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Director's Cut

Lesson 28 from: The Cinematic Filmmaking Workshop

RJ Bruni

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Lesson Info

28. Director's Cut

Next Lesson: Choosing Music

Lesson Info

Director's Cut

(upbeat music) Okay, so let's get into assembling our film. You're gonna find a few things when you watch this. First off, editing is not that hard, especially when we did a lot of the work beforehand in our pre-production, it just made the production easier, and because the production was so straightforward, it's gonna make our editing very straightforward. So when we are so planned and put together, it just makes the whole process even easier. What you will also find is that I am not the most technical editor in the world. I like to take things very slow and just make sure I'm very in tune with my emotions because I'm trying to build something that makes people feel something. So I have to make a move slowly, feel that emotion myself, and then hopefully that translates to the audience after that. So if I go too quickly and I have all these shortcuts set up and I'm whizzing through the process, and I'm not thinking about what am I feeling and how did that move make me feel, or how d...

id that sound make me feel, or how did holding this shot make me feel or the scene as a whole, if I'm not constantly studying that with myself, and if I'm not in tune with that, I'm not gonna be able to judge if this is a good film or not. So that's very, very important. So for me, there's gonna be people out there, probably yourself watching this, where, I got shortcuts for this or shortcuts for that, all this stuff and that's awesome. I've got a couple small shortcuts myself, but I take things very, very slow. Stuff like setting up my workspace and my timeline, it could be more efficient, but for me, it's just what keeps my head space clean and to be able to take things slowly. That's what most important. So this is not a technical breakdown of the most efficient way to be editing and using Adobe Premiere. This is just my thoughts and theories behind how I edit. So take that into consideration. It also doesn't matter if you're using maybe Final Cut Pro or any other program, what I'm going over is not really the technical details. It's more so my own theories, my own reasoning for pacing and music, sounds and all of that. So that can be replicated in any program. I wouldn't be able to show you my process editing the whole film, start to finish, 'cause that would be many, many hours. So what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna bring you along and reverse engineer a lot of the decisions I've already made. So I edited about 3/4 of the film. I'm gonna walk you through all the decisions I made so far, and then together we're gonna edit one of the last scenes. We're gonna go over how I assemble it. Little bit of color grade, little bit of sound. And then by the end of all that you're gonna have the confidence to go and edit your film. So let's get into it. Okay, so here we are inside of Adobe Premiere. So first off, I'm just gonna show you how I organize my folders. It's important to keep our workspace clean, just like our studio or our office. If our workspace is clean, our headspace will also be nice and organized, which is what we want when we're editing. So it's good to keep our folders nice and clean. Again, we have our assets folder basically just replicated what we had in Finder. We have music, we have our raw footage. I added a sequences folder. So any of the sequences or timelines that we make will go into there and then also have a sound effects folder, which nothing is in it yet, as you can see, but we'll add sound effects in there later. So I'd like to make a few different sequences. First off, as you can see this one's looking pretty full already. This is our main sequence. So most of the time I like to name it, the name of the project and that keeps it nice and easy to differentiate. Then I also organize our footage into the day shot. So in all of these different sequences, we have day one, which has all of our footage from day one in there. We have day two, same thing. We have day three and I also put the interview into its own sequence. Awesome. So there's a couple ways to edit your film. One, you can put all the footage in and if you want, you can go through and you can make selects. So there's gonna be doubles of each piece of footage. If you've did a couple takes or whatnot and you can go through and just pick your favorites, delete and make a nice clean timeline with all the footage that you want to use. That's one option option. Number two is an approach that I took for this one. I wanted to keep my energy moving. I wanted to keep my excitement for the film moving. And often what happens when I make selects and I spend hours and hours and hours going through this footage, like just day two or day one, we got 30 minutes of footage, day two, we got almost an hour of footage. So that would take a few hours to go through. Usually my brain is really exhausted by the end of that. And I'm actually not looking forward to editing after I've