CLASSROOM: Valuable Mistakes of a First Time Film Editor1 min read
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Written by Martin Garrison
In 2007, I wrote, produced and directed a microbudget feature film called Jackson Arms. The culmination of a lifelong dream, the film was made possible by the sale (after an extensive rehab) of my own home—a DIY endeavour dependent, for its success, on both hard work and good fortune.
Because I was a first-time everything and the film, a comedic romance, was shot in two weeks (with animal actors and characters speaking Chinese) there were hiccups—and more than a few warts. After the film wrapped, I believed (foolishly, it turns out) that I didn’t need to hire an editor because, well…I could edit the film myself.
This mistake—not my last during editing—would prove costly. Not only was I too close to the material (having written and directed it), but I also “didn’t know what I didn’t know,” which made me—at least when I began—the worst person possible to edit the film. It would take over a decade labouring in my home studio (crafting and then re-working cut after cut of the movie) for me to learn what editing was all about. In thousands of tiny choices—what to leave in or take out, what to modify and how—I gradually made a discovery I would not have anticipated: that, to me, editing was by far the most creative aspect of filmmaking.
Image credit: Jackson Arms
