Edit Sweets

This week has been a week of thinking about edits - the footage from Savage is on the table, as well as their “publicity shots”, which means I now have to wade through hundreds of photographs of my own face to find the ones that will make me look most... um... marketable?

I also have to look at my own performance of this show that means so much to me from 7 different camera angles, including, oddly enough, a fixed camera that does a low angle shot of me from behind, which is an angle I’ve never seen myself from before and turns out to be moderately flattering for my figure, though I’m not entirely sure what it contributes to my comedy.

(Facts: I know this angle exists and is useful for editing purposes provides a handy edit point if you need to cut away from anything, because it means both my face and the audience are out of shot or obscured by the lights, so anywhere that’s a mess, they’ll drop in a bottom-shot).

What it means in practice is that I now have an hour and ten minutes of footage of my own clothed backside if I want it. Feel sorry for the cameraman. If I were on that shoot, I’d have wanted to be on the Boom-camera, because then you get to whoosh around. Butt-cam seems like the short straw. Particularly as most of your work is wasted. I’d be tempted if these were the days of DVDs to do a butt-cut commentary reel, and if this were any other show, to push the buttcam footage to the front of the edit, as the default angle and see if we could do the whole show without ever showing my face. In fact, I could use *this very* butt cam footage and dub any of my shows over it! So much potential! (Butt cam has opened doors in my imagination, as confusing and inexplicable things often do - if you’ve ever wondered where I get my ideas it’s things like, but not limited to, this.)

As it is, I am now wrestling with the language of editing my own work, and it’s exciting and depressing and dysmorphic and cringey and very cool. Occasionally I catch myself smiling at my own jokes, and that’s totally lovely, as long as no-one else is observing me observing myself because then it immediately becomes humiliating.

Often in the past, I’ve just handed over editing control: a combination of trusting their skill, being interested in their collaborative contributions and not trusting my own patience or objectivity. Now I have to knuckle down and do this all the hard way. Wish me luck!

Xx

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