Lessons

Lesson Info

Building the Rough Cut

The way I've got my thing set up here, generally speaking you'd see thumbnails here, but because of what I'm trying to show in this class, it just gets really distracting. So I'm gonna just show it as a list view to keep your eyes focused to the right-hand side of my screen, and then focused over here. If you guys remember in the previous couple segments, I talked about getting our audio down to a timeline. I talked about getting our cameras to a timeline. I talked about getting everything down to the timeline and synced. And then I talked about removing some of those little gaps between his statements where I'm talking. 'Cause I don't even know what I'm saying anymore once I'm at this point. I just need to hear his statements. When you get to this moment, right, we're at the point now where you can just play and we can start to listen to the things that he's going to be saying. My name's Ivan Salaverry. I have an MMA gym here in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, Washington. An...

d because it's familiar now, and because we know what he's going, where he's going and what we've, we've logged those notes, now we can start to make those decisions about how we wanna structure this. And if you remember my storyboard, my storyboard was like, okay, I want to start with an emotional statement. So now I'm listening for that emotional statement. Or now I'm listening for that experience of walking into the gym. So we're gonna jump into a part of this edit and we're gonna listen to this entire clip. What I'm gonna teach you here is how to take this one singular clip, listen to it a couple times, and then start to chop away at it. Because the most important thing our job is at this point is to take this statement and shrink it down. You gotta take that statement and make it digestible. 'Cause he says a lot of things, he says a lot of great stuff, but you got to, got to, got to get the statements down and you have to remember who's going to be watching it. So let's listen to this. Let's turn the audio up in the studio a little bit so we can actually hear what's going on, and then we're gonna actually start to listen and start to work through some of the things here. When you first walk into the gym, the smells. There's gonna be absolutely something that you're not gonna be used to, especially if you, you know, work in an office the whole day. When you come in here, you're gonna smell humans. Human bodies. Sweaty human bodies. And it might alert you a little bit, to say the least. But at the same time, it is what it is. It is the environment you're gonna be in, human beings sweating. And from there, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? Um, but we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. You get in here, you change, you get into the locker room. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you know you do a little bit of stretching. The coach guides you into a warm-up, then teaches you a certain technique, and then little by little you start gaining these techniques and you start wrestling with these techniques. And that process, that day in, day out of doing that, you learn how to wrestle. Then comes obviously what you get from wrestling, the endorphins, the biochemistry of just the adrenaline. And the purging. I think honestly a lot of guys get a purge of sweating, of letting that energy out. Which to me, I honestly believe that every man and every woman needs that. Very, very long statement, isn't it? He says a lot, a lot of different stuff. So as we listen to that, what are you thinking? What are you hearing? What are some common themes? What are some repetitive things that are being said over and over and over again? What's offensive? Not offensive to the point of, like, oh, he's offending me, but what could be a turnoff to someone listening to that and seeing that that would prevent them from wanting to go there? These are the things we're listening for. These are the things we're looking to cut, right? Show of hands. Let's go ahead and start picking out some stuff that we heard. That it's a stinky place? Right, exactly. So the first thing I'm gonna cut. Basically just the human... Body? Rawness and, yeah. You guys are on track. That's exactly what we're cutting. When you first walk into the gym, you're gonna smell bodies. Human bodies. (audience laughter) Right? And I know what he's getting at with that, because what he's trying to say is that, hey, it's real, it's earthy, it's salty. But... If I've never been into a place like that, do I want to be told it's gonna smell bad the minute I walk in? No, no. Do I want to be told I'm gonna be affronted on my senses? No. So I'm gonna hack away. I'm gonna listen to again. I'm gonna listen to again, but this time, this time, I'm gonna zoom into that clip. I'm gonna zoom into that clip right here and let's drag this timeline all the way over so I get more space. As I do this, I'm gonna take my Razor tool, okay? That little Razor tool, and I'm gonna cut every time I hear something that's offensive. That's all I'm gonna do. I wanna cut, not remove the footage. I'm just gonna mark with a cut. And what I mean by "mark with a cut," is I'm gonna follow the playhead and then I'm just gonna click. And I'm gonna click. And I'm gonna click. You see what I'm doing? I'm just marking through that footage where something I react to emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever