Get Creative: now. Guide to filmmaking in lockdown, Part 2

Get Creative: now. Technology inspires the art, the art challenges technology

There is an incredible film currently on Disney+ called “The Pixar Story” Which is this incredible documentary which documents the early years of the animation company Pixar and its founder John Lasseter. I’d highly recommend it but in the film came back to this single quote:

“Technology inspires the art, the art challenges technology”
— John Lasseter
With every film they made they asked the question “whats the story we want to tell” and then “How do we use technology to tell that story”

The team at Pixar knew that the technology couldn’t do people well yet but could make a toy look great! and now we have “Toy Story.”
This in broad strokes is what filmmaking is all about. It’s the combination of technology and Creativity.

Hi! I’m Luke, I’m the editor and tech-head here at OSBD. I have edited some of OSBD videos over the last couple years. I have also edited two feature films for OSBD’s sister company Blue Hippo Media.

In this blog post, I’ll be running through a few tips on how you can edit the film your making, and where to find some resources to help your work grow!
Software:
All films are put together in editing software. Some of the most popular including AVID, Final Cut Pro & Premiere Pro. This can easily seem like a big barrier to cross, as all of these editing platforms can cost a lot of money.

Lots of editing platforms like AVID & Premiere Pro however offer monthly payments rather than one big payment. AVID is around £50 a month while Premiere Pro is around £60 but for that price you also get the rest of the adobes library of softwares like Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator all industry standard products.

But most computers come with an editing software inbuilt:

Windows Movie Maker / Movie Editor

Very good for basic things but takes some forcing to use well.

Apple iMovie

Very usable and good at some basics plus some fancy graphics.

Both work well for a first attempt but are both known as single track editing which means you can only have 1 audio and visual channel at once. This limits what you can achieve if you want to try more advanced edits. However you can still achieve some great results with both. Lots of starting off Influencers use us theses softwares when starting out not needing to switch to bigger platforms.

If you want to try somethings more advanced, you have three options to take your editing to the next level:

Adobe Premiere Rush

Free for first 3 edits then £8.99 a month

DaVinci Resolve

Its free!… No really.

LumaFusion

£28.99 on the Apple app store

Click on the icons to learn more about each program!

All three Editing softwares are incredible cheap compared to the 3 professional softwares previously which would cost you alot more money. Davinci Resolve is free and is a fully working editing software in its own right that currently lots of editors are switching over to.

At the end of the day which program you pick does not matter as much as the story you are telling and there are plenty of tutorials online which you can use to grow your skills.
Techniques:
The next question you need to ask yourself once you have your software is what are you trying to convey to the audience.

Over the last 100 years of filmmaking we have developed a language of film that takes certain ways of filming and editing and associating different emotions to each.

Instead of writing them all out below i have provided a few links to videos that explain them better.