A few months into my postproduction hiatus and I have realized something that has change in me in the last few years. I'm really comfortable with being wrong.
So, as I stated in my previous post that I was going to pay the bills the old fashion film ways; union film lighting. As I rubbed shoulder with my union brothers and catch up on old times, as we move big gear on big movies, I realize that there is this weird pressure to hit "perfection" on the first attempt at something. Having not done Big Budget shooting for about 8 years and some of the lightning equipment has evolved; so, I was a little rusty. No major mistakes that you get a nickname over or anything, but little things, little mistakes were made by myself. My bad.
I was surprised how people were quick to try to locate the offender but I was even quicker with my hand up to take responsibility for my faux pas and confortable doing it. Sometimes I would get friendly ribbing from people that now that I was just getting back into the swing of things. But sometimes, I would get disapproving glares, comments that were intended to induce some form of shame or even the mini speech about how it is done from younger members that didn't know me.
At the beginning I thought is was comical, then I was annoyed at why are we wasting time breaking down the mistake, then I thought about how film works; it is all about mistakes and adjustments. And most of the time things that were made a "big" deal out of turned out to be something that changed in the end like most things in the film world. I started thinking about why am I so un-phased about making a mistake.
Editing is making mistakes many times on an hourly basis. And over the years, I have noticed that if I don't just start making mistakes or editing, I develop editors block. So, I make the mistake and know that I'll come back to fix it later. I have gotten very comfortable with mistakes. For example, I think I nailed the essence of the cut and/or the director or producer points out key plot point that's not in the screener. My bad, I cut it out when I was trying to make the edit air tight for pacing. Or even better, I am at a show and tell with ad agency and don't like any of the 12 versions of the spot, technically my mistake. My Bad. I got a millions of these... Feel free to comment with your mistake stories. To quote Deniro in Cape Fear, "... Reminds you your human"
Conclusion. If you can't deal with making mistakes, editing is not for you.