The First Time I Got Paid for It
My first gig as a professional video editor was a true trial by fire
It was one of those right place, right time coincidences. In the fall of 2004 I was working full-time at EPCOT at Walt Disney World (WDW) in Orlando, Florida.
For those not familiar, the park is laid out like a giant figure-eight, with the entrance/lower half (‘FutureWorld ‘) being composed of attractions focused on the challenges of the ‘World of Tomorrow,’ with names like ‘The Living Seas’ and ‘Universe of Energy’.
The upper-half of the figure-eight is referred to as World Showcase — and is a permanent World’s Fair-like exposition of eleven different countries featuring their respective cultures, live entertainment and, of course, delicious cuisine!
Innoventions
In the fall of 2004, I was working as a show presenter at Innoventions, the building which lies at the nexus of the aforementioned figure-eight and serves as a showcase of consumer-friendly new technologies.
As a corporate-sponsored venue, my job there consisted of escorting tours & delivering presentations on such diverse topics as the Segway two-wheeled motorized personal vehicle (very cutting-edge at the time), ‘The House of the Future’ (officially, The House of Innoventions), Forests for Our Future (a game show and interactive area highlighting sustainable forestry), and The Ultimate Home Theater, among many others.
I was very happy at WDW, and at over five years with the company I had become a tenured Cast Member with a pension as well as a cushy union bid line of four days ‘on’/three days ‘off’ (referred to as “4 x 10s” in Cast Member parlance.)
The schedule worked out perfectly. On my three free days in the middle of the week I was in school part-time. Enrolled in the acclaimed Film Technology program at Valencia Community College in northeast Orlando, it was my goal to work in Florida burgeoning film industry upon graduation.
Meanwhile, back at WDW, my working days consisted of working in a wide variety of venues and locations, so things never got boring or predictable.
A World of Creatives
Now here’s one of the great things about working at Disney that you don’t hear much about. A common denominator of many a Cast Member (at least in my particular theme park sphere) was that each was a creative of some sort.
I’m talking about the aptitudes, personalities, and career aspirations of many of the front-line Cast Members — we were all either hopeful theatre majors, up and coming graphic designers and/or animators or, as in the case of Yours Truly —budding film majors/makers . . .
. . . and all of us were trying to get through that little “Disney keyhole” to someday go pro and stay employed with the company in an area tied directly to our career interests.
A nice side benefit of working at Disney was, if you ever wanted to collaborate on any kind of creative endeavor, chances are that you would find a ready pool of talent somewhere within your regular Disney social circle.
So when a friend suddenly approached me with a highly-paid video editing gig, naturally I jumped at the chance . . .
The gig paid the hefty sum (for 2004) of $1,200 for an industrial film* I was to direct, shoot & edit. The project would later be screened at the fall 2004 International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions convention in Orlando (commonly referred to as IAAPA.)(No pressure, right?)
- An industrial video is an in-house short short film usually used for education and/or training purposes.
Mine would be titled “Museum vs. Attraction” and run approximately ten minutes in length when completed.
The short’s script was a humorous exploration of the sometimes tense creative dynamic between “preservation” (museums) and “entertainment” (theme parks), with the narrative tension made all the more real via a fictional core story of two twin brothers . . .
As adults, Bob and Pierre Bunson had each pursued careers in the seemingly opposed museum and theme park industries, and accordingly, have long since ceased speaking to each other.
The part of the two brothers was played by the same person, my fellow EPCOT Cast Member Tom Heckel, with the actor donning a beret and spirit-gum-attached mustache to portray the effete “museum” brother, Pierre, and an inordinately loud Hawaiian shirt to designate the brash “theme park” brother, Bob.
Bob’s native environment would be portrayed via an early Sunday morning visit to the Fun Spot America theme park in Kissimmee, Florida — where the deserted atmosphere at the back of one of the park’s roller coasters would serve as an appropriate backdrop for the boisterous Bob.
Just down the road via Kissimmee’s touristy main thoroughfare of Highway 192 would be found the backdrop for “museum” brother Pierre — Valencia Community College’s Osceola campus, located in east Kissimmee.
The Challenges of Small Unit Video Production
We scheduled the shoots for our common days off, and quickly set to work gathering the sequences required by the ten-page script.
