We recently finished up a video for American University that was made to thank all of their 8,000 donors who contributed to their annual giving campaign. On this project, I worked as the editor to compile the two and a half hours of interviews that Kevin had shot into the final product.
To start, I just went through all of the interviews while writing notes on it all. From there, I highlighted the good points and sound bites of each interview and cut those all into a separate timeline. This created essentially a compilation of solid footage that I could easily look through and pull from. With this all sorted out, I started to get a sense of what kind of video the footage might lead to. I continued to follow the path that the footage was leading me down until I came to what I felt was a fairly solid rough cut.
After incorporating a bit of Kevin's feedback, Kevin sent it off to American as the first draft. When we received their response, there were many things they wanted to change. The direction that the footage had lead differed slightly from what American wanted the video to be. As we talked and worked with them further, we were able to refine the draft into a very strong final cut of the video that fully animated their vision.
During this project, I think the main thing that we were able to learn was how to better communicate with the client so we can increase our efficiency in coming to their vision in the future.
