo and and prompt something there so then I could select the back of her head change her short hair into long hair I could select her dress and turn that into a pink dress as opposed to like a brown dress and then select the back of her head and add a pink ribbon there and it all looks pretty much exactly what I wanted to look like and that's the opening shot so then directly after that we can cut to the real life video of her stepping out on stage wearing similar clothes would you welcome please Drew Barrymore [ __ ] off I don't like this but I do like this very much A lot of people are getting so excited about like mid-journey and like even runway in terms of these AI tools but this is one of the best instances where it's like this is how you can use it narratively and I do love that use case like it's great to show off your incredible images you're making a mid Journey but if you can use it to tell a story that is the best use case for a for generative AI yeah it's got to have a real world example and case for it it's gonna have a real reason to include it you know because if you can include anything just inherently putting something in there that's from mid Journey you're making a statement that I had the option to include anything I wanted in the world here and this is the decision I made you better have a weight like wait behind that that decision that's true because lots of people can say oh on set we were struggling we didn't have time and that's why we didn't get a good shot but on Mid Journey you're like you could do anything so you better be very intentional yeah with whatever image you put out there I am very envious all of the accessible tools that you have to really help whereas even for me at that age I didn't quite have the tools to really achieve what I had in my mind whereas I do feel like for you it's so much more accessible and so basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm very envious and I hate you for it and I love you for it but it's just being able to tell those stories so quickly the next generation is able to get to a higher skill set much sooner now and I always do love however how every new generation of filmmakers gets at I know when we get to that stage where there are 14 year olds creating masterpieces on their phone which will happen we don't hold a grudge to that I think it's never been a better time to be an ed so be a Creator be a filmmaker and that's only going to improve as long as the world isn't you know in a nuclear war and we can't hold a grudge to that so I think it's a beautiful thing that kids and young people have these tools to push themselves creatively I will say inherently because those tools are there doesn't mean that you know how to use them or what to do with them or how you want to use your voice and still the things that you learned years ago you know you wouldn't have become the creative that you are you know if you hadn't put in the The Blood Sweat and Tears and working out what your voice was and regardless of the tools you had you know that's still the tools weren't there is the reason you became the editor that you are now the tools that I had access to gave me the ability but then I still had to learn how to use them it reminds me of one of my favorite stories where there was this uh poet in a village and he wrote poems by his hand and gave it to the local newspaper and they printed it and the entire Village came in and read his poems and like they all loved it but in time he actually did start to go blind and he wasn't able to see his handwriting anymore and so what he did is actually he got one of the first ever typewriters and he started to write his poems with the typewriter uh before he went totally blind he was able to continue publishing his poems but what actually changed was his poems suddenly had a lot more of a rhythm and the language became a lot more uh mechanical it's an interesting way of showing that the tools that you have can so inform how you think and and so that's why when I look at some of these new tools since you have the access to that tool or you're using that tool that tool will inform your thought process if I was to do an advanced uh image such as mid-journey at that time I can't but now that I can I have started thinking about using mid-journey as my creative process and I think that's probably like the same thing for everyone else now it's like now that I have this tool this gets me to a new creative pathway sooner and it helps me think in that way as well yeah yeah oh I think like anything that can constraints that we have that causes the type of creativity that we end up producing and so even if we have more tools tomorrow than we do today you know still there's going to be a new bucket of constraints that come with that you know and so it's always going to cause more problem solving is the the key to all editing and creative decisions so that's not going anywhere you know even if we had if we could click our fingers like that and produce anything in the world then the problem to solve is what do we want to produce and that's not going anywhere exactly we've talked about this most recently with uh Michelle Carrey as well and I think I've even labeled uh this with your content as well Daniel where there is instances where I start a video on my phone five seconds in and I go no this is not good enough for my phone and then I immediately then send it to my television and I sit down on the sofa and I start watching this and I'm treating it in the same way that I would if I sat down to Netflix or on HBO and I call that feeling premium content Daniel I do label your content as premium content and so for you then why is this production quality this storytelling this feeling why is it so important for you and why is it even important for you to be Distributing it on YouTube I try and approach everything about these films as if they are traditional pieces and so I I the way I brand them the way I Market them I'm taking very strong decisions in uh how like the reputation and the hype about a film that before it comes out and so I want their weeks before a video comes out I want it to be a palpable sense of you know hype and I want there to be kind of a buzz a reputation about what the idea of a dodfor documentary I'm trying to step away from what's been established in this quick and easily digestible content give a video is up the last thing I would say is Go watch this now that's just not on my vocabulary whatsoever it's like if it takes you two weeks that's fine just go watch it whenever you've got half an hour to go get comfy on the sofa that's more important to me that's like uh rewriting that in their head as something that they should look forward to as opposed if you're telling them watch this now that feels like a chore you're dragging them out of their comfort zone to go do something right now and the way someone thinks about my video a week after they watch it is more important than when they're watching it you want to make sure it stays with them and I think that's probably what