Final Cut, Lost Planet, Work Editorial, and PS 260 Editors Spill Emotional Editing Secrets

Jim Helton, Kenji Yamauchi, Ben Jordan, and JJ Lask are featured in Little Black Book’s “Emotional Editing: How Leading Editors Deal With Emotive Subject Matter.”

LBB’s Zoe Antonov asks leading editors from across the industry how they approach emotional edits and how they balance craft and storytelling.

Skillful editors can play our emotions like a violin – from tender romance, to tear-jerking tragedies and can’t-look-away PSAs. Masters of the behind-the-scenes process, they weave thread after thread until the storyline is complete, and better than ever.

There are some crucial moments that are not to be overlooked, and an editor’s trained eye is the only one that can catch it before it’s even happened. Perhaps a heartbeat of silence, a split second of shock, or a long pause that seems unworkable. It’s up to those who will push the project to its final form to chop up the silence, or let it linger.

Some are led by emotion, others by the script, and another contingent by the music, but no matter what the guiding light is, it remains true that the editor is the master puppeteer, without whom the soul of any project would be lost. So, how do they do it? How do they plant it where it was wholly unexpected? Read on to find out.

Head to Little Black Book for more!