Some people get a kick out of watching the unedited stuff. Some find it boring. I don’t know why, but I seem to fall into Camp Number 1. I want to see the unedited version. I want to see what happened, in real time. As in this case.
Years ago, I made an edited version of this party footage for my YouTube channel. My aim was to “punch it up,” cut out all the “dull” moments, make it appeal to an audience suffering from attention deficit syndrome. Here’s what that looked like.
Fun stuff, no doubt about it. And…when I happened upon the original raw content today, I couldn’t help but be drawn in to the immediacy of it. There was an energy to it that buoyed my spirits. The truth is I really did walk into the party without letting Vivianne know I was going to do that, camera rolling. And when people see a camera, they tend to respond in a heightened way. (I do need permission from participants, and in an environment like the one here, I could get them. A relatively controllable situation.)
The humor of these folks was so much fun. Did you catch the first word out of Vivienne’s mouth when she saw me coming? “RAID!!!” I missed that before. Thanks to video tape, it got captured.
I also like the idea of what John Davies, my Wild Chicago co-creator and TV teacher extraordinaire, called “showing the hardware.” On Wild Chicago, we chose to leave in the camera bobbles, the inadvertently twisted faces people made, the non-smoothness of it all. If the audio man got in the shot, so be it. How often do you get to see a guy carrying a “fish pole” — an elongated boom mic — his head adorned by headphones, his body indicating that he’d rather be somewhere else? With camera operators, a similar editing choice existed. Rather than actively avoiding mirrors or reflections of any kind, which is the case in more traditional production, we encouraged our camera guys to shoot into the mirror or reflective window. Why not?! I guess you could sum up our position this way: If it happened, why hide it? Show it!
Yes, traditional editing is all about hiding stuff. Leaving it out. Keeping you from seeing it. For many productions, this makes sense. I’m not knocking it. I’m simply owning that I’ve always been more of a let-it-all-hang-out kind of guy. Or at least that’s the impression I’ve created. (Aha! Another way of editing!) So, this morning, watching and being delighted by the raw tape and all it captured, I made the decision to show it to you. That right. Another editing decision.
See, it’s impossible not to edit, when you get right down to it. Even the “raw” footage reeks of decisions as to what to shoot, how to shoot it, when to turn off the record button, and more. In other footage I viewed today from the same tape, there was a section (not shown here) where I said some words to the camera. I took three or four takes before getting it right (according to my own specifications.)
Funny, painful story: English musician and TV presenter (Beat Route) Jools Holland came to Chicago to do a show about our city, and he wanted to meet me to get some ideas. On camera. So we set up a shot to cover our “first” meeting, somewhere along South Michigan Avenue. He asked me to be sure to say a couple of very specific things pertaining to his show. In other words, he wrote a line for me.
Take one — I flubbed up. Forgot a part of the line. Take two. Almost got it. Take three. Botched again. Take four. I froze up. “Let’s do it again. Sorry. Sorry.” Take five. Nope.
And it went on for maybe two or three more takes. Until, at last, I got it right! What a relief. Imagine my horror when I finally saw the finished show, months after it had aired: Jools had taken that series of flub-ups and turned them into a rapid fire onslaught of blithering Ben shots, illustrating my inability to deliver my line smoothly. Ten-to-fifteen seconds of me screwing up. That’s yet another way to edit: take what happened, show it, but without all the extraneous stuff in between. It can make anyone look terrible, inept.
My pride took a hit. Now I want to find that show and see it again. Maybe it wasn’t all that bad. I can only hope. But really…who cares? All’s fair in TV and war, right?
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