This is all excellent, Joy. You have a great eye. What’s your editing background?
I starting goofing around with a mini-VHS camcorder when I was 11, and then taught myself how to composite, stop-motion animate, and a bunch of other stuff. Because of all that I got accepted into a special high-school film program that’s part of the public school system in my hometown and was probably the best program of it’s kind in the country during the time I went there. After three years of that course, I had a college-level grasp of Editing Theory, After Effects Compositing, and Film History. I’ve always been really good at the visual side of Filmmaking, but I STUNK at the storytelling/writing side, so I decided to round out what I was bad at in college by taking an English Lit degree at St. Andrews in Scotland (Think Oxford or Cambridge. We’re no.1 in the UK, baby!). That degree kicked my butt! But by the end, it had achieved it’s purpose by teaching me how to research and write properly as well as how to tell a story clearly to an audience. While I was doing that degree I took two years off in the middle to work, so I could get out without any debt. During those years, I worked professionally as an Editor, Animator, and Motion Designer. I did some work for Discovery Channel, and I designed and animated the GIANT 360 boards at the Carolina Panther’s NFL Stadium.
When I got out of College, the high-end editing/post production industry collapsed in my neck of the woods, so after several years of trying to make a go of it, I started doing other work professionally, and in my own time I began writing graphic novels, because that’s the cheapest way to make a movie, lol! Hopefully in the next several years, I’ll be able to publish those, and long term I’d love to turn them into features, if they do well (Finding a good illustrator to work with has been really hard for some reason, but hopefully I’ll eventually be able to track one down). The reason I started recutting STAR WARS was actually to stay in shape so to speak, haha! The stuff I’d like to do eventually is as complex if not more complex than George’s SAGA, and I wanted to get as good and fast at cutting as possible, so that if I ever got the chance to work on a project of that scale, I’d be as prepared as I could be.
One of the reasons that I started doing the editing show was to make the knowledge and expertise that I got from my education and professional experience more accessible. (Film School is way too expensive, yo!) Back in the day, I was able to work professionally as an animator/compositor because of Andrew Kramer’s free AE tutorials at VideoCopilot.net, so I thought I’d try to do the same kind thing for Film Editing, so other poor folks like me could learn for free, if they’re keen.