#461 – Be Kind Rewind: How to Become Great in the Age of AI
It's August, and Cut/daily will be taking a break for the next month.
(I hope you're finding some time for R&R or at least the chance to do something different over the summer!)
But rather than leave you empty-handed, I'll be sharing four special issues from the Archive for you to enjoy — maybe for the first time – or for a second juice of the lemon.
The next quartet of Cut/daily issues carry the namesake of the delightful 2008 Michel Gondry masterpiece, Be Kind Rewind.
But fear not, regular service will resume in September.
Before we dive into #433 – How to become great in the age of AI - which is definitely the longest and most detailed essay I've written on Cut/daily, ever.
But also probably one of the best things I've ever written on Cut/daily(?)
I wanted to add one further thought about AI and the craft of editing.
How can you edit if you don't know the footage?
While AI tools keep promising to do away with the editorial drudgery of:
- organising
- labelling
- logging
- transcribing
all of our media for us, these tasks are often the gateway to how I become intimately familiar with the footage, the interview content, the tone, feel, pace, and the scope of a project.
It's while I'm going through it all, putting clips in bins, pulling selects, adding notes to interviews, etc., that I often have the first (and usually best) ideas on how to turn it into a final film.
So while having some of this done for me at speed feels good and useful (e.g. transcription or adding all the metadata/tagging to make later searches incredibly fast), the idea of handing over my footage, interviews and cutaways to a text-to-edit-AI-bot, feels like a shortcut to nowhere.
How can I know it found the most interesting cutaways?
How can I know it used the best interview segments?
How can I know it has captured the essence of the project?
I can't, because I didn't do the work.
As I say in this week's essay:
“The future belongs to those who read the original sources.”