it is, I'm gonna hit it. I'm just gonna through, listen to it again. Okay? People do this part differently. This is the part that I do that works for me 100% of the time. This is what I do, and it works. It works aces. Because what you're doing is, this is like whack-a-mole. Every time you hear something is, pop! Hear something, pop! Okay? Pop! Alright, so let's do that. We're gonna listen to it one more time, and this whole process is exactly that. You listen, you listen, you re-listen, you listen, you listen, you re-listen, and you start to truncate that statement down and down and down and down until you're not, you have just this much left that says a better thing. So let's keep doing. I'm gonna hit play and I'm gonna hit and just play whack-a-mole with this piece of clip. When you first walk into the gym, the smells. There's gonna be absolutely something that you're not gonna be used to, especially if you, you know, work in an office the whole day. When you come in here, you're gonna smell humans. Human bodies. Sweaty human bodies. And it might alert you a little bit, to say the least. But at the same time, it is what it is. It is the environment you're gonna be in, human beings sweating. And from there, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? Um, but we take you through the process You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. You get in here, you change, you get into the locker room. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you know you do a little bit of stretching. The coach guides you into a warm-up, then teaches you a certain technique, and then little by little you start gaining these techniques and you start wrestling with these techniques. And that process, that day in, day out of doing that, you learn how to wrestle. Then comes obviously what you get from wrestling, the endorphins, the biochemistry of just the adrenaline. And the purging. I think honestly a lot of guys get a purge of sweating, of letting that energy out. Which to me, I honestly believe that every man and every woman needs that during the day. I went through, and every time I reacted to the statement, I cut. And it could have been because I heard something pop audio-wise. It could have been something because, ooh! That's a good statement to start with. I cut. Ooh! That's a good bad statement. No! Cut it. Oh no, he keeps going, and I keep cutting, because I'm literally whacking down every time I hear something that I don't like or whacking down every time I hear something I do. Now how do I tell the difference? I gotta go through it again and play each segment and here's where I delete. Get it out of the timeline, period. No reason to keep it. So let's do that. So... I'm gonna listen to each statement. Here, before you keep going, see how I only cut the top line here? Let me just make this bigger for y'all. See how I only cut that top video track, video track two? There's a line here, but then there's no lines anywhere over here. I need to go through the rest of my timeline for this clip, and if I'm on snap to, this magnet tool here, it's just gonna bring me right to the cut. So I can just keep cutting, and as I go through, I'm gonna cut down the rest of this footage, along with the audio track, as well, okay? And you gotta definitely make sure you cut everything. Otherwise when you start deleting, you'll delete the entire clip or major parts of it. So just come in here and delete or cut wherever you see one of those marks. And it's a very deliberate process. I know that when I do it this way, I'm not gonna lose anything in the statement. Unless I want to get rid of it. So what your timeline should look like now, it should look like just a sliced pie. I've just sliced all of it, I've taken all these little statements, and I've gone, okay, boom, boom, boom, boom. All manageable, okay? Now we're just gonna listen to each little bite-sized morsel, and we're gonna make a determination to delete or keep. That's all we're doing at this point. Delete or keep. So that's what we gotta do. We're gonna do it for each one of these clips. Here we go. When you first walk into the gym, the smells. Do you keep, delete, or trim here? Trim. Delete. Okay, we can delete or we can trim. So if I take a look at this, I liked what he said at the beginning. When you first walk into the gym... Right? I like what he said there. What don't I like? The smells. Okay, so I can-- (audience laughter) Great timing. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna look at that audio, audio track. It goes, "When you first walk into the gym," pause, pause, pause, pause, pause, "the smells." So I'm gonna cut it there and I'll keep that first part. I'm gonna trim it out. I'm gonna cut, cut, cut, cut, and then grab my selection tool and just expand a little bit. Click and drag, delete it. So now that statement is... When you first walk into the gym-- Okay, we've got that first little statement. We're gonna keep going now. When you first walk into the gym... There's gonna be absolutely-- Ooh, bad noise. Immediately cut. No sense in trying to save that. You've got other stuff. Get rid of it. The minute you hear something like that, don't matter. It does not matter how important that statement is. You can't do anything to save it. Embrace that fact, get rid of it. Done, gone. Next statement. Something that you're not gonna be used to, especially if you, you know, work in an office the whole day. Meandering statement. Doesn't really say anything. Get rid of it. Okay? So... Smell humans. Human bodies. Sweaty human bodies. Definitely cut. (audience laughter) And it might alert you a little bit, to say the least. But at the same time, it is what it is. It is the environ-- Okay, so wait, I missed a part. This part here. And it might alert you a little bit, to say the least. But at the same time-- So that's what I call a transitional statement. It doesn't say anything, but you can use that to bridge to another statement. So we're gonna keep it just in case. