Making Editing WAY Easier: Pre Production

[Music] every minute spent organizing is an hour earned i know organization isn't so sexy but i'm going to tell you today why it is so sexy actually today i'm going to show you how organization before you ever get into your edit will help you never get stuck in your edit this is before you even open up your editing software with a little bit of sexy organization up front you'll avoid hours of pain afterwards me and my team use these techniques we're able to output many documentaries in one year and not get overwhelmed or inundated stuck in any of them we've completed upwards of i think around six documentaries this year and we're about to release another one with mile by mile documentaries are particularly a nasty beast when it comes to editing they're very easy to get caught up in all of the footage and not know where the beginning the middle or the end is you hit export on the film and you watch it back and just feel like something was missing it wasn't right today let's solve that here are some practical tips for you before you ever get into your editing software i first want to establish what editing is this tip is going to help you sift through all the hours of footage that you've probably captured and then this is my definition simply put editing is arranging a selection of moments or thoughts in the form of footage and content towards a common goal question or resolution essentially film editing is the rise of tension towards a deliberate ending that word ending is the most important thing the first thing you do before you ever open up your editing software before you ingest any footage is define your ending how are you supposed to edit a film how is it supposed to start and land somewhere if you don't know where you're going you see your whole film should be leading towards the ending so before you care about a cool sequence at the beginning before you determine the color palettes and everything where does your film finish where are you leading us to is it going to feel like a payoff in your film if you haven't determined the editing don't open your editing software because you're just setting yourself up to get lost because you don't know where you're going you might be thinking mark what do you mean how do you define this well back before covid we used to use sticky notes we were all here at this office we would put the sticky notes up for the film each film and define the ending but now with covid we're kind of spread around the world we've been using millinote more here is the film battleground now i grabbed the screen grabs as we would shoot this footage for each scene and placing it in a millino project so that i could keep track of the film before i got all confused in the adobe premiere timeline and i couldn't see a wide view this is kind of just a quick tip in life is when you're getting overwhelmed by things take a step back and look at the full picture it's easy to get lost in the details and that's why i love using millino is i can quickly look at my film here and figure do i have enough scenes do i have the right scenes and where is this leading there was this poem that quickly brought to me halfway through filming where we weren't sure where to place it in the film and i realized that it could be a great way to summarize the films we place it at the end but we didn't want it just to feel like a random ending when i saw it there at the end it felt a bit disconnected to the rest of the film and that's when we decided to add a scene at the beginning of quasi actually writing the poem so that it was bookended this opening scene we see where quasi was writing is leading towards the ending so with milino what i would do is if you imagine i had my editing software open here i would just find the scenes we just take a quick screen grab of the scene out of the quicktime and i just drag it into the project here and then i can quickly add a caption to this so this was opening scene and now i know the scene and i can begin moving this around the film i already placed it at the beginning of the film before i get to the editing software or if i'm passing this along to an editor they'll know exactly where i want that scene in the film so i would take all these screen grabs and i'll place them here and put a little arrow so i knew the progression of the film and this is what i would do every day before i go into the editing software i would open up this project and look at the next scene that i wanted to edit before i got to editing i knew in general where the film was going or at least what i was trying to accomplish so that i didn't just get into random scenes and start getting overwhelmed with the hours and hours of footage that i shot now that you have the ending you want to establish a good beginning and the three things you're trying to establish in the first five percent of your film is who what and vibe that's what i'm trying to establish first off you want to show that you're an artist that this film is good so you want to set a vibe next you want to show who the film is about give us a quick origin story and then you want to show us what your character is journeying towards what question your film is answering if it doesn't have a character if it's about a topic and as i mentioned you want to show some vibes and go watch my latest video i'll put the link on right now talk all about how to shoot good footage so that you can hit aveda nas vibes because for me as a filmmaker i want my films to both look good and tell a good story so then how do you determine this up front well really quickly i just create three columns to determine what this footage is so for mile by mile the short documentary we just released about lawrence hacking and his 10 000 mile race for the dakar rally i went in and i created a beginning section here in milano which i sent to my editor lewis because lewis is cutting this and he's not in the office here and i wanted him to have some direction and to understand where we're taking this film so like i said vibe what and who so i immediately took some screen grabs as i imported the film in so lewis kind of knew the vibe i was going for this is placed beyond the pines sort of vibes and what's great too is i've just added some music here i downloaded this from musicbed and you can literally physically drag in the file or put a link to the playlist so i was showing louis here that moody dark it's the mark bone vibe a lot of other filmmakers do it but i grabbed these songs off music bed because i want luis i i don't want him to send me a project that's not in line with my vision i'm trying to help him understand without trying to be over prescriptive right off the top where we're taking this film so i've established all these photos here that show him the mood then i just gave him just quick notes of who lawrence was and i got on the phone with lewis and explained a bit that we want to show that he was a dakar racer who he was in the past and gave us that tone and mood of that he did this race in 2001 he was 47 years old when did it was crazy and then i want lewis to know what we are journeying journeying towards and so this is where i would leave just like a comment here you can see comments are just really easy i just drag this down here and i would tell lewis that let's establish that and then down here i'll leave another note to him to say this so quickly lewis knows that i want some vibey music some cool shots we want to establish who lawrence is so that people know what film they're watching and then we want to show the journey again if your character doesn't have a want in your film they're not a character so we want to show that not only did lawrence want to finish that race but later on in the film we're going to talk about his future aspirations oh and then you can see there's this other scene here which this is his origin story as we always call it and this is that he first discovered he wanted to go on motorbikes when he put a baseball card or a hockey card because we're in canada he put that in the spoke so i put that picture right there for louis so he knew exactly how to start this film so right here