Some people get excited by the prospect of video editing but have no clue where to actually start. 

I myself understood the core concepts of the technical work a good few years before I truly got the concept of visual storytelling. It’s the same with any other art, except in today’s world it’s getting easier and easier to tell stories on the macro level, with less and less people and singular involvement. The truth of it is, if you still know how to edit, you may not quite know how to tell a story. 

Video editing, in general, is the process of cutting up footage. You “ingest” footage that’s been shot, you chop it up, and then align it together and “render” it out. It’s why there’s a “cut” tool, that helps you slice and dice footage, similar to actually cutting film in the original days. Except today’s tools are much easier to use and cameras give you near instantaneous access to footage. You can bring all your footage on a timeline and go ginzu on it immediately. That’s how I like to edit, bringing on the full footage and then paring away what I don’t like and ending up with a lean and mean video. Or you can go the conservative route, individually viewing each clip you shoot, selecting the “ins” and “outs” and then layering it in your footage. However you like to do it, it’s the way of telling the story and that is the most important point of video in general. 

When you watch a movie, you feel emotion, reaction, visceral content flowing into your eyeballs and making you think about the content. It doesn’t have to be Marvel effects, some of the simplest and best stories are told with just one camera and one angle and maybe even no actors. But there’s been a deliberate attempt to convey emotion and tell a story through video, and that’s the point of storytelling.  

So when you sit down at your editing suite, how do you start to tell that story? It all begins with a framework of what you want to say. In my style of taking things away, I still start with a baseline-either a voiceover or a script that gives me a direction on where to go-hence the term “director”. In large productions, you can have individuals dedicated to each part of a production-a director to oversee and basically make the vision, a cinematographer that sets the camera angles and lenses, the “look” of the production, a visual effects coordinator that presets scenes that need effects, all the way down to grips that rig equipment and prepare it for the shot. In many parts of today’s world, all of those jobs fall to one person or a much smaller team. Having organization is vital on that front to ensure you don’t have to reshoot things constantly. 

I prefer to start with that voiceover. It gives you clues and context on what happens next. Even if there’s no voice over, the script usually describes the mood, the scene, the angles and the tension that you can create. How do you want to set this scene? How long of an intro do you give before action starts, or dialog is necessary? Or, what is being said on the production that conveys the ideas you want the viewer to see? Where do you match this look, this effect or even a scene with another?

These are all parts of your production that you take into consideration when you edit. You’re creating a finished mix of video, effects, ideas, voice, music and more to create a fully fleshed out project that people will watch or want to watch. The best ones give people that reaction-there’s more to want, colors to awe, more to think about and more to react to, even for a commercial that’s selling things. 

It’s nice to be able to shoot and reshoot things. Multiple takes give a director the ability to choose the best angle or the best take that an actor gives, but what about live events? 

Let’s take a wedding, for example. You cannot ask a bride to go back and walk down an aisle again. It can ruin the wedding and emotion of the first take, many people are not actors and cannot “act” on demand. If you’re looking for the photojournalistic look, you’ll want to capture things as they happen naturally. You’ll need to be prepared at the first shot, with multiple cameras in order to get the best angle and then tell that story as best you can with what you have. It’s why you need to be prepared and have a game plan beforehand-mostly just having experience on where the wedding goes and how to get those angles. You’re telling the story of the wedding-where two people are sharing the start of their lives together. 

It’s the same with sporting events. You can’t ask for a replay on a touchdown, so you’ll need to make sure you’re in the best position to capture that and if you miss it, then you miss it and that can affect the project. For live events, you need to be prepared and think ahead of how you’re telling the story so that you can get footage to match what you want in the end, if there’s a narrative involved. And even if there’s no direct narrative-you capture an event to capture, you still tell a story by the video itself. To recap an event, you’ll cut it down to highlights, the best parts, the best bits. This is what happened here, etc. 

So there’s plenty of ways to cut that video that “makes sense”. Don’t start at that timeline, get started cutting it up to show how you’re telling that story using video.