SCRIPT:
EE: Hello! I’m Owen Liu, and I’ll be your host for today’s podcast. Today, we’ll be joined by senior Jason He, who will dive into his passion for video editing.
EE: What initially inspired you to start making video edits?
JH: I think initially, probably YouTube music videos. I’ve seen music videos for different songs, and I really like the transitions and how edits really make the music come to life, especially when the scenes match up with the lyrics — and also just watching some short movie clips from YouTube, maybe just five to 10-minute short movies, gave me a really, real feeling, and that’s why I like to edit, and that’s what inspired me to start doing them.
EE: What sort of sounds or visual effects do you care about the most when editing?
JH: One big thing I really love about editing is the transitions. Whenever the beat drops, an 808 happens; that’s when I really want to make a transition, because that’s when I feel like the scene can be the most alive, especially when you match up a beat drop with a scene transition. That’s probably my favorite part, and that’s the part I pay the most attention to when I edit a video — those transitions.
EE: What’s the process for video editing like?
JH: For me, it always starts with a song. Whenever there’s a song that makes me feel a certain way — for example, if I hear a song that I haven’t heard in 10 years, and I feel some sense of nostalgia — then I’ll take that song, and I’ll use it as the base. And once I import that song into an editing app like CapCut, that’s when I start listening more closely to the lyrics and finding videos from my photo gallery that match the mood of the song. Then I work on a lot of the transitions, which is a big part of it.
EE: What types of things do you usually edit, and what content do you make?
JH: I’ve made a lot of different kinds of edits. Like, sometimes my friends will send me highlights from their track season. I’ll make a track edit for them. That’s going more into a tuff edit. But I’ve also made edits where it’s just I’m kind of bored at night, so I just assemble a couple of clips from my photo gallery. I pick a song I like at the moment and just start smashing the clips together and making good transitions.
EE: What are some of your favorite things to edit?
JH: It’s stuff that will make me feel a certain way. In general, it’s not something that would be posted, and people will be like, “Oh, that’s tuff”, but it’s more personal, where I look at it, and it’s like reliving my memories, especially through a good song that takes me back to the old days. It really makes me feel a certain way that’s really real.
EE: What would be an example of that?
JH: I used to live in Canada, and in Canada, it used to snow a lot, and I used to do a lot of weird things then, where even if it snowed on the basketball court, I would use a shovel and would shovel the snow off and play basketball. But it was just a really fun time. So I’ll just take a happy song that I listened to back when I was in Canada, so maybe a 2015 song, and I’ll just take it, and assemble a couple of clips of young me playing basketball with my dad, or maybe playing soccer with my friends, and smash that together and make an edit out of it.
EE: Do you feel like edits help you hold onto your memories?
JH: There are times when we feel nostalgia, and we want to relive the old days, especially for me. I’ve moved a lot, so a lot of the time it’s physically not possible to go back to your past or relive those memories with your friends. But it’s also not good to forget those things. We want to at least remember the good memories that we’ve had. And that’s what I use editing for: it’s what brings me back to happy memories that I know physically won’t be possible, but I can have the same joy looking at my past self or my past friends.
EE: How does it make you feel after you’ve completed a full edit?
JH: During the editing process, I’ll probably watch the video, maybe hundreds of times, because I’m making so many cuts — but like the final product, I personally just feel overjoyed. There’s a lot of emotions, especially when I’m making one of those edits where I’m taking a song that I really like and putting it with clips of my past self — I feel like my edits personally make me feel really overjoyed, but for someone else, they’ll just see it as a normal video. But it’s really more of a personal sense: you hear a song you haven’t heard in 10 years, it feels like you’re reliving something from the past, and it’s a great feeling.
EE: What are some of the challenges you face during editing, or through that entire process?
JH: Yeah, there are a lot of challenges. For one, I do have a video shortage. There’s only a limited number of videos of my past self, and even for my friends, there’s only a limited number of clips they want to include in an edit. And especially with a song, it’s like two to three minutes. I don’t want to use the same clip for more than 10 seconds. So I need a couple of dozen clips. And it’s usually hard to find that; it’s a really big limitation. But I guess another thing is that sometimes in a song, not every part is interesting. There might be a verse that’s like a minute, and it kind of gets repetitive or monotonous, and I kind of want to cut some part of that song off. And that’s also a challenge, because I don’t want people to kind of lose interest in the edit in a verse that’s like a minute. I really prioritize the chorus, or like the parts where everyone knows the catchy parts. So, making sure the sound of the song is always lively is also pretty challenging.
EE: Do you plan on editing other things in the future?
JH: Probably, but I think for me, the best use for editing is what I was talking about, like reliving memories and just stitching videos together of my past, and adding a song to it to make me just feel joy.
EE: Thank you so much for tuning in, and that’s it for now! A big thank you to Jason for sharing his experience with us today! Stay tuned for more stories coming soon!
Music used:
Podcast Smooth Jazz Instrumental Music by Denis-Pavlov-Music | Used with permission
