Video: How Does an Editor Think and Feel?

This is excellent from Tony Zhou who keeps producing terrific and informative videos. Here he delves into the craft of film editing including interviews with several notable editors, attempting to get into their minds about their process. Bottom line: They choose cuts based primarily by instinct. Check it out:

Two takeaways for writers:

* We can bring our own inner editor to work in our writing. How and when to enter and exit scenes. How and what to focus on with our scene description, each line a potential camera shot. Transitions between scenes. Lines of dialogue, what to keep, what to cut. Even choices of INT. and EXT., DAY and NIGHT, moving from scene to scene can created editorial opportunities. When you write, especially those final drafts, bring your inner editor to bear on the material.

* Watching this video reminds us — yet again! — that movies are primarily a visual medium. Obviously directors, cinematographers, and actors have much more say as to the visual nature of movie simply because they are involved in the production stage of the process, and yet writers should almost always default to thinking visual first, dialogue second. If we can convey in words what we hope the production team to accomplish in a visual moment, we stand a chance to have a greater influence on the final product as well as play to movie’s strength — visual storytelling.

HT to One Perfect Shot.

For Tony Zhou’s Vimeo channel, go here.