And although the repetition of overhead planes, passing ice cream trucks, and morning leaf blowers made us sometimes think that the world was conspiring against us — we powered through to compensate for all the ambient noise by just filming another take (or two, or three . . . )
My Personal Post-Production Facility
In Orlando I lived in a brand-new rent-controlled efficiency apartment just north of Kissimmee — one where I had taken to sleeping on the futon in my front living room (my bedroom long since having been converted to an edit suite — what a friend once referred to as “Mulder’s Office”.)
My edit setup at the time consisted of a dual-processor silver Mac G-4 “Wind Tunnel” model loaded with Final Cut Pro, PhotoShop, and the usual assortment of audio tools such as GarageBand and Adobe Audition. Connected to this setup were my Mini-DV and Hi-8 video cameras (the world was just on the cusp of consumer digital at the time), as well as three S-VHS edit decks which were utilized for making rough working copies and viewing dubs.
But What We Really Need Is An English Accent
In “Museum vs. Attraction” the narrative timeline is carried along by the voice of an offscreen narrator.
I told Tom I knew someone who developed my photos at Publix who had a fantastic British accent (you know, the kind women swoon over . . . )
A part-time Civil War re-enactor, my friend Larry Jacob was from London, originally, and had what I referred to as a “pleasantly neutral” English accent. He would be a perfect fit if he agreed, and since he frequently worked on big-budget Civil War films as an extra, he was intrigued and quickly jumped on-board.
The Score
Since we were working primarily with museum and theme park stills and short first-person video segments, music played a key part in maintaining viewer interest.
Subsequently, the sound bed of “Museum vs. Attraction” was created on the aforementioned version of GarageBand with the program being so easy to use that I never even had to crack a manual to master it. (One of the driving appeals of owning a Apple computer at the time.) I also quickly found some very polyrhythmic loops on GarageBand which would perfectly serve our purposes.
The GarageBand loops were then supplemented by a few tracks taken from a free music online music library known as FreePlay. The service features an easy-to-use search engine and an extensive library of music keyed to any emotional tone or film/video genre, with new tracks being added constantly.
You Can Never Have Enough Sound Effects
In addition to catchy music, though, we needed one crucial sound effect — that distinctive sound of a boxing bell as so often heard at the beginning of a particular round.
I searched all over the internet, but as the web was still in its relative infancy at this point, there wasn’t much to be found.
It also wasn’t in my growing production library of sound effects, many of which were imported from CDs as well as old vinyl records. (Sound effects records were one of the first things to be junked when CDs came into play in the mid-1980s, so they could be had rather reasonably and worked fine as long as they were in good condition.)
I recalled hearing the very sound we needed in the old Twilight Zone television show from the early sixties, and checked to see if I had that same episode in my video library. Luckily, I did (albeit on a LaserDisc, but since it had uncompressed digital audio, it worked perfectly.)
I started ingesting all of the collected footage into my computer and executed what is referred to as a first assembly — all of the best/last takes of each clip laid down in script order with no trimming or adjustments.
Tom came over and gave me the go-ahead to go ahead and cut on my own and I eventually got the edit to a point at which it felt really good. (I think I even had that that little “shiver” that editor’s experience when things are really gelling.)
Tom was very happy with my progress, as well, and the music and sound effects seemed to complement especially well the footage we had shot one week earlier.
Multiple Deadlines and Late Nights
By this point in the production schedule, though, the IAAPA convention date was looming.
Worse yet, the client was calling for a series of last-minute tweaks and changes.
Tom soon moved in to my apartment.
We starting cutting in swing shifts, with Tom sleeping on the couch. During my longest editing session, I cut straight for around 14 hours, then tapped Tom on the shoulder, cup of coffee in hand, and said, “Your turn . . .”
This went on for several weeks, as we overnighted S-VHS work dubs to the client (A Different View in Franklin, TN) which were then replied to with a series of emailed requests and suggestions.
With teamwork and an ever-gurgling coffee maker, though, we made our deadline, and I received the completion balance of my $1200 payment.
The film subsequently debuted at the IAPPA convention in November of 2004, and I was now officially a professional video editor.
I subsequently went on to work in television news as a craft video editor for several years.
You can VIEW the completed film HERE on my private YouTube channel:
