Crowdediting — Working With A Lot of Other People

There are two types of crowd editing that I’ve experienced in my life — one of which causes me to look for the nearest open window, and one of which enriches my entire experience.  Right now I’m teaching a class in Advanced Editing that pushes the boundaries of that second one even further.

So, let’s explain.

For those of you who are wondering what I mean by “Crowdediting”. I’m doing a riff off of the oh-so-popular modern term “crowdsourcing.”  Jeff Howe, over at Wired, describes it this way:

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

In other words, you take a job (such as editing a scene, or a commercial, or a film) and let a whole bunch of people edit it on their own, letting the crowd develop of the result.

In its most horrible incarnation, this tends to look like an editing room with an editor, producer, director, studio representative, network executive, two or three “creative assistants” and a bunch of friends all hovering over the Avid, telling us (as editors) how to put the piece together. You know the joke about a camel being a horse built by a committee — that’s how it works. No matter how much civility is involved, the fact that there’s no leadership, makes the fact that there has to be one product at the end, very very difficult.

But this really is a business of collaboration. In my position as head of the editing track at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, the student films that are the biggest disasters are usually the ones that are run by directors who give only lip service to collaboration, and demand that everyone come to their vision, as they’ve originally conceived of it. The end result may not be a camel, but it certainly isn’t a horse.  It can best be described as a saw horse — a horse that bears only slight resemblance to a live animal. It has the form, but none of the life.

But collaboration isn’t the same as crowdediting, though I’m intrigued by the concepts of crowdediting.

Right now, the Advanced Editing class at USC is made up of 11 students who have each taken  the dailies of the feature film THE NINES (the really interesting and compelling, Ryan Reynolds/Hope Davis/Melissa McCarthy film directed by John August of whom I’ve spoken about a number of times) and are cutting it into an alternate version of that feature film.  I assigned a different section to each of the 11 back in January. All of them read the script and we talked about the plot, the characters, the subtext, the arc of the story — in short, all of the things that go into editing the film. We were visited by John and his editor, Doug Crise. Then the students started cutting together the film, one scene at a time.  We watched scenes in class and I gave notes, along with the class. At one point, about six weeks ago, we finally had the entire film assembled and watched it in class as a full-length first cut of a feature film and stepped back to critique it

Since then, we’ve re-edited a new version of the film every single week and are just about to lock picture this weekend (meaning that we’ll stop cutting and move onto sound, music and DVD creation). One of the students exclaimed this week that she really liked what had happened to the film in the last week. In fact, what she was really reacting to was the process that had led to the very successful version of the film that we saw this week. It wasn’t just one week of re-editing, but an entire series of decisions, made by the entire class.

While I’ve been funelling most of the comments, working as a benevolent overseer, the largest group of decisions have been coming from the group as a whole, as they learn week-after-week, more and more about the film. The point is that you can talk all you want before you start shooting a film about what it’s about, but you always learn from the footage that you edit every day.

The discussions in the class have been great — even though limited in time (we’ve carried them forward on a class blog). Frankly, there is no way that we could have arrived at the shaping of the cut as well (and as quickly) without the large amount of input from the class. It was necessary, of course, for there to be one person to make some of the thumbs up/down decisions, and to give the film some coherence over eleven different editors. But this was truly a film collaboratively edited by a crowd — a crowd of 11, perhaps, but a crowd nonetheless.

It’s a great lesson in collaboration — how to elevate the editing process and the final film. And it’s something that I wish every single director going through USC and every other film school could learn first hand.

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NAB

The largest get-together of television, film and media makers and distributors is the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas every April. This year NAB (as it is called) happens April 18-23 and I’ll be speaking at a number of venues, as well as going to the first NAB Tweetup.  If you’re going to be there please drop me a note (norman@normanhollyn.com) and let’s try and get together. For now, here’s what I think I’ll be doing while I’m there:

Monday, April 20, 2:00 PM — I’ll be signing copies of my new book, THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT, at the NAB 2009 Official Bookstore

Monday, April 20, 8:15 PM — I’ll be at the ProMax Digital Lounge, talking about Shaping Stories Through Editing.

Tuesday, April 21 9:35am — I’ll be at the Avid Technology booth (Booth # SU 902, South Hall), talking about “Where are the new editors coming from? And how will they learn how to get there?”

Wednesday, April 22, 9:30am — I’ll be at the Official NAB Podcast Digital Production Buzz booth, being interviewed by Larry Jordan

Wednesday, April 22, 11:00am — I’ll be at the Final Cut Pro Users Group Booth, talking about “15 Film School Tips in 20 Minutes”

Stop by.  At many of them I’ll be giving away a few copies of my new book!!

See you there.