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna trim out that part... Trim out that. I'm gonna move it slightly on over. And then I'm gonna delete the rest of it. Okay, next statement. It is the environment you're gonna be in, human beings sweating. And from there-- Just cut it. Nothing worth there. Can you see how much easier it is when you get the statement, you start listening once, you play whack-a-mole, right? Whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. And then you go through and you listen to each thing. How much easier does this feel now? So much easier, right? That's all you're doing, is when you get to that clean timeline, all you do at that point is listen and cut, listen and cut, listen and cut, listen and cut. Your job right now is to get as much out of that timeline as humanly possible, because if you don't do it now, you're gonna have a hell of a time doing it later. Each clip you keep, each single clip you keep, you listen, whack, listen, whack, listen, whack. You play that game, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then what's gonna end up happening is you're gonna get a really, really clean statement. We're halfway there. Let's keep going, let's keep going. You might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? Wait, wait. I should've listened to that more closely. So let's click on that. You might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? Um, but we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. Keep or delete? Definitely keep. Question? Would you trim the um? Yeah, yeah. So right now, right now we're just trying to get the statements. All of the cleaning up, all of the trimming and making it look and sound pretty, we're gonna leave that later. Remember, one step at a time, guys. We're gonna start with the clip, we're gonna play whack-a-mole, okay. And after we're done playing whack-a-mole, we're gonna listen to each little bite-sized nugget and make a quick, snap decision. Keep or delete, keep or delete. Now we're gonna do that, so I'm gonna keep this guy. On to the next clip. You get in here, you change, you get into the locker room. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here-- I can keep that. It may be helpful later, so I'm gonna keep going. You put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you know you do a little bit of stretching. The coach guides you into a warm-up, then teaches you a certain technique, and then little by little you start gaining these techniques and you start wrestling with these techniques. And that process, that day in, day out of doing that, you learn how to wrestle. Okay, so he's saying a lot about that process. I'm not listening for that yet, so I'm gonna keep that all right now. All of that right now, I'm thinking in my head, I can still use for the edit. I'm just trying to get rid of the things that I don't want. So even if it seems like you could use it, keep it at this point. We're just trying to get rid of the easy ejects. We're getting rid of all of the things that we know we are not gonna need. We're gonna keep going, we're almost there. Then comes obviously what you get from wrestling, the endorphins, the biochemistry of just the adrenaline. And the purging. I think honestly a lot of guys get a purge of sweating, of letting that energy out. Which to me, I honestly believe that every man and every woman needs that. So for me, I like that statement. The reason I'm gonna cut that statement is because there's two things he says here that I think would put people off. The first thing is-- Guys get a purge Purge, and the second thing is-- Of sweating, of letting that energy out. Which to me-- Wait. Wait, it's get back here, it's back here. I think honestly a lot of guys-- Okay, this is really, really minor. It's really minor. He wants his gym to be all-inclusive, and in that statement, he says, the guys. So I can't use that statement because it's not inclusive of who his true clientele is. And there are some people who won't be offended by that or be a turnoff by that, but there are some people who might be. So it's our job to not use that. I'm gonna strike it. Even though it's a good statement, I'm gonna strike it. Can you see how these editing choices that I'm making right now have nothing to do with speed, tempo, and flow, but has everything to do with crafting a statement? Crafting those sentences down into manageable, bite-sized pieces. So now I'm gonna zoom back out to see my timeline here. I cut out a good portion. I cut out the "bodies" part. A good thing to do here is I'm gonna ripple delete. A ripple delete, what it does is it eliminates that space. If I right-click and click ripple delete, it moves that space over and jams the clips up together. So it's control click, or ripple delete. Now here what I'm gonna do here is play it again. Again and again, and keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting. See, my