Editing: Theory and Practice
0:00 [Music]
The Oxford English Dictionary defines art as "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in visual form, such as a painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power." Or, more currently, art is a connection between purpose and interest: what you're telling the audience and how you tell them. Whenever I make an edit, I always have that thought in the back of my mind, because if you forget either of these pieces of what art fundamentally is, the edit fails.
There are some amendments that I need to make to this definition, though, because purely expressing purpose and interest isn't really the greatest business model, as my upload schedule can easily relate. I make edits on YouTube in the pursuit of their viewership, that is, in the hopes that they perform well on the YouTube market.
1:01 It's because of that that whenever I make an edit, I usually tend to air on the side of interest, as how well information is communicated to the audience and how much they like the video is ultimately what YouTube uses to determine who the video will be recommended to, and thus how often it will be seen. And in order to get that communication across, I need to keep the audience's attention, which is really the crux of what interest comes to.
You can get your interest in an edit in many ways, from audio to video to anything in between, but because YouTube is a visual medium, I tend to keep my interest visual and focus rather little on the audio composition of my videos.
There's a hierarchy of visual quality when you make these edits. At the most basic level is just a black screen with some audio. Whether that be a song or an narration or something of that sort is up to the composer of the video, but at the end of the day, the video that you end up with is pretty boring and uninteresting because there's no real video there. Yet, it's something that people have done a lot throughout YouTube's history, because you still have that element of interest from the audio working towards the composer's benefit. To find yourself a tier above this, you introduce video elements like pictures
2:03 or video clips, and simply talk over them. This is what I used to do in a lot of my older videos when I wasn't able to put anything else on screen, and that works because you're still able to have a degree of visual interest from what you are able to see on screen alongside interest from the audio that's playing.
Another tier above this is where 99% of people are going to stop, because when you get to this point, videos start to look pretty good. It's at this point that people incorporate video that's actually connected to the audio that the viewer is listening to, most often time through a vlog. It's in these edits that basic cuts to and from information keep the scenes lively and relevant to the audio that's used, bringing interest a step above simply placing static pictures or video on screen.
A tier above this is where I usually edit, and I distinguish it from the previous tier because of how much original media goes into the composition of the actual videos. I like to think that the first step towards editing at this level is constantly maintaining some sort of movement, no matter what's going on within the video. This can be difficult, because a lot of times, if you want to make an edit, you're not going to have an endless supply of video that you can just talk over, especially if you're discussing something that really doesn't
3:03 have much of a basis in media, like a singular song. It's at that point, before you even try to create movement and make a proper edit, that you need to consider what elements you're actually going to put into the video. You should always want to go with something that's relevant to the discussion. If you're putting a picture of a dab on screen while discussing Donald Trump, you destroy the majority of interest you receive from the picture because it's in no way relevant to the audio.
Now, when you do find a relevant material, you could just make a basic edit with a simple picture on screen as you talk, but then there's little movement on the screen, and you lose visual interest. What you could do to fix that is scale the picture in some way, either in or out or to one of the sides, to create the illusion of camera panning, and that can work pretty well. But what I tend to do when I make an edit is try to transform the pictures I use into videos by breaking them into smaller parts, then adjusting their positions in 3D space. When you get creative with this, you can make a lot of minimal adjustments that work in total to not only enhance the newly created video via contrasting movements, but in doing so give it a greater deal of visual interest, because you have those movements going on at the same time. What becomes more difficult
4:04 is when you really don't have anything to put on screen, but still need to create that movement. It's therein when you need to consider not only movements, but how aesthetically pleasing your video is. To do that, you need to get a sense of what you want to be in the viewer's focus as you maintain interest with movement. This means creating a clearly defined background and foreground, especially when you're working with many elements at a single point in the video. Putting everything in focus destroys interest, because the viewer simply has too much to look at at a single point in time, as there's too much movement generally going on.
The easiest way to get there for me is to use contrast in both the sharpness of my elements and their colored tones. As our eyes—and by extension, cameras—tend to do, you generally want to make things in the foreground sharper while blurring out the background. I reinforce this generally with a color contrast, usually bright in the foreground and dark in the background, to again draw further attention to whatever sharp elements I have on screen.
When you throw movement into the mix now, you need to consider what's actually in focus. You want to keep foreground focus by using flashier movements, which I'll get into later, while using more subtle movements in the background. I'll usually use this animated dirt texture that I created in
5:06 Photoshop, because it works perfectly to maintain movement that's non-destructive to interest, because it's neutral from whatever is being discussed. In a similar way, you generally want your background elements to do the same, always maintaining overall interest, but not distracting from your foreground elements or discussed audio.
These foreground elements, however, also need to maintain their own sense of focus. When using text, I try to keep that by using typography, which essentially means using different fonts and their different styles at different times to relate an overall sense of what should have that focus. Again, I do this through contrast. It can be done through color, but typically I do it through weight and italicization. Something that's more important I'll put in bold, or even condensed bold, to create an even further contrast while using light and thin text to make clear that something perhaps isn't as important. It's also useful to do this because even if the meaning of the thicks and thins is lost, the visual contrast that's created is overall more aesthetically pleasing than simply using a large portion of text with the same exact font characteristics. You can also use fonts to great effect to relate emotion through what style you're actually using, or to create a sense of continuity throughout the video, then use a
6:07 different font to break that continuity, and thus, again through contrast, highlight visually a change discussed throughout the video narrative.
