Project Category: Premium Content Streaming, Educational
About: MasterClass offers members online courses taught by highly accomplished professionals in their field. This class on mental strength is taught by fitness professional Robin Arzon, and focuses on how to accomplish your goals using mental fortitude.
Position: Story Producer - Cut Down
This class had already released when it was handed to me for a cut down. TRT for the course was about 6 hours, and my job was to get it down to a maximum TRT of 30 minutes. I watched down the entire class, created a cutdown outline proposal for MasterClass, and cut story timelines for my editor to work from. To cover the new cuts, I sourced archival and stock footage and worked closely with the editor to ensure the new, shorter version of the class was just as rich as the original 6-hour version.
Production Secret: Machete on my mind
Whenever I have to do some big cuts for time, I take out my machete - metaphorically speaking. It's easy to get attached to your story and to the work, but taking a step back and being able to edit for time while maintaining quality is an important skill. As much as it can hurt to lob off the heartwarming story, or the epic adventure moment, or the personality laugh - having discretion and sticking to the intention of the piece to maintain the story is a skill I've honed over the last 8 years of story editing.
