As a film festival trailer editor, it’s my 4th year working with the Edinburgh Int’l Film Festival. Editing the film festival trailer is a job I love – working with over 100 films and adding audio elements to make a super short highlights film.
The Edinburgh Film Festival 2016 will take place between the 15th-26th of June, now in its landmark 70th edition the festival trailer brief was to include as many of the films as possible. It was cut in 4 days and I love the creativity of this type of fast paced job, where you’re collecting up all these films and create new meaning and association out of the clips. Hopefully it has a nice balance of fun and creativity and will encourage people to check out the festivals selection for 2016.
The project was edited on Final Cut Pro X and I was able to include 112 films (I think probably the most ever included in the EIFF trailer) and I confirmed everything to fit a 2.35 aspect ratio. I worked as the Digital content producer for the festival in 2011 and I know from experience what a hard, but incredibly rewarding job creating the trailer can be. 5 years ago things were alot harder with most of the films being a nasty mix of frame rates, aspect ratios, formats and codecs so made it a big editing challenge.
For the 2016 version the quality of the films and editing software allowed to to push passed technical issues much quicker, to get to the funs stuff – choosing and position clips including Trainspotting and childhood favourite E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. It’s a mountain of content to sift through and to cut films of these caliber down to a two or three shots is tricky. But my hope was to not choose really obviously shots and link them well where possible. Hopefully people like my toilet humour 😉