Aside from focus when things are in the background, you still have more options to alter as to how aesthetically you choose to create interest. Positioning elements in ways that may be jarring to the eyes is probably one of the worst things that you can do if you're trying to make an edit with any amount of elements on screen. You have the option to use the Rule of Thirds to position elements, but that tends to leave a lot of room open for accidental focus on the background, which is why I generally place elements at the center of the screen, or at least base positioning on the center. This means maintaining a proper balance of what you're actually seeing on screen by keeping element symmetry, as placing elements too far off to the side can be jarring to the eyes.
In the case of this clip from the video I made dissecting Life of Pi, the actor is positioned by the Rule of Thirds to the left of center, so when I introduce the word "logic," I do so to the right of the screen, as it not only maintains a central focus, but in doing so relates to the audience that it's this actor whose logic I'm discussing. Only when you've picked relatable elements, have positioned them properly, and have established basic movements,
7:08 can you then begin to manipulate what movements you use and when you use them. Doing so in correspondence to the purpose of the video—in my case, the narration—is, as I stated at the beginning of the video, the crux of editing, and is what I refer to as representation.
The most crucial part of achieving this is a proper execution of timing in videos, as properly timing any sort of edit is what allows the audience to discern a relationship as represented by what was able to be seen on screen before and after the edit was made, creating another essential contrast. A relationship is also illustrated between my narration and the elements I choose to place on screen, as doing so at a proper time relates that the elements currently being seen are directly related to that narration.
In this video itself and in the video I made on Black Mirror, the majority of my timed edits are cuts. Since I have video playing on screen that has been pre-omposed and is already indicative of what I'm discussing, you can contrast that with the more transition-based edits I make in the videos on Life of Pi and Vapor Wave, in which I had to actually compose those elements themselves. In either case, cuts, because of their quick
8:09 nature without any in-between frames of smoother transitions, have a rather jarring effect, which is why I typically don't use them very often. However, when they are used, they create a sense of importance and immediiacy, as they appear without the viewer's ability to solely become acclimated with them.
Perhaps the edits I make most often, though, are those dealing with slides, whether in position, scale, or rotation, as they're really the easiest way for me to bring things on and off screen, that is, into and out of the viewer's focus. The specific key frame interpolation I use is exponential at both key frames. It's the same interpolation used by the Nerd Writer, Vox, and Captain Christian, because of how elements ease onto the screen very naturally. Using no easing at all tends to create a very synthetic, visually unpleasing movement with start and stop points that you can almost feel as they take place on screen. By contrast, the easing of exponential key frames creates much smoother motion, yielding a much cleaner, more professional feeling. At the same time, using these slides instead of simply cutting to an element's appearance or disappearance on screen adds to visual interest, as it creates that flashier foreground movement that I alluded to a few minutes ago. Bringing things on in
9:10 this way means I can then use respective motions to further relate the purpose of elements on screen by manipulating how and when they move. If I want to show the relationship between multiple elements, I'll move one out from one underneath the other while transitioning the other element off screen. I can also move elements offcreen as new ones appear, denoting a relationship between that which is now on screen and that which is offcreen. Moving elements in this way guides the eyes towards the appearance of new material using old material, explicitly linking the two in terms of purpose by utilizing visual interest.
I do the same by replicating which sorts of movements I use. Utilizing the same sort of slide denotes an identicality among elements in that it relates that because a similar or identical animation was used to allow for such elements presence on screen, a similar or identical purpose exists for such elements in terms of the totality of the video narrative. What using these slide effects also does is give the video a sense of grander continuity.
Take this clip from my video on Resonance. I begin with the clip from Despacito. Slide this picture on screen. Slide a second picture of the NES on screen. Slide notes out of the picture
10:12 to denote their relationship to the NES. Slide notes off screen while sliding clefts out from under them to visually represent where such notes are placed in which cleft. Slide a video of Super Mario Brothers over the NES in its own shape, then slide that mask out to reveal the whole video. That 30-cond sequence can be traced from beginning to end with new movement, transitioning into the new scene with Mario gameplay fluidly, as the beginnings of it were introduced into the previous scene with Kojicondo as a background element.
Moving elements over top of each other as such yields a more fluid visual experience for the viewer in that manner, and is an experience that can be further made fluid by the use of other transitionary movements like alpha mats, which allow me to transition things on screen through the use of shapes. Turning those transitions into a cohesive edit means introducing them alongside media element choices that maintain movement, while also arranging them in ways pleasing to the eyes, typically with focus on the video center and a proper background and foreground. Using complex movements then adds continuity and representation of ideal, bringing everything together to properly
11:14 demonstrate purpose and interest and, well, make an edit.
This is Mr. Amazing. Thanks for watching. [Music]
If you like this video, please consider donating to me on Patreon so that I may produce more like it. The next few videos coming up will be the sections of my own videos and the steps that I took in my editing softwares to actually make the edits possible. These videos are going to be organized much like this one: me simply talking over my older videos with some minor edits here and there so that I can just get out some more content for you guys while still maintaining a visual interest. I've also got some other ideas in the works, which you can check out on my Twitter linked below.
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