only made selects and my creativity is almost gone. So we have to be careful of our creativity, that we're not wasting it, right. So what I did instead is I made all these three sequence or four sequences, all the footage will live in there and it will never be deleted out of this sequence. And then what I do when I want to edit it scene, like I have a good idea of what my first scene is. Then I'll go, I'll find... Well, in this case it was a one take, but let's just pretend it was all this footage. I'll find the footage. I will drag it over and now I can make my quicker selects as I start to edit the film. So that would be our one take, our footage it's hidden. So if I know this is my first shot, awesome I can slap it in. And then I can slowly start to build my scene and delete things from this timeline. But if I need to go back to them later, if I'm searching for some footage, it's really easy to scrub through and find that footage. Really excited about how some of this footage ended up. Looks awesome. So, we will delete that. So this is about three quarters of the way done, or at least rough cut. And I wanna walk you through this. So this isn't the craziest looking timeline. Sometimes you see people on the internet post their crazy timelines, just tons and tons of layers and colors. And this looks very different from that for a few reasons, we haven't dove into sound too much yet. So our sound is pretty basic. And usually that adds many, many layers, but for the most part, this edit will be very simple. It's very slow. And it's really about story and dialogue and sounds. So it's not gonna look like the craziest timeline and that's totally fine. I think we're gonna make for an amazing film. So I'm gonna walk you through some of the scenes and I'll explain to you some of the decisions I made. Let's start at the beginning. Okay. So looking at our timeline here, couple things to note. The quality of your screen recording that you're seeing is obviously lower quality. That's just so you can see everything that I'm doing smoothly, but I'm seeing definitely better quality. And you will also be seeing obviously better quality screen when you're editing. But for the sake of the workshop, it will be a little bit blurry, which is fine. So first things first, we have this adjustment layer you see here. We'll talk about this more later, but all it is, it's a conversion lot that makes basically my log footage look a little bit more lively and usable. We'll talk about that more in depth later, but I just put that on there. I can also just edit it in the log and that would be totally fine, but I like to see colors, I think it gets me excited. So I put that on there. If my computer starts to bug down and isn't able to properly or smoothly watch the footage and I'm losing frames, I might take this off, but so far so good. And then I have this letterbox as well. I wanted to give this film a letterbox, sometimes as you've probably seen in a lot of my other films, I've used four by three, which is quite the opposite of this one. This is a 2.35:1 letterbox. This is just something that you can make in Photoshop as a P&G file or you can also find it online pretty easily, but for now it'll help us as we're slowly start piecing this film together. And it just gives us a quick and easy, good idea of the feel of the film. So I like to get excited about those things and put them in right away. Okay. Let's get into it. First things first, we have as you can see this one take here. It brought us to a minute and 17 seconds. So that's our opening film. And there won't be a lot of editing in this part, but let me show you this first little second and I will break it down from there. (upbeat music) Awesome. I love watching that clip. It was accelerating shooting that clip 'cause we had to do it a few times. I had to get some rack focusing right. And when you get a minute into a scene and you don't wanna mess it up it can get your heart racing for sure. And I felt like that happened again to me right there just rewatching it. So that's exciting. That's awesome. So first things first we have a little bit of black space here. Usually I like to open my films with some black space just to give the audience some time just to sink in. It's only three seconds. It's not enough for them to leave, hopefully, just gives them some time to settle in and then we get into the film. So during that time, I actually put just a little bit of ambient sound that I copied from this clip. So I just copied just the soundtrack and duplicated it here. So we just have a little bit of ambient sound just to keep our audience intrigued for a little bit. And then we get into this shot, which is awesome. Obviously there's not a lot of cut in. This is a one take. So I think it did its job well. We have some beautiful sounds. I feel like we get immersed into the scene. Obviously this is a little bit overexposed here. Don't worry. We'll fix that later. No worries because this is a raw clip, so we'll be able to adjust it quite nicely. There is some peeking of the audio when she's slapping the clay. That's totally fine. We'll also fix that later. But the more important things we hear halfway