Part of an editor’s responsibility is to take the material and understand what the editor’s vision is, but also, bring to the table their own particular perspective.

“A really good editor understands that, what he or she feels about the material, how they respond to the material, is just as important as trying to do what the director wants,” says Sam Pollard.

Sometimes, it’s about re-editing somebody’s interview or taking an actor’s line and finding a different note, a different word, or something that they might have said in a different way, in a different take, and using that instead.

“Some people call it sleight of hand. To me, it’s part of the practice, it’s a part of what I call the nuts and bolts of editing,” says Pollard.

“I see myself in a very funny way. I see myself as not so much as a magician, but as a professional craftsperson, like a master carpenter where my job is to take all these pieces of wood, or sculptors, they have all these pieces of clay, and give it shape and form and art.”

Sometimes, editors have to try something different: that tool or that piece of clay may not work.

“I see myself as a craftsperson. I always have. And to me, that craftsperson, if he or she does their job properly, they make it rise to the level of art,” adds Pollard.

One thing that everyone needs to understand about filmmaking and film editing is that so many components are necessary to make a good film.

It’s not just shaping performance in a fiction film. In a dcoumetnary, it’s also understanding how to figure out the best pieces of an interview and make different segments come together.

It’s also understanding how to create the soundscape of the film and how to create the titles.

What’s the opening Title Sequence and what should look like? Or should there be no titles at the beginning?

How should it unfold?

Should it be at the beginning?

Should it be at the end?

“There’s some films I’ve worked on, like the title sequence in Mo’ Better Blues, a wonderful company, Balsmeyer & Everett, they created this wonderful title sequence that they gave me all these beautiful elements of Denzel and Joie and Cynda Williams, that I was able to shape to make it
work.”

“They did, also, a wonderful sequence for Jungle Fever that’s really very nice, using the landscape of Brooklyn to create the titles,” notes Pollard.

Titling is a very important part of this shaping of the filmmaking process and telling the story.

Pollard mentions a film about Martin Luther King and the FBI that he recently finished. When working on it, a company in California created a raw-ish title sequence with Martin Luther King using both imagery that we shot on a soundstage, imagery of archival footage of Dr. King with stills and other elements to create a very textured opening.

If you’ve got the budget and the money, you can do extraordinary title sequences. Sometimes, if you don’t have the budget and money, you can still do extraordinary title sequences.

Everything about filmmaking is going the extra mile, using your imagination and your sense of technique, and finding good collaborators to make the story come alive.

KIMBERLY ALEAH: As a content creator, data is one of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal. Ultimately, when you make something, you want to make sure that you’re getting it out in front of as many different eyes as possible. What I do when making a piece of content from a creative standpoint, is always start with the fact that we need a hook. We need something that’s going to add something different to the larger cultural conversation. This is because when you’re on the internet, there’s unfortunately a lot of other stuff to compete with.

Once I have that hook that we’ve used from pre production, production, editing, all the way through the development process, we have to figure out where we’re going to put it. This is when data comes into play, because data allows you to profile your audiences. That can look like a number of things.

For one, you want to find out when people are consuming content. Are people consuming content on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon? Are people consuming content on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 PM?

Another thing you want to ask yourself is – what is my target audience? Am I going for school age children? In which case, maybe I want to publish stuff before the school day starts at 8:00 or after the school day is over at 3:00? Is my audience younger professionals? In that case I might want to wait until they get off from work. Is my audience more based in New York than LA? What does that day look like for them?

Just asking all the different questions about who an audience is, what type of content they want to consume, when they want to consume it, and then lastly, on what device, is important to effectively reaching them.

Are they consuming content on a smartphone? Are they consuming the content on a desktop computer?

Across different age demographics, you’ll find that for the 13 to 18 window, a lot of that is vertical video. When you’re a creator, it might incline you to consider shaping your piece so that it plays a little bit more aesthetically for a phone.

It’s just thinking about all the different questions of who the audience is, what time they consume their content, where they are consuming their content, and lastly the ideal duration. Duration is one of the most powerful aspects of data because it lets you know that not only is an audience engaging with content, but they’re sticking with it. They’re watching for more than three to five minutes. They’re watching the full 12 to 15 minutes.

