Hello! I recently hit 30 subscribers and it feels like a good opportunity to reintroduce this Substack.
Hello! My name is Joe and a few years ago, I moved from a marketing department to an IT department at work1. At the time, I was the single video and graphic design person and my boss asked that I write down everything before I left.
I cranked out a few Word documents with a list of instructions and turned it in. After reviewing a few of the documents, she looked at the one about using the makeshift studio we had for shooting short videos and then asked “Ok, but how do I do this step?”
The step was “1. Turn on the camera”
The office had a bunch of Canon 5d Mark III DSLRs. If you had never touched one, could you figure it out?
It dawned on me that what seemed common sense or obvious to me was actually complicated and difficult to anyone else in the office.
From Googling just now, there isn’t really a name for this, but Emma G. Rose calls it the “Common Knowledge trap”.
So I went back and rewrote my instructions, assuming, as Rose put it, like an alien just arriving on Earth.
At that point, I had been working corporate video for over 10 years. I assumed everyone knew what I knew. My instructions explained what I assumed was the complicated part, and I didn’t realize that all of it was complicated.
Why is video making so complicated? Shouldn’t all of this be easier? Where do you start when learning something seems hard?
And that’s where this Substack comes in. It should be easier! All of it should be easier!
Did you know you already know how to edit?
You may not know who Walter Murch is, but you’d recognize the movies he’s edited and/or sound mixed (the most famous being Godfather I, II & III, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient, which he won the first Oscar for Best Editing2). In a college editing class, one assignment was to read a chapter out of his book In the Blink of an Eye and I loved it so much I ended up buying and reading the whole book because I’m fascinated by the psychology of video and film-making.
At one point, Murch describes a coincidence he noticed when editing The Conversation. Right where he was going to make a cut to another shot, Gene Hackman was blinking. Then later he read a magazine interview with John Huston with this quote:
“Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. After the first look, you know that there’s no reason to pan continiously from me to the lamp because you know what’s in between. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.”
Murch goes on to use the quote and Hackman’s performance to prove that our eyes aren’t the reason for blinking, our brain is. If the eyelid was only needed to keep eyeballs from drying, it would be automatic or rhythmically consistent. But that’s not how it works; sometimes we go long stretches without blinking, either in times of stress or high concentration. Also, a blink can be considered the brain’s form of punctuation.
Go ahead and try the Huston/Murch blinking experiment. I hold my arms out to the side and look at one, then the other, and then back. I always blink on the way back to hand #1, because the brain recognizes there is no new information to process. The sentence my brain puts together is “Here’s the left hand and here’s the right hand. [*blink*] Now here’s the left again.”
I keep this in mind when I’m editing a video, especially a long one. There comes a point where the feeling to blink or cut to something else comes up. Don’t ignore that feeling! That’s the brain doing the editing for you.
For the record, I don’t work in a button factory.
For your bar trivia: The English Patient was also the first Best Editing Oscar winner to be edited digitally/not edited on film.
Don’t forget to join my chat, only on the Substack app.
I love that tip re blinking and how it’s the brain being an editor!
Wow, great post, Joe! I've encountered the common knowledge trap in college and in learning to code.
"Once you know something, it’s hard to remember what it was like to not know that thing." - Emma Rose
Some teachers assume that beginners like me know more than they do, and they end up confusing us.
Also, you've inspired me to read "In the Blink of an Eye". Thanks!