through that this music slowly starts to come in and it brings a bit of a build and I wanted the build to end as she had her hands on the clay. So that's exactly what happened. And then the music as we get really, really close, the music starts to fade. As we see here from my key frames and then the sounds of the forest start to build up so we can start to hear the birds and the creek, which is awesome. That's this layer here. That's just some ambient sounds that I captured in the field while we were out shooting on day two. So that's exactly what we had planned a month ago in pre-production. When I got to the editing there, it was very easy to put that all together 'cause it's exactly how we planned it. Everything from the audio getting louder as her hands sink deeper and deeper into the clay, that was all planned beforehand and it worked out awesome. I'm pretty excited how that scene worked out. I think it immerses the viewer quite well into this world that they're slowly going to get a peak into. So let's move on the next. So here we have a scene. We are going into of her slowly start to make her way through the forest into where she's going to mine her clay. What I'll do here is I'll play you little bits at a time and start to explain my reasoning. First things first is we brought the music all the way down. So this scene is opening up with no music at all. I just wanted some space for the audience to feel and experience in the senses that she was. We didn't need to build any extra emotion up here. We just wanted it to feel present. So I started with no music and we just really wanted to hear the sound of the forest and the sound of the clinking of the gate and stuff like that. And we also wanted to introduce Cathy's voiceover, which is this layer right here. So once we get into the voiceover, I'll tell you what parts of her voiceover that I chose. Let's give it a quick watch. There was a bit of a turning point where I really was thinking about how valuable is this. I mean, it's great. I'm making things by hand on the hierarchy of objects. A handmade thing seems important to me and really valuable. I would sometimes imagine this like mound of stuff that I have made in the last like 10, 12 years and just felt like does it matter, I guess. And that's where I sort of started to think a little more about making something beyond just an aesthetically pleasing object and take my individual touch out of it and make it more about the material and the place. Awesome. So, so far we have this scene of her making her way to the clay and then I'll break down the second part of the scene. But first off we start going to the voiceover. First things first, I wanted to introduce her some sort of a problem. So here she's explaining a bit of a mental barrier that she was having of basically the bigger question of why, why is she doing what she's doing? Does this stuff even matter? Is she just building just to build? So I wanted to start the audience off with just an issue that we're having that hopefully we come back to later and hopefully during the film she figures out that why, but that was my reasoning behind choosing that piece of our interview with her. As we dig into the footage, I just wanted to build a lot of peace. So there's a few faster cuts here. I don't always need to see every single bit of the process and our audience can put the pieces together if we have how long is this. It's great. I'm making- Two seconds of this, opening the gate. Half a second of moving. Another two seconds of... We don't have to, if we saw that whole clip of her unlocking, pushing the gate, closing the gate, I don't even know how long that would be. That would probably be 15, 20 seconds. The audience can fill in the gaps there. We do not need to show all of that. And then we get into this beautiful shot that I wanted to keep a little bit longer, just falling behind her, just brings us into the forest even more, which is exciting. So pretty much throughout this scene, we just have these beautiful, detailed shots of just seeing what she's seeing, hearing what she's hearing. I really like this shot. I wanted to keep this one long as well. She's trudging through the open field. It looks very full, but for the most part, we mostly just wanted a good spot to introduce her and her problem, which we stated in the interview. And now let's go into the second part here. And I wanted this next part of the scene before we got into another song, I wanted just this moment of peacefulness. As she starts to experience this forest, I wanted the audience to start to really, really feel the peace that she experiences here. So I took out, all the voiceover. We have no voiceover for a good 10, 20 seconds or something, and then you'll hear the music starts to fade in. And that's when we bring the voiceover in again. So let's give that a watch. More about the material and the place. As artists, we are drawing from this huge melting pot of experience. When I finished high school, I went to Australia and then... Okay, let's stop it there. So pretty much did its job in only a few shots. We have this awesome shot of the focus panning down, just telling the story of her