i've established for lewis right away exactly what i want the film to look like in the beginning but i've given louis some creative liberty so he can edit it together in the way he best sees fit but i'm reminding him of the mood i want who we're talking about and what this film is about what this film is journaling towards where it's going to go it used to be so easy in our office we would all be here together we would all be working off the same notepad or putting stickies on the wall but now when i'm working on projects like this film i'm doing about the autism spectrum disorder my editor is down in la so we can't just share sticky notes in the same office so her and i have actually created this entire edit flow and i'll show you this now i've actually had to delete a lot of the descriptions this film isn't released yet so i can't give away where the film is going so normally all of these cards here you're seeing on screen if i zoom out here would all have thorough descriptions of how the film is progressing i'll give you like a little sneak peek here to the thematic flow this right here is me writing all of the themes in the film and how they ratchet up the tension towards the final ending and i've had to kind of redact some of this but this to me right here what you're seeing on screen is our film those are the themes and i've established that with our editor so she knows what we're trying to establish in each scene so that it's not just stuff happening on screen so it's actually the theme of the film that we're expressing again we always talk about the theme is the layer underneath what's happening on screen and if you don't determine a theme for your film which is the question your film is trying to answer you're gonna have a shallow film and it's not gonna be as interesting or as timeless as you would hope so going back here though to this edit workflow we again took screen grabs of each scene so we'd add a title and the way you just do this is you drag a column down here and then if i copy over this picture and drag it right here and then i give this a title this is run on piano so as i mentioned normally all of these would all have descriptions for what the scene is but we did this me my editor we had over 70 hours of footage when we were halfway through the film we're doing a film about four different people who are part of a band who are on the autism spectrum disorder there was a lot to work through and it was kind of getting overwhelming for us so we went into mill to note we took screen grabs of every scene because every day i would go film with each character i tried to shoot three scenes so i just went back to my schedule and i knew okay in this day i filmed an intro for the guy jackson or in this day we filmed in the basement with the guy spencer take a screen grab and we'd put this as a new scene and then we began working these scenes together and kind of the way we knew where these scenes should go is we knew the ending we knew where the film was progressing so we know that each scene is kind of rationing up the tension or giving us more information at the character making each person more interesting so simply put when you go into your millino or whatever software you're using or whatever sticky notes you're putting on the wall ask yourself does the scene provide new information about the character and does it increase the tension or get us closer to the ending if you can do one of those three things then it's valuable to put that scene in that part of the sequence if your scene is not helping us learn more about the person or it's not that exciting you don't want to put that late in the film because it's just going to be a boring scene you want it to help speed up and move towards that ending so for eva and i the editor we put all these scenes in here and as you can see back on this home page we've had three different versions of this we keep changing and progressing and i save old versions in case the new version of our edit is terrible and what i love this is before we've even gone into adobe premiere before we've done any editing we have an idea of what our film is going to be like now it always ends up changing but what's kind of cool is you're looking at a film finished before we ever went into it and that helps that helps when you have dozens sometimes hundreds of hours this is so sad to me when i see people trying to shoot their own documentaries and they get lost in the footage they never finish the project and i think that's because people get so deep into their timelines and their editing and their questions and all the quotes that they don't get to see the bird's-eye view of their project and so for me when i'm getting overwhelmed in my edit i come back to my millinote project so i come back to my sticky notes and i look simply where are we in the film does this scene help here or why am i not enjoying this moment of the film well it's not actually moving us towards the ending i can actually go think about where the film is progressing what was really fun is we actually me the editor and the writer all got on to millino at the same time and we all were moving these around working on the same project simultaneously which was really fun it was like we were all editing together in the same timeline without us all being on adobe premiere but then we hand it over to eva and she takes the principles from this and injects it into the film so just to summarize that organizing up front just even a couple minutes of organization will save you hours down the line in your film establish what your ending is first then establish your beginning so that it can lead towards that ending if you try to do it the other way around you're probably going to have a really underwhelming ending and when you establish that beginning establish the vibe the tone the aesthetic of your film establish who we are talking about who your character is just give us a little hint to who they are their background their origin story and then tell us what the film is journaling towards what is the tension what is it that your character wants and from there that's when you get to start organizing all of your scenes and start progressing them towards that looking that there is a rise in tension in your film or a rise in the information making sure that every new scene is adding to the film and not just taking up time and space and that's what we've had to do in some cases as you can see even from edit flow 2 to edit flow 3 here there was 4 scenes deleted and it's probably going to continue to go down because we're only about halfway through the edit it's probably going to get sharper and shorter which is what you want in your film by the way i put a link down below to millino it's something that we're using on all of our projects now we even did this dark office vibes we're redesigning our edit suite so landon who's part of our team he created this whole thing we're reshaping our edit suite and so he sent me this so that i knew what he had in his mind i'm a big fan of keeping things simple and keeping things from a high level view and i've been finding millinote has really been helping our projects like that and it's how we've been able to kind of manage six documentaries all at the same time we're working on two feature lengths we have clear sky still going on and a couple other ideas for the new year but we don't want to get overwhelmed as i would say it's okay to be stressed it's not okay to be confused we've been able to do that by keeping a high level view of the project and not getting stuck in the weeds you

Channel: Mark Bone

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Keywords: pre production, video production, pre production process in film, how to make a youtube video, how to edit videos for youtube, premiere pro cc, filmmaking tips, editing tricks, adobe premiere pro 2021, adobe premiere pro effects, adobe premiere pro free, mark bone, documentary, the art of documentary, matti haapoja documentary, peter mckinnon lightroom, milanote, how to, video editing, video editing software, adobe premiere pro tutorial

Id: FwqeVdBxVF4

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021