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“Some New Shit Has Come To Light”

As a Storyteller, when new shit comes to light you have to stop the presses, re-work, re-edit, and make it right.
So, here’s the deal, a few days before the air date of the final episode of “Mini and Dane” on EpicTV, the series ender involved a quote where Dane basically says that he’s going to keep adding new videos to Marine Layer Productions.
Then I get an email from Producer Jamie Tierney at Victor Charlie Productions saying that Dane wants that quote deleted. In fact, he doesn’t really want to do Marine Layer anymore.
At this point, we’ve pulled so much content out of episode 3 on Dane’s request that if we keep pulling from it, there’ll be nothing left. So I said, “Great! If he wasn’t to kill Marine Layer, tell him to record it on his phone and send me something to replace it with.”
Within a few minutes I get an audio file from Dane and the rest is history…or is it? He kind of leaves it open.
Point being, as Storytellers, we’re sometimes fixated on having the story exist as WE see it. (I don’t want Marine Layer to dissolve!!) We want everything to go as planned. The truth is that the story exists without us. It’s simply our job to convey that reality to the viewer.
In this case, it caused this video to go from a series finale that fizzled out, to newsworthy. Everyone wants to know what’s happening with Marine Layer/Dane and because we were open to change, Dane gave us something that no one else was able to get.

Mini And Dane-The Birth Of Marine Layer Productions

I recently finished Post-Production on a series for Epic TV featuring the beginnings of Marine Layer Productions. It’s a pretty amazing story that actually changed the way we view media.
Thinking back to 2010, I was cutting TV shows and feature length action sports films such as (The Art Of Flight) Back then, Action Sports films involved two years of shooting, three months of editing, World Premiere, tour stops, etc.
Seemingly overnight, the internet gives athletes the ability to completely control the way they communicate with the public and now we’re mainlining clips on a daily basis and I’m partially responsible for that. In 2011, shortly after witnessing what Dane was doing with Marine Layer, I’d begun a series with Erik Roner called “Roner Vision”. The concept was simple, sponsors pay athletes to do stuff, athlete brings you along to shoot action and edit it, you find an outlet that’s willing to pay for exclusivity to your videos (i.e. Network A or Epic TV) and that becomes the funding for an athlete to have their own personal production person.
With all of the amazing talent out there and the easy access to shoot, edit and create our visions. It’s an exciting time to be in Video Production!

Everything Has a Storyline

In Sports Productions it’s often easy to dismiss an edit as simply being a montage. Sports Production is one of the only forms of video production where it’s become acceptable to slap a bunch of A+ footage together over a killer track and (as long as everything hits a beat) you’re going to make something interesting enough for people to watch.
But everything has a story and in my opinion, your viewers desperately want some sort of linear content that pulls them through the piece.
I recently cut this commercial for C&C Yachts that makes for a good example of finding storyline.

When this project showed up on a hard drive there was ample direction provided on what shots it needed to begin with. The crew walking to the vessel was obviously the beginning, followed by some rigging shots.
Dock
When they got to the open water, it was suggested that it could be a mishmash of great shots. Which could have been great! But as I was looking through the footage and listening to the song I’d pulled for the rough cut, I’d noticed there was an amazing build in the track that couldn’t be ignored. The crescendo at 1:10, that’s my key edit. I’ll often place a marker on the song and select the best shot to fit that part of the track. Then I’ll actually build the rest of the edit around that moment. That moment is where your viewer is going to really “feel it.”
You’ll notice that the beginning of the edit contains of lot of shots of sailing upwind, which provides great action and works in unison with the build in the music.
Onboard shots of tacking and the crew trimming the sails gives a wonderful feeling of excitement.
tacking
As the viewer approaches the 1:10 minute mark the song finally crescendos. This is my key edit and what better way to hit that beat than with the raising of the spinnaker and see this puppy run?
Spinnaker
Producer/Director/Cinematographer Onne van der Wal did an amazing job of pulling together various angles of this moment using a helicopter, on-water chase boat, and multiple GoPro Hero3 cameras positioned around the boat.
run

In summation, Hip Hop mogul Dr. Dre said it best “Make’em feel it” and adding that extra continuity into you edits to create storyline is a great way to achieve that.

DIY: Royalty Free Music

Let’s face it, licensing music is a pain in the butt.
As a Producer, you’re typically prepared to put in the leg work of licensing and buying a few tracks to highlight your action montage. But, no one really wants to do that for background instrumentals. After all, you’re planning on putting voice overs and interview audio on top of that song anyway.
Well, I’ve recently come across a great solution.
I created this song in a few minutes, check out the youtube video…

Here’s link to a few other songs on my sound cloud account.

Inspiration: Video Sampling

As an action sports editor, I’ve been asked for years “could you edit a snowboard film in front of a live audience?” And For a long time the answer was, “not unless everyone wants to sit in the theater for a month.”
Although video editing has a lot in common with creating music (i.e. a pale introvert sits in a dark room, cueing clips in a certain order using a non-linear editing program.) It’s actually quite different. I could go into various ways that it’s different, but simply put… time. Video editing takes much more time. Music can be instantaneous, spontaneous, direct….in essence…live. That’s why you can name multiple DJ’s and you probably don’t know of one editor.
I recently came upon this Youtube video by Memorecks showing an example of how he was able to link video to his audio samples using Ableton Live. Although there are a few issues to work out (mainly render speeds), It seems like this would make it possible to create a montage style edit in front of an audience.
Currently, the concept has me up at night and I’m excited to dive into it further! Stay tuned