I can’t decide if I love or hate editing. Somedays, I get totally lost in the footage and hours go by like minutes. Others, I catch myself counting minutes that feel like hours. I really enjoy the process of watching the piece take form. I really dislike the process of digging through the capture scratch, looking for the gems in the mound of discarded muck. I have all sorts of theories about this duality: maybe editing itself should be seen as many processes in one. So, I enjoy editing but dislike certain tasks associated with editing, such as hooking up external hard drives or the camera, logging and capturing, organizing footage. That must be it.

This week was editing intensive. We critiqued each other’s projects each day with a different lens: with Patrick, we assessed the pieces overall, with Sharif, we talked about them from an editing perspective, and with Allan, their cinematography. Interestingly, often the advice was contradictory. More interestingly, some of us found that by tweaking the piece according to the advice given by one instructor who may have blasted the piece to shreds with criticism, the next instructor remarked on how impressive it was for a first project. It shows that the little things make big differences.

We are also working on our next round of pitches for the upcoming project. I feel like we all thrive off of each other’s ideas when we start brainstorming on someone’s original conception. I often feel like I want to plagiarize the collaborated idea at the end of the class.

As an outside project from those associated with BDFI, I’m also working on piecing together footage for a doc that I shot this summer. This past week, I’ve finally kicked that project into gear realizing that it is already March and I will have let all of the fabulous resources I have at BDFI go to waste if I don’t get cracking on this much longer project. Also, there is a very narrow range for how long we can stomach our projects—our learning curve is just so steep! Only a few months/weeks/days even minutes after making a mistake or “creative decision” as I prefer to see them, we have already learned from it and are ready to move onto a new project, destroying the archive of that mistake as we go.