How to Become a Movie Editor

Video Transcript

"All right folks, in this clip I'm going to talk to you about how to become a movie editor. All right, first the most obvious route, university, film school, go through a four year program, major in editing, afterwards you're obviously going to bet set up through your school with job interviews, contacts, references that you can you know take to move your movie editing career forward. It is not necessarily a guaranteed career path, I mean it's not like becoming a doctor where you go to seven years of med school and then in the end all you have to do is pass your exams and you become a doctor. You have to have the talent obviously to back it up as well, but in film school you're going to have the opportunity to build up a lot of work and visual material, a reel, to show people. So you know, if you applied yourself in school chances are you'll be well on your way to getting that movie editing job out of film school. However, in the world that we live in today there are literally thousands and thousands of opportunities for just your average everyday individual like myself, yourself, anybody else, to become a professional editor with literally just our own home computers. Most Macs and PCs today come with their own editing software, so anybody with a little free time after school and some video footage to cut and paste can learn to become an editor, and basically all this would require is you taking the time to really sit down and study the craft of editing, and you know basically just teach yourself how to become an editor, and whatever route you take, whether it's you know being self taught or going to an actual university or institution to learn the trade, at the end of the day what you're going to want to do is build up what's called a reel. A reel is basically a two to five minute visual presentation of your best, best work. What you are capable of as an editor. And it should consist in my mind of about three to six different individually cut together clips from different projects. Each one should be about thirty seconds to a minute long, and they should play back to back, and it should really just be highlights of the best material that you have edited together. Once you have this, you can then begin to submit it. At first I would submit it to local production companies, the ones that are a little bit smaller, you're not going to get a job at Warner Brothers in your first attempt, you know, working for a major studio production company. You're going to have to start a little bit smaller. But this is very much a moving up the rung of the ladder type of business where if you gain enough notoriety and work, at the smaller level, it only moves up from there. It all just depends on your talent. So if you want to become a movie editor, get a good reel together, submit it, get experience working, actual working experience as an editor in small independent productions, if you do that, you already are a movie editor and you'll be well on your way to becoming a very successful movie editor as well."