Offline Editing | Introduction

Before I went to film school, I thought I knew what editing was, until I finally came to an understanding that editing is so much more than just “cutting pieces and sticking some of it together into a new piece” and then voila—you have created a masterpiece!

Nope, one thing I learned from my lecturer who taught basic editing is that editing is not a tool, but rather more of a sense or a way of thinking, a very specific and unique way to tell a story that not everybody has. He said that everyone can (or at least learn to) operate an editing software, but that doesn’t make a good editor. It’s about how you operate those. It’s about how you tell your story.

1.1 Illustration of Editing

source: unsplash.com

So, yes, editing for motion picture is indeed the process of organizing, reviewing, selecting, and assembling the picture and sound footage captured during production. Meaning that it is the editor’s responsibility to put the pieces together in order to create a compelling story, based on the script. A good editor would have that sense of storytelling and therefore knows their way around how to achieve it.

Among the things that I’ve learned from my editing class, “the who” is a first thing first. Before getting into the details, we go through who’s in charge and who’s in the team. So next I’ll be sharing some interesting thing that I get from my class and perhaps not all amateur fully knows.