This week our guest lecturer was Ian Cudmore from Chutney Films.
Our lecture was late on a Thursday evening for a change but no one seemed to mind as it was an interesting look behind the scenes at how an editor works and what projects he has been involved with. He uses the term “editor” loosely to describe himself as he actually is involved in a variety of different things in media production.
Ian’s lecture was like a brief overview of how he became the self-employed editor that he is today. He originally started out in the National College of Art and Design doing an industrial design degree (something i originally had down on my CAO form) and then went on to do a masters degree in Trinity College where he studied digital media. His view on our course was that it gave us a great advantage in the digital media industry by having a wide skill set coming out of it.
Ian got in contact with James Yorkston (a music artist) through MySpace after sending him a short video that he made in his spare time. James was so impressed with his video he asked Ian to make an Electronic Press Kit or EPK for him. An EPK is a short video documentary about the artist that normally goes out to the press when an album is released. To film this he flew to Scotland and spent several days filming James recording music along with a few short interviews. Through making this EPK Ian made connections which led him to make videos for the music artist Lisa Hannigan. Although not getting paid much for the videos Ian said he benefitted greatly from doing this by gaining more connections in the industry. The videos he made also helped Lisa get noticed on YouTube and helped get her an interview on an a big American chat show (i think it was the Carson Daly show).
This is one of Lisa’s videos that was edited by Ian.
Recently Ian has been working on projects for RTE. These include shows like “The School” and web only shows for “We Own The Streets”. He gave us an idea of what its like to be an editor for these programs and some helpful advice to always organize your video files as some shows can have hundreds of hours recorded for just a few minutes of used footage. Somewhere around 1/20th of the footage recorded is ever used in the end.
Ian’s lecture was interesting and felt very personal. It opened my eyes to just how much work goes in to making films, even short films and what to expect working as a free-lance editor.