trudging up a creek. I was pretty excited about how this shot turned out. So I held that one for pretty long. Thought it cut well with this one of her putting her bucket down, establishing that she's at her spot. This is one of my favorite shots of the film. Just having focused on her eyes and the reflection of the forest, I was pretty excited about that. Pretty excited about to see how this shot's gonna color grade later on. And then establisher of her just experiencing the clay for the first time. It's almost like she's testing out the clay here. So that one just made sense to put in there. Another shot that cuts well with her hands and then this last shot. So this is where a music comes in. This shot is powerful because it's the first of the shovel digging into the clay. And it's the first of this long process that we're going to take the audience through. So I really wanted to build it up. So as you can hear, the music starts to get in as we first shove the shovel into the clay. So let's give that one another lesson. As artists, we are drawing from this huge melting pot of experience. So like I've mentioned earlier in the workshop, filmmaking is all about contrast, building contrast. If we had a song playing this whole scene and we didn't develop just that sense of peace, we wouldn't be able to amplify this scene or this shot at all, which we find is very important. I'll give you an example here. I'll move this song over and let's just see how it completely changes everything. As artists, we are drawing from this huge... Awesome, it sounded awesome. It also worked. That's the thing about filmmaking. So many things will work, but it didn't let this shot stand out. It didn't tell us that this is an important moment. It told us that this was an important moment and this is important, but in my mind, I wanted this shot to stand out. So that's why we started this song. And we started to feel those heartstring moments when she started to dig into that clay. So I'm gonna move that back. Awesome. So now we wanted to build this story about this contrast between her digging the clay. And then we wanted to tell the story about her going to Australia and mining, and then that's how our voiceover goes. She just explains, "I went to Australia, I dug clay or I took samples of gold and put it in a bag and stamped the coordinates on it." And she highlights the similarities of how that's similar to what she's doing today, and she didn't even realize that till years and years later. So let's play this scene out here and we'll see how I built it. As artists, we are drawing from this huge melting pot of experience. When I finished high school, I went to Australia and then I got a job at a gold mine. At the beginning of every shift, I had a map and I had to collect rock samples. The rock sample would go in a little canvas bag, I guess. And then I wrote the coordinates on the cloth bag, which it's one of those things where I feel like me making these simple utilitarian forms and stamping the geographic coordinates on this clay that stuck outta the ground. It could 100% be a coincidence. Ah, it might be nothing, but I like to think that all those connections mean something. (upbeat music) Awesome, I love that scene. Okay, so as she starts to talk, the music builds and we have this moment where she says, "And then went to Australia," and it flips the page. I went to Australia and then I... Which is awesome. So we hear the sound of the page flipping, which that was a natural sound that we didn't even have to add in, which was awesome, made things really easy. And it was a nice sharp sound. And I cut this, it made it seem really quick as if almost the video was flipping into the photos. And I just cut this as you can see frame by frame halfway. All these cuts are when the photo book was halfway flipped already. And you can't really tell, it almost feels like it's fully flipping. So I went to Australia and then... 'Cause it just makes it feel nice and fast. So I did that for a lot of these. This one as well. This one was almost fully flipped, but it gave the illusion as if it was just flipping very quickly. I had a map and I... And with that combined with the sound, just worked really, really well. So we have this awesome photo scene. You can tell the stories. There's a lot of ways to do this. We could have had the photos pop up full-screen, but I really like this idea. So I just ran with it, pretty pumped on how it turned out. And then I love how this last one, it's a half flip and then it goes right back to the forest. Almost as if to flip right back to that scene. And then the rest of this scene is now when she's talking about how it might be a coincidence at this clay. So when she first mentions the clay, that's when we go back to this scene. So I wanted to make the audience feel like, "Oh, okay." Put the pieces together, what she was talking about and just made it easier. And really it's just some shots that we cut out of the many, many shots that we got in the field of her digging clay. Let's just give it a watch. Utilitarian forms and stamping the geography coordinates on this clay that's dug over the ground, it could 100% be a coincidence. Ah, it