If I Can Dream: The hazards of editing
One of the advantages to the “If I Can Dream” experiment is that it offers its audience the chance to really see the power of editing. As an editor and a viewer, I find it interesting to see the chopped up versions of things I watched live.
The “Lost in L.A.” clip is a perfect example – I watched this occur on the live stream, flipping back and forth between the cameras. Normally, editing can improve something like this, by taking out long gaps and repetition. However, in this case, watching it live was more amusing.
Many of the shots here – especially the “Why is the light off?” bit – lose a lot of the humor and reality of the moment by being inserted, out of context, into a spot in the continuity that it didn’t actually occur.
For a show striving to be different in so many ways from standard “reality” television, I think the editors here took too many liberties in re-ordering shots. The only cuts it really needed were for length. The content of the actual, real moment had me cracking up. Sadly, the edited version is a letdown, and comes off like a standard scene from a more generic, less interesting reality show.
I gave this whole experiment a chance in spite of my doubts, and much to my surprise, I found myself enjoying it. As such, I hope this kind of editing doesn’t herald what I should normally expect.
Leave the heavy editing for the weekly compilation episodes. Give us the rest as raw as possible.
Writer. Actor. Director. Chalk artist. YouTuber. Nerdfighter. Traveler. Pansexual. Genderfluid. Millennial. Socialist. Living a complex life beyond those words.