This is where you find your strongest audiences, because you’ve made something that they find interesting. If you’re already starting with something on your phone, and you’re doing it with a group of diverse individuals, and throwing it into this larger ecosystem, it’s not only going to inspire other people to share your work, but it’s also going to inspire you to create new things that you didn’t think of originally.

And so for me, I love smartphones, which are very on brand for millennials. It really is one of those things that you have as a tool in your pocket to tell stories instantaneously. When we talk about these larger social movements that are happening, there’s a reason that a lot of the stimulus, a lot of the incidents that start those movements were recorded on phones.

They’re so much more accessible. They just let everyone have an immediate voice that doesn’t have to be mitigated by a traditional development room, a traditional studio process. A lot of the bureaucracy gets skipped, and a lot of the content making gets put first.

What does the future of cinema hold? I have often been beaten up over the last 10 years. Therefore, I’ll be very shy to say what I ought to say. You know my guess. I can tell you what I hope it will be, because we’re witnessing a television take over, streaming services take over the theater business unless you’re a big tent-pole movie.
We need to think about what we want for the theater industry in the future. The streaming television industry is booming because they produce great and digestible content, a user-friendly format, great funding, and plenty of resources. These factors negatively impact the film and television industry, which makes it difficult for traditional theaters to sustain their industry in the future.
I believe in the theater. I believe in human nature working as a society. However, we must employ the mentality of a ritualistic temple to maintain human nature in society. I refer to it as a temple because many of us don’t attend a physical church or a temple anymore.
We need to go to the movie theater. I’m not hallucinating. We, as a group, go to a place, preferably a dark house. We’ll speak freely, a heart-to-heart communication so that we enter an abstract world, forgetting reality. But you get down to the truth. I think that’s something. When you walk out, life is different. You are inspired.
It’s more than entertainment—it’s spiritual as well. I don’t see how you can get the same effect sitting at home watching television, going to the bathroom, and resume watching. It’s different. I think of the ritualistic event presented in a black box, where you’re sitting as a group, as a congregation. I think from day one in the cave; the cavemen spoke of how to hunt lions over a campfire. People become absorbed into storytelling and togetherness.
I still believe in the theater. However, I think it needs an upgrade. It’s hard to compete with television. If you want people to schlep into a big place, but have safety issues, then at some point it will cease to be. I don’t know how much theater can survive. Everybody’s going through a difficult time.
My thoughts are immersive, so we can experience with a group of people. You’re inside a movie instead of watching it from outside. The movie has its own language, 2D film, whatever, but it’s something bigger than life, with fine quality. Like when I was young, and I’d see a Hollywood make a movie.
No matter what they do, we go see it. You have a choice in this. Those days are probably harder to get back. It’ll be taken away by television, and unfortunately, sometimes iPhones. But in theater, you must make something good, very special. And some of them will be immersive.

“When talking about film history, you have to begin to think about what cinema is at its core. Cinema or motion pictures is an image that moves,” Alrick Brown explains.”
“As soon as man could see, he started interpreting stories, looking at the stars, differentiating shapes of objects, naming constellations. As soon as a kid could, they probably were drawing images with sticks and dirt.”
Early cave dwellers used image paintings in caves to communicate. Later, the Egyptians used hieroglyphics to tell their stories and preserve histories.
Those symbols and images were a prelude to film’s beginnings.
Over a century ago, the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison’s company, experimented and found ways to make images move, creating motion pictures.
Gomez-Rejon’s film tells how film history and Edison, others are joined by history
“I made a film recently called The Current War: The Director’s Cut. I wanted to show how filmmaking and electricity were invented at the same time,” comments Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.
It started in the 1870s with beautiful studies in film motion by Eadweard Muybridge. They were done, I think, with twelve cameras. That evolved into William Dixon and Edison working together on the kinetograph and kinetoscope.
Next came, the Black Maria, Edison’s film production, considered to be the first film company. Remember, at this time in history film was still a novelty. But then we see it progress. The Lumiere brothers (Auguste and Louis Lumière) have the first kind of commercial film screening.
Georges Méliès starts doing narrative storytelling, but it’s still very theatrical with a fixed camera.
“Everything evolves again with Edwin S. Porter’s, The Great Train Robbery. This film, with its illusion of uninterrupted time caused by innovative (for the time) camera cuts and pans, is like the beginning of modern film language, or film vocabulary,” states Gomez-Rejon.
It’s fascinating to see their work and how it’s been interpreted by film industry types throughout the ages. Certainly, these films spoke to me.
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“Fundamentals” means understanding the basics. For filmmakers, that means understanding where film has come from. Film is only a little more than 100 years old, but it includes literature, photography, drama, theater, dance, and music, all rolled into one art form. It’s a very powerful tool.