might be nothing, but I like to think that all those connections mean something. (upbeat music) So fun. So the biggest thing that I wanted this scene to end is I love this wide shot of her, just pounding into the clay. And then it made it feel, so I cut her out. I cut her out halfway and then I kept the audio going almost as if to slowly separate us from Kathy. And this shot at the end gave us the illusion that she was just... We're leaving her, but she's still there digging. I love that. We don't have to showcase her bringing the clay out. We already know that's what she's gonna do. We can just end it there, and that's totally fine. So, the song ends, I drop the last shot on the beat of the song. That's just a fun thing to do. And then there she is, still digging. I actually might use this shot later on. I'm leaving myself open that I also got a shot of her standing in the middle of the ravine. And I was point on using that shot at the end of the film for the very, very last shot, just a quick flashback. But I loved what happened with this shot so much with the sound of her digging that I also might move this one to the end, but we'll see when we get there at which one we like better. Okay, so let's go on to the next scene. So we just had a bit of the process of her starting, essentially the whole process of the plates and bowls. I wanted to give the audience a bit of a break from that and introduce her family. So once again, we start with the scene with no music. I just wanted the audience to slowly start to feel like they're coming into this scene, without any music. So we just had lots of beautiful sounds and then it's her just with her family gardening. So let's give this one a watch. We do introduce some of the voiceover later on, and then we have a nice fun song. So let's play it up to that song. (indistinct) Yeah, get that one off. That's right. So just use your thumbnail. There's another one here. (indistinct) That's right. It's okay. Kate, check this one over and see if they're moving this one. The place where we live now, in some ways I feel like it sort of nurtures creativity. I spend a lot of time on the trails and along the river on my own and with my family. It's really become a place that feels... It feels pretty special to me. We can generally eat from a garden and eat things that are from around here. And then now my clay is from here and I'm selling to people here and everything has become a little bit more simple in a really nice way. Okay, there we go. Let's stop it there. I'm excited to show you that part with this song. That's an awesome little song, but we're gonna start here. Once again, we have some establishers just to bring us into this new scene. Before we seen a lot of overcast, but this is a beautiful sunny day. So let's show that. We have this awesome shot of the trees. We have this flare coming in. This is where the did a really good job. We have some soft flares and you can see throughout this whole scene like, oh man. Along the river, on my own and my family. Look at those. Look at those, awesome. I love just beautiful lens flares and fun character like that. That gets me excited. So I kept a lot of it in here. Pretty basic scene. I just wanted to make sure everyone in our family was somewhat introduced. So here we have this, this more of a dialogue scene where you can see her just guiding her son. I don't know. I just felt that that was needed just to not start off on just silence, but just her being a mom. And I wanted to showcase that. And then we go to this awesome closeup of the hands. Then we go, we introduce her husband really quickly. And then both her daughters. And I'm really big fan of this shot. So I just kept it. We had, I think 20 minutes of footage from this scene, lots of options. But this was a very peaceful moment. We did not need to put a million shots in here. We just needed the audience to feel like they were immersed there. So we didn't put all the shots. Well, we didn't even put the 10th of the shots. I just like this one so I held it. And then wanted to end on just the idea that they were gathering some food that possibly they were going to eat later, which will allude to our last scene. Yeah, then they're leaving the garden. They're going for a walk. And this is where things start to ramp up a little bit. So we talked about in pre-production, how we had this scene in mind of her processing the clay and building these plates. And we wanted the song to be fast, even though our activity was quite slow, like building a plate goes quite slowly, but we cut the shots really fast. As you can see, all these shots here are cut quite quickly. And then our song is also fun and quick as well. So it brought some energy to something that normally does not have a ton of energy. So that was supposed to be only processing of the clay, but I really wanted to have something here when they started to gather berries. So I actually started, as you can see, this song has a nice, clear cutoff halfway through where it just has a peaceful moment. I planned for the berry-picking to occupy this part of the song. And then when the song changed, that's when we go back to the clay and