hope is that by doing this with you on this clip and spending the time doing it with you, you're gonna see that editing is just part and parcel and step in process of a larger thing. Your workflow in RAW, what is it? You bring the image into Lightroom, exposure. You adjust your exposure. Maybe you touch white balance first, then you go exposure, then you add your contrast, then you do all your things down that right panel, top down. We all do it. This is exactly that same process. You look at a clip, you look at the whole thing. Then you play whack-a-mole. After you're done playing whack-a-mole, you start deleting. After you're done deleting, you move the statements together and you listen to the clip one more time. When you first walk into the gym... And it might alert you a little bit, to say the least. But at the same time, you might be nervous. You might be-- Whoa, whoa, I just heard something. When you truncate those statements, what did I just hear? Oh, okay. Well, let's start moving stuff around, 'cause right now, right now is where things get interesting, right? I'm gonna start moving these statements around so that I can start to get a phrase out of him. Okay, and let's go ahead and ripple delete that. Now listen. You might be-- Whoops. When you first walk into the gym, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting in-- What did I just do? I took out all of that silly stuff that didn't pertain to the core meaning of that statement, and I just gave you a sentence. "When you first walk into the gym, you might be nervous." Yeah, I'm gonna smell human bodies, but in reality, I'm gonna be nervous. Okay, let's keep going. Into? What is this? Um, but we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. You get in here, you change, you get into the locker room. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you know you do a little bit of stretching. The coach guides you into a warm-up, then teaches you a certain technique, and then little by little you start gaining these techniques and you start wrestling with these techniques. And that process, that day in, day out of doing that, you learn how to wrestle. Then comes-- Okay. So that's a really long-winded statement. Now we gotta listen to it again and truncate that down and chunk it down even more. How does this feel? A lot easier, right? It's a lot more simple to look at it in this way and cut these statements down in this way for us to then be able to really truly start to edit. So we're gonna do that, we're gonna keep doing this. But before I keep going on, how does this feel? What do you guys think about this? Yeah? So it feels really accessible and it feels like it makes a ton of sense for very specifically what we're doing in terms of this is a client interview piece. For different types of pieces and projects, it feels a little bit less intuitive to sort of go, to be on just the audio and some of the cutting, and so I still feel uncertain. Okay, so as we think about all these statements, especially when you take a look at... Let's even think about a statement in general that doesn't pertain here. We can always cut things out of a statement to make them more truncated, regardless of the type of project we are shooting. And in your context, if it's a recipe, there's a lot of words in between that we can cut out. 'Cause really, when I'm giving a recipe, all I want is to know two eggs, how to stir them, how much sugar, how much stuff, right? If we have a lot of words that follow the actual nugget, we can cut that. That don't pertain to it. I'm gonna show you that right now, because there's a lot of words here. He's got a lot of words in this middle part, and it's saying almost exactly the same thing, just differently, over and over and over. Let's listen to this, and then I'm gonna, again, start to kinda play whack-a-mole, where I need to truncate the statement down. When you first walk into the gym, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? Um, but we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. You get in here, you change, you get into the locker room. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here-- It says-- Room. It becomes-- Okay. So I'm listening here for ways to connect my statements. Becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you-- Okay. So what I did here is I started to listen for ways to connect what he said in the beginning with what he said later. Watch what I just did. I'm gonna not delete just yet. When you first walk into the gym, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? Um, but-- Okay. So I'm gonna get rid of that "um, but" to give myself a little bit of more continuity in what he's saying. Okay, here we go. Let me just do this real quick. What am I getting into? What is this? But we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. Okay, that's a statement. I'm done right there, so I'm gonna cut the rest if it doesn't appeal to me. You get in here, you change, you get into the locker room. Don't need to know that. Don't need to know about changing, don't need to know about in the locker room, so I'm gonna cut that. It becomes a step-by-step process. Ooh, I like that. "It becomes a step-by-step process." Can you see what I'm doing, guys? Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead, ripple delete that in. