“Paul, I think I did something wrong, can you come see?”
Poor Paul came out of his editing suite again. But he always come out with a smile, ready to help. It was my first time editing with Avid and I felt like, barely two hours into it, I had already broken the entire system.
For a few weeks I felt a mix of dread and excitement at the idea to start editing. I already worked on Final Cut Pro at McGill but, Avid seemed very different. After shooting Occupy DC, I decided to take the lead and start editing the piece.
It took me a while to really understand how to properly lay out my footage on the timeline. There was always something wrong: the audio was off or the cut wasn’t right. And I would shyly call Paul to my rescue. The cool thing with editing is even though it’s a bit complicated and frustrating in the beginning, it’s easy to quickly get into. I started wanting to know more about color correction, effects and animation.
I also recorded my voiceovers. It was very funny because, as a French speaker, some words were hard for me to pronounce.
When the piece was finally done, I waited for Rosemary and Catherine to see it. I watched them while the piece was playing, waiting for their feedback. Were they going to like it? I was proud of my work but maybe it wasn’t good enough. I was really glad to hear they liked it and they gave me some constructive feedback to make it look more professional.
The most rewarding part was when Catherine posted it on the Internet!
In the end, I learned the best thing you can do is just give it a try! I thought I was going to be bad at it but along the way, I realized I loved editing. And even if I did something stupid, I had my technical and psychological support from Paul, whose ready to fix my mistakes, and Brianna, who cheers “ Oh it looks sooo good! I LOVE it!”.
– Clothilde Goujard