we're processing the clay for this section. And then I'll show you the scene and then we'll break it down a little bit further. (upbeat music) One thing that feels important to this work is that it's sustainable and also regenerative. A certain portion of the sales of any of the work would go back. For the most part, it goes to trying to remove fish farms from the ocean because the wild salmon, of course, is hugely important to the river, to the health of this whole area. (upbeat music) Awesome. So fun. So first things first, when she first hands this beautiful bowl to her son, that's when the music starts. We could have also cut it on a shot. So which means, we could have cut it maybe here when the next shot changes, but I like this movement. I thought it felt nice. So yeah, that's sometimes that's all it takes. You do something, see how it feels. And if you like it, leave it at that, move on. And hopefully, your audience feels the same thing. So that was my idea there. And then here, we wanted the cuts to go a little bit quicker. I loved this shot of me coming in, coming into this moment with her and her kids. So I kept that shot long, but the rest for the most part are pretty quick shots. And I was pretty excited about how this scene turned out. The lighting was just so good. And all those red raspberries with the green behind it. I was just so excited how this turned out. So a couple things still need to be done. We need to sync some audio a little bit. Some levels are a little bit loud for the scene, so we'll probably work on that later. But for the most part, I was pretty excited how this turned out. And her voiceover talks about how she wants her work to be sustainable. So as she's talking about the environment, I thought it was good just to showcase this scene of when they're experiencing the environment and just enjoying it. And then the last shot is just the water alluding to the river a little bit. And then we go right into her process in the clay. And I actually sped those... I didn't speed them up, but I sped my cuts up a little bit on that scene. So they're just going a little bit quicker after that. And it's a fun little scene. Let's give it one more watch near the end here. (upbeat music) So much fun. I loved that shot. This is one of my favorite shots from that Dave shooting. This is like intentional slow motion where we saw a movement that like, "Man, that would really be fun to just amplify that moment." So we shot this one in slow mo, and it actually made... For my decision making, I had more shots that I could have kept going on with. There's more process that we could have done, but I feel like taking the plate out of the press was enough for now. And then this was a perfect shot just to slowly fade us into the next scene, which is more peaceful than this fast-paced cutting. But for the most part, everything so far is just the way we planned it, which is exciting to see. It's fun to see that start to all come together. And so far, we're at five minutes, 30 seconds. If I watch this as a whole, this is a very fast five minute, 20 second. I feel like we've jammed a lot in there, and we've got some really good stuff to come still. Couple things that I want to keep in mind so far is look at how much music I've used. I used a little bit here, a little bit here. Like these songs are very short. Like that's a minute long. This one's also about a minute long. Like I'm not using these full songs. I don't want the song to guide my edit. I want my emotions to guide my edit. And if my song can amplify the emotion that I want to be coming across on screen, that's when I want to use this song. If I just start a song and let this song play the whole edit, we're not gonna have the contrast of the peaceful moments and the fast moments, and we're not gonna be able to play with our audience, and have them feel happy and energized. Like this is a very happy, fun go-lucky scene. And then maybe a minute later, we're gonna go into something that feels a little bit more serious as you're gonna see next. If we just have a song, let that guides our whole edit, we're not gonna have that rollercoaster of emotions. And it's just gonna have one feel the whole time, which is that if that's what you want, that's awesome. But I like to have lots of ups and downs. So that's my reasoning behind that. And then I also wanted just some peaceful moments to experience without her talking. So as you can see, we have three little chunks of voiceover so far, but we also have lots of time just to soak in what Kathy's doing. So let's get into the next one. So as the plate starts to come off the press, we have this very peaceful moment. There's something to my mind still that we hadn't done was, captured the peacefulness in her studio. I wanted to see the little trinkets, all of her past work and stuff like that. And with the fast-paced edit, we don't necessarily get to do that. So I still wanted this scene where things were very slow and peaceful. And I thought that rain scene where the rain started to pumble down was a good transition into that moment. So let's see how all of that started to play out. I used to spend a lot of time on the farm, where