Fresh and energized from the Monday excursion to Cologne, the film program quickly got down to business for their first week of editing class. This week, with the addition of a film screening Tuesday night and two days of casting that ran after hours at the new AIB, proved to be an intense test of academic endurance. On Tuesday morning, the program was introduced to Andreas Frowein, who will be instructing editing classes for the entirety of the semester. Andreas has taught film at various universities across Eu-rope and the world and is especially knowledgeable with editing software and the tech-nical side of post production.
Shortly after Professor Frowein’s introduction, he began teaching the basics of Avid Media Composer, the primary editing software being instructed to the film group from Los Angeles. Avid, along with Final Cut 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro, is a top-of-the-line “industry standard” software that many professional filmmakers prefer. He taught the foundational techniques of editing with Avid to enhance our filmmaking tool belt and help us maintain a well rounded background as we move forward in our film education. To get a hands-on experience, each student received some video files transferred to cut together on their own. It was difficult to get used to the flow of a software program like Avid, but once we got into it, things started moving more smoothly. This little scene we had to edit, would be the class’s first project that would be due at the end of the week.
After spending the first day in the editing lab, the class had more lecture-style instruction the second day, learning more of the theory and conceptual purpose of editing for film. In the second portion of day two, and in order to do a hands-on experiment students shot a scene with two cameras and three actors from the class. Jocelyn Cooper, Nick Logsdon and John Capone acted and improvised a scene. Following the three actors improvising for the class, Andreas decided it would be worth shooting for real and not just experimenting with physical demonstration. Kendall Milton took the helm as director of the scene along with Sam Zook and Victoria McCurrie as camera operators. The content of the scene progressed in a light-hearted and comedic manner with Logsdon and Capone developing an interesting chemistry. But perhaps the most important thing, we learned difficult shooting and editing techniques.
Overall, it was an intense week of work both in the editing lab and in overall discussion and planning for the nearing shoot dates of the narrative projects. The students put many hours in the editing labs not only to familiarize themselves with Avid but to also put together a smooth and polished cut of their scenes.
It’s shaping up to be an exciting semester with Professor Frowein!
By John Capone