makes this premium is because actually it does create an emotional impact an emotional Ripple with them for the rest of that week like that's what's premium is how long this stays with you emotionally and how much of a memory this does give you when you have that experience and I also think that's really interesting that you say that given your background some people may not know but you started out on Tick Tock which is very fast paced it just dawned on me like oh that's so interesting that he doesn't care about attention span about right now about getting somebody to immediately act on a call to action there's so English discussion about when it comes to editing and you know retention-based editing and the opposite of that there's people feel like you have to be one or the other and so yes I was initially a short form editor I came from Tick Tock and that has to be faster than the stuff I'm making now those decisions that you learn when you're a short editor if you're doing it right it's not being driven by how fast you can go and that's what spawned retention-based editing that we that lots of people hate but if you're doing it right it's not about being fast it's about making the right decisions the right way that directly translates to long form and so I feel like lots of the stuff I've learned from Tick Tock has directly converted into long form when I feel like I use it even though it's slower essentially at the same visual storytelling things that I'm using now I originally crafted on tiktok if you do it the right way it's not about speed it's about how effective you are with your Cuts you're a proven case of one of my favorite observations I've made with a lot of uh creators that are coming out of tick tock and on YouTube shorts where again you do have to play the retention game to start with like hey I know how easy it is for you to stop watching and so I have to make sure that every frame every second every cut has a good reason for you to stay and I think that does develop a really really good discipline of considering does this moment matter and now there are two directions you can go with this like one you can start editing really really fast and like just like overwhelming them and like or you can kind of go into that sort of like more emotional and artistic and effective way where it's like am I telling you the story in the best way that means that you want to know and like and and are emotionally engaged in where this is going because you built that skill to think on that really micro scale and then use that to Ripple across the macro scale that is such a new Incredible skill set that I am seeing in a lot of these uh shorts creators now that are actually going into long form and I think New York are really like a perfect example of that many of the things that I love about Tick Tock is those because you have this that constraint is you know people are going to swipe off this if they don't they aren't engaged by it straight away and so people have to be really creative to keep you in there to keep you hooked and the people who have who I love on Tick Tock they don't rely on any of those hacks or cheats they just know how to tell a story that well that fast and I feel like the best storytellers are the people who could say it quickly on YouTube now that you have this extra time one of the things that I learned quickly is because I was now had this extra time not only have I've got more time to breathe in the the pacing but I've also got more room in the aspect ratio so I felt like it was this breath of fresh air and that was great but because of that my initial response was like okay I'm just going to use this I'm going to drag things out and I'm going to be slow and uh that's that wasn't effective and so you that efficient storytelling you have to make sure that's still top of Mind regardless of what format you're working in and luckily those things that I was learning on Tick Tock and consuming every day from the people I was watching is it taught me a lot what were some of those things that you learned on Tick Tock that you have now brought over into YouTube and you've seen them working yeah like the visual storytelling stuff the show not tell that really helps some of the like the one I edited for you Hayden the Mr Beast one a while ago I ended up having to you know we sometimes in your scripts there's like an abstract conceptual line that you know is you have to attach something visual to that to embody something and there was one idea I think where we had Mr Beast standing on stage and then he grew so a tool that had crashed through the roof right and so that's something that not everyone has that brain and that was just a silly idea but it's an example of in any script that you've got if there's a line that has room for you to say something else on top of it you need to push that as far as it goes and that's where I learned that visual storytelling just because you have to attach as many meanings to a line as you can the advantage of young creators starting out on Tick Tock before they come to you YouTube and what like what some of the advantages of that might be I think the only reason I'm here now and the type of creative that I am today is because I put those reps in on Tick Tock and with other clients every day you know it's because there's much faster turnarounds when you're creating tick tocks and so I was you know I was able to just work on something for a couple days and then put it out put it to bed work on the next thing over and over and over and over again every single time try something new over a while after 18 months I had built this library of skills that didn't exist before and if I had just been working on longer projects and only working in one skill throughout I wouldn't have been anywhere near as where I am now it reminds me again when uh me and Logan were doing daily vlogging it was just like deadline was get it done that day and make another one do it again do it again do it again do it again and it's even at that time I don't think I was studying practically or anything like that I was just doing and doing and doing and doing and then all these videos are still online and you can just see the gradual increase in quality just over time and I just love seeing that that progress and I think it's a really really good representation of how important not just learning things practical so it's great that a lot of people listening to us on the editing podcast and learning a lot all these philosophies and these practical tools and these really great foundations but none of that matters unless you're also giving yourself experience turn the podcast off right now and go edit something [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Editing Podcast

Views: 144,582

Keywords: dodford, dodford jim carrey, dodford donald glover, dodford adam sandler, filmmaking, filmmaker, film tutorial, editing tutorial, corridor crew, colin and samir, video essay

Id: nUswBhWr7lY

Length: 39min 47sec (2387 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023