I would find a place where I could lay down and have as much surface area of my body touching the ground as I could. And just the feeling of wanting to have a connection to the earth. I'm hoping people feel that when they're using it, that same connection to the earth and being able to eat food off of a plate made from the clay, from the ground here. I hope that that is a meaningful experience for people. And I hope that they can feel that same connection. (upbeat music) So this clay is part of the same seam of clay that runs through the valley. One of the connections that people would make to this clay when I told them that I was a ceramic artist, like they had stories about it and nobody had much of anything good to say about it. And it's always the clay that's like, it just seems like it's problematic and in the way. But yeah, there is something really nice about making a thing that is of value from something that is, I don't wanna say worthless, but you're not seeing as like a material of a lot of value. (upbeat music) Oh, what a good scene? This is a good example of me protecting that excitement, protecting that childlike, wonder with my edit. I've taken this edit so slow. I've edited in small chunks and I've only watched that scene two or three times. And I still get this feeling of emotion and excitement. I was almost sweating watching that. Like it was fun to watch, fun for me to just even show somebody for the first time, show you it for the first time. That was exciting to me. So I think that's important, as we keep continuing going down this edit that we continue to not over edit, not over watch. And we continue to be excited about these scenes that we're creating. 'Cause then we can judge it. We can see if we felt anything. If we feel like we're still energized in the edit, but we're not feeling anything from it. That means maybe we changed something up. Maybe there's not emotion there that we wanted to create, but I feel pretty moved by that scene. So let's start to break it down a little bit. So first we have these awesome shots. And here it's... Again, guys, it's so simple. It's like a few shots, handheld and it's more about just feeling like we're there. We don't have any music. We don't have any voiceover. We're just immersed in this moment. Just bystanders, looking into Kathy's world. Feel like we're in this cozy little cabin. Look how many cuts this is, this is maybe 10 cuts in this little part here. Pretty basic, guys. These edits don't have to be always fast-paced. If we have some slow moments, it amplifies the fast moments. It makes them feel quicker. And with more energy, if we have that contrast between fast and slow, right? So I love these moments. Editing is not rocket science. So as she starts to talk, let's hear what she says. I used to spend a lot of time on the farm where I would find a place where I could lay down and have as much surface area of my body touching the ground as I could. And just the feeling of wanting to have a connection to the earth. Awesome, so the reason I put that part of Kathy's interview there is because she starts to talk about this connection to the earth and it alludes us into this moment where she's touching the clay and we have these beautiful flashbacks of the forest and the mud as she's touching the clay. And almost as if to allude to the idea that her touching this bowl that she's making is bringing her back to that place that she got it from and bringing her back to the elements there. So as she's talking about feeling a connection to the earth, and that's what she's trying to do, I thought it was perfect to put that just before we started to see this little bit of a montage that we planned in the pre-production, this whole scene. And this whole idea of flashing back to the forest was planned way back a few weeks ago now. So I thought that was a good spot to put that. So we still have some shots of just the details of her, of her studio. And as we go into this more powerful, powerful moment, I had a few slow motion shots that I was saving that I got from the field. 'Cause I wanted to amplify this moment and just make it feel more dreamlike and slow. And then let's just give it another watch here and see if we accomplish that. And being able to eat food off of a plate made from the clay, from the ground here. I hope that that is a meaningful experience for people. And I hope that they can feel that same connection. (upbeat music) So this... Awesome. Let's go back to the flashbacks for a minute. So I wanted each flashback to be connected to a moment of her in the studio in some way, could just be the light in, could be the object, but let's go through a couple of these. So first shot I had was her wiping her hands clean. Second shot is a flashback of her getting her hands dirty. I thought those contrasted well together, it was cool just closeups of her hands. So those went back-to-back. Here I have her getting her hands wet and then turning the wheel on with her foot. And I thought this matched quite similar. This is one of the things I didn't have planned. I did not plan this, but it just worked out really well. Her foot is in a very similar position to her