We Don’t Know What Editing Is

Editing. It’s something I think about a lot.

Too much.

I’m in the middle of writing a YouTube script about it and I’m including a story about meeting a group of creatives where my contribution was whining about how much I hate editing. It was one of those moments where no one else shared my feelings and I knew I had some growing to do.

I’ve slowly realized a dislike or resistance to editing… is a problem. It’s something I should have gotten over or at least understood better a long time ago.

Editing is less about a preset, cool transitions, or spell check — it’s the process of actually selecting, modifying, and refining your work. Choosing pieces of art to work together. Massaging your ramblings into readable text (working on it!). Forgetting about colour grading until you have something that clearly communicates what you’re trying to say.

I like ideas. I come up with ideas. I consider myself an “ideas guy”.
But ideas are nothing. They can be the foundation of something, a spark, a seed, a party trick, but are nothing themselves.

They are the reason to take an expedition, but you still need to take the expedition. You need to find the energy.

I can have the idea to climb Mt. Everest. I could live the rest of my life believing that I could have climbed Mt. Everest.

Editing is where the idea takes physical shape. Editing means you’re serious.

Editing is everything.

Editing is climbing the mountain.

We don’t know what editing is

My last youtube video brought this up. I talked about how it’s misleading to focus solely on our heroes’ finished products.

We believe, and more nefariously, want the creative process to be a single spark of an idea that propels one, perfect stroke of the brush.

And then we blame ourselves, give up when it’s not.

If we want to be creative people ourselves we need to understand the process to get to that result. We don’t see the outtakes. We don’t read the rough drafts crumpled up in the garbage. (I am reading rough drafts right now, making my way through a great book called The Work of Art.)

In that video I showed how Elliot Erwitt’s famous shot of the little dog wasn’t a perfect moment. I gambled that he didn’t even know he got “the shot” until he was looking back at his contact sheets (Contact sheets, or contact prints are a quick 1:1 inversion of the sheet of film negatives for selection).

Look how blasphemously large that crop is. I’ve had puritanical youtube commenters bug me about making much subtler crops to my own images.

Editing is the real work of art.

Editing is not a preset, not retouching, not removing a large, hairy man in a speedo from the back of your beach photo. Editing is the bulk of the creative process. It is The Work. To try to avoid it or shortcut/preset/ai it is to skip the whole deal of art: to sit with your work and understand and craft who you are and what you are trying to say.

What do you… I have to say?

In true Dunning-Kruger fashion, talking with successful creative people about the process of editing has illuminated how infantile and undeveloped my own creative process has been… and still is. It’s a miracle I get any youtube videos up. (I don’t have a problem with the do-or-die parameters that come with client work.)

There’s a big gap between what we fantasize the creative process to be like and its reality. The human brain loves to fill in the gaps, or simply fall for the mystique that others project.

BTS is marketing.

Even “behind the scenes” is marketing. Even on my videos. It’s edited only to show you the best parts, the best takes, a few instances of “action” and “cut”… in fact it’s a law that you have to end the BTS video with the assistant director yelling “cut”. The BTS never shows the pathetic self despair as I sit alone to try to figure a scene out in my head. It doesn’t show me building a Google Slides doc to beg people to help me out. It doesn’t show the hours I spend cursing while looking for a random camera rigging part for a youtube video i’m going to edit out anyways. It doesn’t show the hours I waste simply avoiding this newsletter.

Ideas are nothing. I keep starting and abandoning newsletters, videos. I’m collecting mountains of words. Shiny new ideas distract me from old ones as soon as the high of conception wears off and you’re now tasked with execution. The expedition.

I somehow always think “this time it’ll be easy”.

It’s never easy, but each time it’s a bit easier.