Hi Friends and fellow classmates.  The final is finally upon us.  This was a good project and challenging.  In this project I shot approximately an hour of video of my wife making a cheesecake.  What’s challenging about that?  Well, to reduce that hour of footage to 3 minutes for starters.  I learned more on this project than all the others combined; especially about editing.  While I’m not under any illusions that this video could, on any level, be considered great; I learned that pacing and cutting can be implemented aggressively while still maintaining continuity and a modicum of watch-ability.

While editing this video I thought I was being aggressive.  So, when I finished the first edit and found that my video was still around 15 minutes long, I wasn’t sure I could condense it in a way that could be both watchable and still come in under 3 minutes.  That’s when I started slicing and dicing.  I found that cutting on the action and using dissolves to suggest the passage of time helped me to eliminate huge portions of the footage that wasn’t nearly as important as I had originally thought when had I shot it.  I also found that there were some key shots that had defects in them (i.e., slightly out of focus or something distracting in the frame I hadn’t noticed while filming).  For the most part, I was able to cut around these defects and realized that I enjoyed the process very much.

I’ve discovered that I enjoy editing, and I want to learn how to do it better.  I’ve enjoyed meeting all of you in this class almost as much as I’ve enjoyed viewing your work.  I think all of you are very creative and have bright futures.  Keep up the great work, and I hope to see your names in the credits some day.

Warm regards,

A. H. Norton