Given that this blog is called 'Cutting it as a Christian', I've written remarkably little about faith and editing. In fact, I've written remarkably little at all lately. Time to rectify this. By talking about puppets. Obviously.
Don't close the tab just yet, there's method in my madness. It's by cutting a video that centred around puppets that I was reminded of one of the many reasons I love the editing process. I love how you can start from trawling through what can be hours worth of footage, pick out golden moments, put them in order, refine them, find patterns, restructure again and again, and finally end up with something complete, layered and sometimes quite different to what you started with. It's an often frustrating, but ultimately very satisfying process. It's often in the edit that subtleties and meanings can really start to surface, and really it's a great privilege to be the one to unearth them. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's widely accepted among Christians that God is in art, and to me editing in itself is an art-form through which God can speak.
All this from a puppet video you say? Maybe I should take a step back for a moment...
Over Christmas I was involved in creating our annual puppet music video for church. Yes, you did indeed read that correctly. Every year we put on a puppet show for two of the local schools' annual carol services, which are held at our church, and over the last few years we've created a video to accompany this.
This time, we opted for an upbeat version of 'Do You Hear What I Hear?' In the video, there's an instrumental section that involves two of the puppets (a sheep and a green shepherd, because all the best shepherds are green) heading off to tell a king about this miracle baby the angel's told them about. I love cutting to instrumentals, there are no words to dictate the picture so they allow a certain creative freedom that you don't get in many other genres. Sometimes they're not thought about before or during filming, which makes them a complete and utter nightmare because you have nothing to fill them, but in this case, we had discussed them beforehand and the on-set team had done a fantastic job, managing to capture lots of wonderful and creative ideas for me to work with.
I've deviated somewhat (remind me never to play 'Just A Minute'). Back to editing. Suddenly I'm cutting this video together (more specifically this instrumental), and really starting to see a deeper meaning in the footage I'd been given to work with. It may have just been meant as something to be quite amusing and get the characters from A to B, but it actually started to form something more than that. It started to feel like the shepherd was so enthralled by this news, and saw it as so important that he was rushing, pelting it across the land (or...Eastleigh) to tell the 'mighty king' of his incredible news. First he rushes past the station, beckoning the sheep on, as if he's saying 'come on - we've got BIG NEWS to spread'!
Then, as they pass the church, the shepherd hurries on past the camera - and turns round - where's the sheep? He runs out of frame, and returns seconds later - carrying said sheep. It's a lovely comic moment that the team created on set, but to me it has some beautiful subtext. In his desperation to proclaim his news, he still doesn't leave anyone behind. He has a destination to get to - but when he sees the sheep struggling, he decides to take on the extra weight rather than dash on alone. This in my mind is so reflective of what this child would one day go on to teach. It's so human and chaotic but love and determination wins out. Maybe I'm going a bit deep, but that's what I saw, and that's how I cut it. Don't get me wrong, I also thought it was a pretty good way to get a laugh, but just because something's funny it doesn't mean it can't have depth.
We finally go to a shot of the sheep sitting on top of a statue whilst the shepherd hurriedly looks round trying to find it. I could start comparing it to the parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep, but then I'd be unnecessarily mixing messages and being very dishonest by saying I thought it was anything other than a nice way to fill the following few seconds before the next verse started.
All that from what ends up being mere a few seconds of the video. It's basically two puppets dashing around to music, but at the same time it there's a meaning there for those who want to see it. It doesn't scream 'OI KIDS - CHRISTMAS IS ABOUT JESUS' (which is a good job really, there's probably rules against that and we'd never be asked to do another video next year.), It's fun, and it captures the impact of the birth of Jesus without ever forcing our views upon anyone.
It goes back to when Jesus was asked why He so often spoke in parables. I've already touched on that though, so I'll only recover that ground when I run out of ideas for this blog.
To claim that all this solely comes from the edit would be doing a terrible disservice to all those who work in scripting, pre-production and production, but these processes tend to get the recognition they deserve, whereas I think editing carries a much greater weight than it's often given credit for. I was heavily involved in the preparation and scripting of this video (yes, puppet music videos need scripts), and I can say that an awful lot of the above didn't occur to me until I started to cut and look back on the footage.
At the beginning of this post I used the phrase 'centred around puppets', but actually, I don't think it was. It was a video centred around the Christmas story. It's about the spreading of the news that a great saviour has come to us in the form of the child. It was just allowed to be a fun puppet show too. The edit played a huge part in both.
There we have it. I can finally justify the blog's title. Which is nice, as deep down I'm quite proud of that wordplay.
