In this four-week course, international editors from around the world work with YFS-trained editing mentors to train up to 12 students who have completed the YFS beginners’ course in documentary filmmaking in the aesthetics and practicalities of film editing.

In this very hands-on course, participants receive an introduction to the School’s digital editing suites and are given the opportunity to edit their own short film exercises using material filmed prior to the course.

Take a look at how this course works in the film About the 2018 Art of Editing: An Introduction below.

Practical skills learned on the course include:

• Communicating with the director and project planning
• Setting up a Premiere Pro project
• Importing and organising footage and the importance of backing-up material
• Preparing rushes for screening
• Selecting and editing rushes into a first assembly
• Editing the rough cut, including how and why to make paper cuts and use transcripts and index card/post-it-note scene summaries
• Creating titles and subtitles
• Exporting Quicktime movies

Students benefit from one-to-one screenings and discussions of their assemblies, rough cuts and fine cuts as well as group discussions of their works in progress and frequent screenings and analyses of a wide variety of international documentaries.

Topics covered on the course include:

• What is documentary and why do we make documentary films?
• What is editing? What do editors actually do?
• Documentary ethics: being sensitive and respectful to people who allow documentary cameras into their lives – plus ways to address complicated and shifting realities.
• How to embark on editing a project, paying attention to the rushes to find the ‘best bits’.
• How to start creating sequences, scenes, acts and narrative arcs.
• The idea and use of visual metaphors.
• How sound design and music can support and heighten emotion, drama and context.
• Teamwork and the importance of creating a supportive group of collaborators.