Re: Guiding kids to learn editing

[Mark Suszko] "How are you fixed for footage of the 3 Little Pigs story? :-)"

Missed out on including that one - whoops!

But in a larger sense, what I SEN was designed to be a baseline program to inform students about what the fundamental goals should be when you start out to shoot anything - regardless of the content.

It's an overview of things like coverage, shot editability, and yes, storytelling elements - that was designed to give students a sense of the possible before they go out to "do it themselves."

The question I was trying to answer is how do you produce quality, if you've never broken it down into understandable steps.

That was the flaw I saw in editing instruction. Students sitting down with no overview of the fundamentals other than as "viewers" or at best "self taught" experimenters with no grounding in technique.

The "big project" approach I'm seeing here is to me, kinda like like training first year english students by having them try to write novels. Nothing "wrong" with that at all.

But the big project approach kinda puts things back in the way things "used" to be done. Rather than where I see the industry going.

Video is (for better or worse) somewhat less a team sport and more and more a personal one these days.

So I'm not sure the "comprehensive look at all aspects of movie workflow, script to SFX is so smart anymore.

Look at YouTube and Vimeo. Where are the eyeballs and dollars flowing? Simple form presentations that while they have a beginning, middle and end (if you're lucky) seldom use the traditional form of the movie or TV show beyond the "infomercial" level. And they're usually the product of a single communicator, rather than a large form crew.

Is this complex multi-step lesson plan the best approach to helping students prepare for that reality?

Maybe it is. Maybe it's important for students to know about the hundred different jobs on a hollywood movie set, even if they're just going to make business videos for their future employer.

But I think the question is a good one to ask in advance.

The thing I keep seeing in my years on the road doing classes for Videomaker is that the hundreds of teachers who went through my lectures typically fell into two categories. One group had virtually no grounding in any fundamentals. The other group were the "movie buffs" who wanted to inspire students through the traditional "large production" practices of hollywood and episodic TV.

What surprised me was how few programs concentrated on the "meat and potatoes" middle where most of the money flows in the production industry today.

It doesn't require hollywood storytelling - it requires functional knowledge inside a single person of how to shoot and edit and deliver a message for clarity.

And clarity requires focus. I think most of the stuff on the lists floating around here are WAY overly complex to prepare someone in a year or two to be a "level 1" working video producer.

They look to me like in trying to be "comprehensive" they're going to try to do way too much, too fast - and so do nothing very well.

That may be a fine goal and just what the OP's class requires. If so, fine.

But to help the students actually succeed I'd focus things on maybe four basic foundational modules - likely camerawork, lighting, sound and editing. And try to give the kids a chance to understand all of those four fundamentals better - rather than trying to skim 50 topics.

But I could be very wrong and the presumption is that the instructor knows what and how they need to teach their subject.

I'd certainly be interested in the results of this approach. Whether the students get anything finished and if so, whether those submissions are tight communications, or the typical stuff I saw while participating in in judging quite a few amateur video contests while at the magazine.

Some quality moments hidden inside a mountain of general confusion.

FWIW.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor