JAM

I have always struggled to be a videographer. I can never seem to grasp the intention of what I've been hired to do. "Shoot this event". It really doesn't compute with me. A friend was having a jam-session and wanted me to capture it. I really didn't know what to do, so I surrendered to being okay with shooting it as weird as I could, and then figuring it out in the edit. I remember hearing a story that Robert Rodriguez was hired to shoot his high school football games, but got fired because he would focus on the wrong things like zooming in to get a cool shot of the football instead of the play. I embraced that spirit, even though the person who asked me to shoot this was pretty clear about how they wanted to highlight themselves as a musician - who incidentally didn't end up making the final cut - but I wasn't getting paid, so I told myself to have fun and shoot some interesting stuff. When I got to the edit, I had about 4 hours of footage from the night and no idea what to do with it. I began a purely binary process of removing all footage that I deemed unusable: repositioning the camera, framing up the shot, or just unappealing looking. I clearly had shot with a certain amount of intention to display a static or zooming frame, so anything that was not perfectly that, I cut out. This began what shaped my editing technique still to this day. Which is a process of elimination and of purely logical moves before needing to deploy creative decision making. It is most similar to sculpting. Starting with a block of marble (all the footage) and chipping away until you have something to show. Eventually I got it down to about 7 minutes of footage and all the while I was thinking, 'okay once I whittle it down to these selects then the editing will begin'. But because of how I had shot it, and how strict I was in trimming it down, I found that, what would normally be considered BROLL, turned out to be my AROLL. I slapped the title on it and called it finished.