foot in the mud. I just thought those ones contrasted very well. And I don't know, I just liked it. I thought it was cool. I thought it was a little bit clever. So those ones went back-to-back. Then we had the wheel, the wheels turning and the camera's panning down. So I matched that with a shot of the clay. As the clay also is panning in the same direction that the wheel's moving. So that was that. And then we have her hands just getting... Her hands were getting really just messy with that bowl. So flashed that to her hands, just getting right where it all started, messy in the mud. And this one I thought was unique. The light was just really soft here and you could see it was back lit. So this one also very back lit. So I match those ones together as well. And then that was the last of our flashback scene. And then we go back to her in the studio. So we're coming to the end of what we have edited here. And this is actually starting to look like it's the climax of our film. We have the last stages of this plate coming to life that we haven't seen yet. And then it goes to this beautiful shots of us seeing these plates for the first time fully finished, which takes us into our last scene. So this is actually starting to build into our climax. And this is a very powerful song with this piano. So I wanted to build this up a little bit. So what I did was I had this last voice over here of talking about how it's nice to build something from a piece of clay. That's almost seen as worthless and make something that's worth something out of it. And I thought that was just a really cool, powerful moment. So I put that there. And then when I wanted to build the energy, I made a key frame and the music starts to get louder as we have the final powerful scene of this plate coming to life and then getting served for what we'll see is the next scene with her family. So let's just give that whole thing on a watch again. This is one of my favorite scenes. I'm so happy with how it's turning out. Let's just give it a good watch here. Surface area of my body, touching the ground as I could. And just the feeling of wanting to have a connection to the earth. I'm hoping people feel that when they're using it, that same connection to the earth and being able to eat food off of a plate made from the clay, from the ground here. I hope that that is a meaningful experience for people. And I hope that they can feel that same connection. (upbeat music) So this clay is part of the same seam of clay that runs through the valley. One of the connections that people would make to this clay when I told them that I was a ceramic artist, like they had stories about it and nobody had much of anything good to say about it. And it's always the clay that's like, it just seems like it's problematic and in the way. But yeah, there is something really nice about making a thing that is of value from something that is, I don't wanna say worthless, but you're not seeing as like a material of a lot of value. (upbeat music) Oh, I love watching that scene. Who would've thought that we can make a powerful moment out of just somebody serving a plate on a table? That's the beauty of filmmaking right there. And to be honest, we could have ended it right there. Like that last shot, of her serving the last plate that could have been this beautiful moment for people to cultivate community and conversation and we could easily just end it right there. No worries. But we do have some more stuff and we'll get into that in the next episode. So far, we've got a good chunk of the film done. You've got a little bit of an in depth look of how I am making some of the cuts and decisions of song choice and stuff like that. But as I build the next scene together with you, you're gonna get an even better idea just about how I'm making decisions, how I'm just following my heart and my guts some of these times where if I feel this emotion, I'm just gonna run with it. 'Cause that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make a move, understand how did that make me feel, and then hopefully that our audience also feels the same way. So let's get into the next episode. I'm excited to edit with you alongside me.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Live Lesson: Feedback and Q&A Session with RJ
RJ's Final Film | SHARED EARTH
Email Questionnaire
Project Breakdown
Scene Breakdown
Creative Deck

Ratings and Reviews

Dani
 

I LOVE this workshop - I have been wanting to film my own 'home life' movies as I am a photographer but I wanted to add even more memories. This workshop has added so much value to how, why, when, and what the process is of film-making for film-making. Thanks to RJ for sharing all his amazing information while being clear, precise, and informative. I am excited to film my next 'home life' film!

Alex Bocajj
 

Great insights into Rj's process. Really enjoyed it all. Rj is smooth and easy to learn from. Loved the "in-field" BTS and going thru the motions live. Looking forward to more material.

Patti Sohn
 

Really informative and inspiring. One of the best video tutorials I have watched.

Student Work

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