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes-- Alright, let's listen to it. When you first walk into the gym, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? But we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a routine. It becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you know you do a little-- Boom, we are done. How much more fluid was that statement? I can clean up some of the uh, uh, uh. If you take a look in any situation where you have a long statement where people just talk over and over and over and over throughout like a minute, you can always get that down to this much. That's in one clip. That's in one clip. The next thing we're gonna do is talking about doing it with multiple clips. Bridging statements in multiple clips. But before we do that, I do wanna hang on this a little bit. This is like fundamental. If we can't figure this out as a team, as a group right now, then I've failed as a teacher. Because this is the most important thing about editing a profile piece. Doing that. Playing whack-a-mole, chunking it down, getting a statement, cleaning it up. Okay? How we doing? Cool. Awesome. Alright, so let's move. At the end of the day, here's the statement. This is the real one I ended up going with. When you first walk into the gym, you might be nervous. You might be nervous, like, what am I getting into? What is this? But we take you through the process. You come in here and like anything else, it becomes a step-by-step process. You come in here, you put your wrestling shoes on, and next thing you know you do a little bit of stretching. The coach guides you into a warm-up, then teaches you a certain technique-- So I kept all of this because now that, rest of it, is gonna be informed by my B-roll. You get that? So what? When you first step into the gym, okay, cool. You're gonna be nervous. Exactly. Why am I gonna be nervous? I'm gonna see a lot of things. So that's B-roll. Okay, I'm gonna go, oh, but there's gonna be a coach. Cool, I think I got B-roll for that, right? Now, as I'm thinking, I'm starting to think of, yeah, I got the B-roll to support that. I got that, I got that, I got that, I got that. Can you see how this is working? Can you see how you could start now to think? All you need is that one statement, and then all of a sudden a flood of ideas come to you for that B-roll. Got a question? So it's almost as if the interviewee becomes the narrator. Yes! Am I getting that right? You got it. Alright. You got it. We are taking the person's statement and having them give us everything we need without us prompting them. I've taken a gigantic stone tablet and I've chiseled away at it for the past three days and now I'm getting to the point where I've got the detail thing and I'm going in and I'm making a gigantic statue. I'm at that point now. And it all involves this technique. This is the reason we are here: to learn that technique. Because if you don't learn that technique, your edit's gonna meander. It's not gonna say anything. It's gonna drift, and you're gonna get hung up on these little phrases that don't belong in your edit. Remember what I said earlier. Delete now so you don't have to delete it later. Oh, and let's pretend I deleted the wrong thing. Oh, that's okay, because if I deleted the wrong thing, I can always put it back in. Let's pretend I'm here and I'm like, oh, I need more statement. I'm not losing it forever, guys. I'm just cutting it. I can get more clip back, so long as it's there, you know. If it's not there to begin with, then you're kind of... Up river. But still. The reason we need to make decisions now is because we got to, got to, got to get to a place where we can start comprehending the edit enough and what's being said so that we can then make more choices. And I just wanna clarify. We're attacking this as a client profile, correct? So got your storyboard, you identified the five messages that you wanted to get through, and now you're pulling in the audio portion of that. Would this be the same process for other types, or are we specifically talking about a client profile? I think that the skills you're gonna learn from doing this for a client profile are translatable. It will translate to any type of project you do. Because the fundamental thing we're learning here is how to cut, how to delete, how to get rid of. Things that don't matter, right? That's the rule of editing. You gotta get rid of things that don't pertain to the topic and don't matter. For us to be training ourselves in this way just to get rid of things that don't say anything, it's the same way when you edit narrative. It's the same way when you edit episodic television. It's the same way when you edit anything else that you're ever gonna do. It's exactly the same way. I used to buy a lot of DVDs and a lot of Blu-rays because the director, you know, special cuts or deleted scenes. How many times has a deleted scene ever impacted a movie? Never. The reason they delete it is 'cause it doesn't impact the movie. It's the same thing here. It was a lot of dialogue, right? It's a lot of stuff. But they deleted it because it didn't pertain. It didn't matter. And that's the hard decisions we have to make when we get here. And if we train ourselves enough to just instinctively, not think about it, just instinctively react and hit that mouse button, to hit that cut, you're gonna be better off. You're gonna be so much better off if you just go, hit, hit, hit, cut, cut, cut, cut. I do this all the time when I edit, and it's never failed. It's never failed me.