Film Editing with Young People

I think the first film I edited was in 1998. I’d used a (huge) Sony camcorder to film a watersports weekend that I’d taken some girls to from the youth club (it involved camping in a field near Holme Pierrepont much to the despair of the accompanying female worker I’d dragged along!). At that time I borrowed some sort of console and the footage was edited on my TV at home onto a video cassette! (The console in the pic is just an example I don’t think it was that fancy!).

When I started work on the Young Movers programme we decided that a film of each course would be a good evaluation method and that by getting young people to talk about what they intended to do following the training this would help with a bit of reflective learning. The Chief Executive was so keen on the idea he went straight out and bought a new Panasonic digital camcorder which he plonked on by desk the next day (in fact I think they still use it!). Back then I was a Windows user - we had no idea how to edit digital video, so a trip to Dixons (now Currys) and the helpful salesperson recommended ‘Dazzle Moviestar’.

Well what a bloody nightmare that was! Once I’d figured out how to use the software, how to transfer footage & so on, it used to take a whole day recording in, another day or two editing and then a day burning the finished film to CD-Rom. Of course PC’s weren’t too powerful then (at least not the ones we were provided with!) so my computer was a write-off for the whole of this time with all of its meager processing power dedicated to creating & burning the film. Any attempt to do anything else on the PC would usually mean a crash and having to start all over again.

At this time providing groups with films after courses was very innovative and well received so it seemed worth carrying on, and to be fair Moviestar did us proud for a couple of years. A change in Chief Executive led to me swapping from Windows to a Mac - the new boss was an Apple enthusiast and I was lucky enough to get a nice iMac complete with imovie. By this time we were working with a lot more groups & running a lot more courses so we also invested in some new (and thankfully much smaller) digital camcorders. imovie was brilliant and accompanied by iDVD I could now get films out as DVD’s instead of on CD-Roms - very slick!

Of course the more you do something the more adventurous you become and soon even imovie was seeming a bit limited and a little laborious so we moved on to Final Cut Express. Still using the trusty digital camcorders - in fact we had a funny moment when we first went to run courses in Tanzania. We created a bit of a stir out there and East African TV came to film us for 2 days - when the film crew got out it turned out they had the same camcorders as us! (unlike the huge things BBC had brought along earlier that year).

Nowadays I still like Final Cut but most recently Kirsty has been using some online film editing suites - Jumpcut and Jaycut. Both are really impressive - film editing online!! I prefer Jaycut as it allows for completed films to be downloaded. The camcorders we use are unbelievably small - we use Sanyo Xacti’s - 2 of which can actually film underwater (and I’ll get some footage up when I find time from our snorkelling in Lake Malawi). The real advantage of the Xacti’s is they record to MP4 format - this means the footage can be uploaded straight onto sites like youtube - or of course Jaycut & Jumpcut etc. - theres no ‘tape’ - recording is straight to a memory card, so a film that used to take the best part of a whole week can now be done in a couple of hours.

I’ve also noticed that on my phone I can actually edit films on the phone - its very basic just allowing clips to be cut/trimmed and remixed - but what was once a time consuming, expensive and skilled job can now be done on your phone while you’re on the bus!!

Related posts

• Youth Work Guide to Blogging (8)
• Supporting Young People in Meetings & Decision Making - Kirsty Taylor, YoMo @ PIP 07 (0)
• Street Games, Nottingham 6/02/08 (0)
• Scarman Trust - Effective Engagement with Young People @ PIP 07 (0)
• Morlo - Anglesey, North Wales (1)