If you want to be successful in this field, it’s important to know what’s come before. When you stand on the shoulders of those giants, you yourself can become a giant in the field. Knowing the history of film will teach you what works and what doesn’t work, and that will make you a better filmmaker.

For instance, if you want to pitch a story, you might reference a film. Sometimes, these references can help you communicate an idea to somebody else.

Sometimes it’s hard because you don’t want to sound derivative, because hopefully you’re moving the medium by doing some original work or interpreting. It depends on what kind of filmmaker you are.

Still, you can connect to previous films to develop your style. Someone who expresses themselves with a camera should learn from previous films, just like an author would want to know literature to see how other voices interpreted certain feelings. When you make these connections, you can find a kindred spirit in a ghost of the past.

It’s sad that people in this industry don’t love history as much as they should, because we are artists. There’s always a struggle between art and commerce, but it is important to know everyone that came before.

There’s always something beautiful to learn from film history. Consider the originators of the montage, colors in film, Avant Garde film, documentaries, and music. They’re all telling a story. By looking back, you can move forward and stay current. You’ll hear new voices, learn from them, and be humbled by them.

“Being a student of film since I was 12 or 13-years-old, I just loved films,” says Sam Pollard. “Learning film history was very inspirational and informative in the shaping of my career. I would say anyone who wants to understand the evolution of film history, should first look at two groundbreaking cinema filmmakers.”
One early director’s contribution to filmmaking
“First, is D.W. Griffith. Though politically I have issues with some of his films, specifically Birth of a Nation, Griffith revolutionized narrative storytelling.”
Griffith, with his camera operator, Billy Bitzer, figured out that film was about more than having master shots. It was also about medium shots and using closeups to enhance a scene’s dramatic actions. It was about the interaction between characters.
He also created cross-cutting, parallel editing. These techniques let filmgoers see story, characters and action occurring in one place, before cutting to a storyline happening in another time and place—parallel action.
Eisenstein changed film editing forever
Another seminal filmmaker in the evolution of film is the work of Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein.
“Eisenstein’s film, Battleship Potemkin, specifically its Odessa Steps scene, was groundbreaking. It had revolutionary editing: from a political perspective, a social perspective, and from a cinematic editorial perspective,” Pollard remarks.
“This film is a must watch for anybody who wants to understand film editing and filmmaking—to watch the Odessa Steps scene repeatedly. I still am inspired and informed by that sequence. “
Another filmmaker who was very revolutionary for being very experimental but also engaging was Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.
Dziga Vertov was Russian, like Eisenstein. If you have the opportunity to watch Man with a Movie Camera, you’ll see he takes you sort of behind the scenes, so you see him, the filmmaker, making a film.
This was revolutionary not only back in the 1920s, but still today in 2020.
Very important filmmakers: Eisenstein, Vertov, Griffith.
Great American filmmakers after the silent era
“When we got to the world of sound, where audio became important, some filmmakers really stood out. But first, before talking about these films, one of the other silent filmmakers who stands out, and whose films I just rewatched, is Charlie Chaplin,” says Pollard.
“Chaplin’s sense of cinema, how he created emotion and character. It wasn’t with a lot of frills but just so dramatic and great. If you go back and watch Modern Times and City Lights, the guy was a revolutionary filmmaker.
But again, when you got to the 1930s, after the silent era was over, you had filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and George Stevens. These American filmmakers.
Influential filmmakers from around the world
“Later, though by the time I got into the film industry, I understood that it wasn’t only American filmmakers who were important but there were European filmmakers, too,” says Pollard.
Filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, and Jean Cocteau.
“There were also African filmmakers, like Ousmane Sembène from Senegal. Yasujirō Ozu and Akira Kurosawa from Japan. Satyajit Ray from India.”
All of these international filmmakers were very revolutionary, with a real understanding of how to create personal, emotional cinema.
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