Cheating in Video Production
Video production and editing has got to be one of the only fields in which cheating is not only accepted, it’s absolutely encouraged. Everything from flipped images to stunt butts, all designed to create the illusion of continuity. If you keep quiet about it, the audience will never know.
One of mine:
I have, on more than one occasion, created an entire scene out of thin air by simply combining long shots of characters with dialog from other scenes. I simply use the long shot where you can’t see the person’s lips move, and overlay the dialog from another scene as V.O. No one has ever caught on that it wasn’t planned that way.
But much like a magician who’s secretly dying to tell people how he did it, if you don’t let your colleagues know some of your best cheats, you won’t get the accolades you so richly deserve. So we’re all friends here, add a comment to tell us about one of your best cheats.
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I had some old hi8 footage of several individual performers that were shot under really low light conditions. Rather than trying to fix each of them, I simply strung them together, adjusted the threshold and solarization, and made a colorful 4 minute art film out of it. Too easy. Never throw anything out. You can use it for something, eventually.
July 7th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Similar to Zoobie’s “cheat” above, I had to edit another news shooter’s raw footage of a local festival for the 6:00 newscast after he went home sick. Apparently, he really WAS sick because when I threw the tape into rewind and watched the fast moving footage, something didn’t look right. He did a reverse record goof. He hit the “record” button when he meant to stop, and stopped the recording when he meant to record, so I saw long rambling shots of him wandering around the festival taken as he dollied his camera around, but every time he framed and focused on a subject to shoot, just as hit got the framing and focus set, he’d hit the red button and the shot moved on to the next rambling scene. He was a shooter that never took his camera off a dolly, so I worked that to my benefit. At one point, I came across about 2 minutes of uninterrupted music during one wandering scene, so using that, I slowed down some of the wandering shots which made them sort of fluid, then I sped up others, reversed some shots, and made a few quick back-to-back freeze frames for effect, all to the beat of the “wild sound” music. This was before NLE’s so it was all tape-to-tape editing. Very limiting, but I used every trick in the book to make a minute and a half “news show closer” piece. I got wonderful responses for my “artistic interpretation” of the festival, and the festival coordinators even bought the aircheck news story.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
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