About Episode
“How can I create a demo reel without any work, and how can I get work without a demo reel?” is a question almost as timeless as the chicken/egg argument. Until recently this was an incredibly difficult problem to solve, but with the advent of so much new technology as well as the ability to download videos from online sites, this process has become much easier.
In this episode I have an in-depth conversation with EditStock* founder Misha Tenenbaum about how his company provides the raw material necessary for editors to learn their craft and perfect it for many different genres, and more importantly how to craft the perfect demo reel in the 21st century (funny enough, it doesn’t involve creating a “reel” at all).
*Use the coupon code FIT for 15% OFF your first order
Episode Highlights
- Using raw dailies (EditStock.com) to learn how to cut scenes
- How to build a demo reel
- Tools to build an online website portfolio
- Overcoming the paradox of needing a reel to get an editing job
- How to highlight your editing skill rather than listing your projects
- Making a strong impression with your portfolio site
- Managing criticism and feedback to become a better editor
- Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours
- Seeking mentorship that will strengthen your work
- Choosing jobs that promote growth
Useful Links
About Guest
Misha is the founder of EditStock.com, a site that provides professional quality film footage for editors to practice with.
Transcript
Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Misha Tenenbaum, and Misha is an editor. He was an assistant editor, and he’s also now the founder and creator of Edit Stock. And this is a service that I’m super excited about sharing with you. If you’re not already familiar with it, now, as one caveat and disclaimer, Edit Stock is a former sponsor of the show, but is not currently a sponsor, but I’m such a big fan of the work that you are doing, Misha, and your product, that I wanted to bring you on the show to share it with my audience. So, it is a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you. I love Fitness in Post, and I use a stand-up desk myself, and believe in a lot of these values. Well, I’m very, very glad to hear that. So, what I want to do today is help my audience understand a little bit more about your background, kind of your, your lineage, kind of the origin story of where you were as an assistant editor, as an editor, back to an assistant editor, and then the genesis of edit stock, and then I just want to do a deep dive into all the different services that edit stock provides and how we can help people find their way through this industry, so let’s just go ahead and kind of start with, you know, your your origin story that led to edit stock.
Misha Tenenbaum: So I graduated undergrad with a broadcast journalism degree, and I applied to CNN in Atlanta, and they told me it’s great that you know Final Cut Pro, but you don’t know Avid, and you need to know that to join our team. So I went to there was two places that I looked at realistically to go to home in Boston or all the way across the country in California, and so I chose Video Symphony out here in Burbank, and after school my first jobs were as an editor working on some reality TV shows for a company called WA TV, in between those jobs, I went back to Video Symphony, and would teach classes, and sometimes I would bring them in dailies, or I would bring them in side projects from things I was working on, or like freelance projects, or indie movies, and I would always tell the class, you can’t take this out of the room, you can’t use this on your demo reel, at the end of the class, it’s a few hours long, but then I’m going to delete all your work, and you know, as you know, no editor can really complete something in a couple of hours, so we were, or at least not during, while they’re also learning something else, so I went back and forth like this, and then I stopped teaching for a while, because my editing career really kicked off when I got a job as an assistant editor on American Horror Story. It was the first season of the show. I watched it on a laptop with the lights on on the Paramount lot, and it scared the crap out of me. And also, I knew right away I was like, this is a hit, this is an amazing show, so I did that first season, and that was one of the toughest but most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. And I left after that show with one of the editors, and was his assistant on a number of projects after that, including the Steve Jobs movie with Ashton Kutcher, and you know, a number of other shows, one called the after that played on Amazon streaming, which was directed by Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, and you know, I just did a number of other projects, but I always had in the back of my mind this idea for a company, so one time, you know, throughout these years I was at the final Pro user group meeting in Los Angeles, and they always introduce me there when I do the Stump the Guru section as Misha, who knows Final Cut, but also knows Avid, so you can ask him Avid questions. And marketing rep from for Media Composer was in the crowd and asked me if I wanted to show AMA, which is Media Composer Five, introduced that at NAB, but we didn’t know what to show, so I said, “Why don’t you help pay for a short film, and I’ll show the workflow? And that’s what they did. And afterwards, you know, I have just zero ambition to be a director or writer or producer or anything, so I didn’t know what to do with the material after I showed it at an AB. This time, when I brought it into the classroom to give my students, I said, “Do anything you want with this, you know, put it on your reel, take it home, practice for fun. And I knew then I said, “Boy, this is this is it. This really solves a problem. And I knew that edit stock needed to happen, but it was actually four years later, before I actually started the idea, and it came around because another company, for just a brief moment, for just a week or so, started doing a similar idea, and then they closed down. As soon as I got that newsletter email from them, I just knew, you know, if I don’t do this, you know, the shame of not doing it is going to be worse than the failure of doing it and failing. I mean, you know, so I just finally decided to do it. It’s been the best decision I’ve, one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I am as proud, maybe more proud of that of edit stock than I am. On of any TV show that I’ve ever worked on, I just really feel like I’m contributing to the industry in my own unique way, and I love getting emails and messages from people who tell me that they use our footage, that it’s helped them get a job, or it’s helped them learn, or it’s, you know, helped their passion for editing.
Zack Arnold: Well, you and I are certainly cut from the same cloth, because when you talked about that moment of seeing this newsletter from somebody else, I know the pit that you got in your stomach, where you’re like, oh, oh my god, like somebody else is trying to do the same thing, and you’re thinking this is the shot, and I have to go after this, even if it’s stupid, even if it’s crazy, even if it breaks me, like I’m assuming all of this sounds familiar.
Misha Tenenbaum: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Zack Arnold: I had the exact same experience with fitness and post, so I can relate to that, and that’s part of the reason I wanted you on the show, is that you have that entrepreneurial mindset, and it’s not just, oh, I see an opportunity to make money, you’re the type that says I see the opportunity to change the way that things are done in this industry for the better, for the sake of the livelihood of the people that work in this industry.
Misha Tenenbaum: That’s right. And if that’s not at the core of the reason that you make your company, your podcast, your product, whatever it is, then you won’t make money on it anyway. I mean, it really is driven by in-depth knowledge and passion for the thing that you’re pitching, promoting, you know,
Zack Arnold: Yes. So now that we understand the basic origin story, where the idea came from, and now we understand that this is something that you’re pursuing as an actual business and career, and it’s not just, oh yeah, well, I have this, you know, little thing over here. Let’s kind of break down what edit stock actually is, kind of talk to, like, if somebody comes up and they’re like, I’ve heard about Edit Stock, I have no idea what you do. What’s the five minute elevator pitch?
Misha Tenenbaum: Edit Stock sells unedited dailies from short films, commercials, and music videos, and even documentaries for people to practice editing with. So, unlike traditional stock footage, which is kind of random, Edit Stock footage is specifically for people who want to learn how to edit,
Zack Arnold: So then how does the process work? Like, what if I decide that I want to use this for whatever reason? What do I actually
Misha Tenenbaum: Do? Okay, so let’s start with, where do I get the films? All of the films are created by real professional indie filmmakers. None of these projects were shot specifically for edit stock. These are all perfect examples of what you would get in the real world. So I make a deal with the filmmaker where they get a commission of each sale, and they’re very proud to have other people cut their projects. Then the student or the customer gets the unedited footage from that short, they also get the completed cut of the short, and in a lot of instances we even provide music, that’s something we’ve been recording with a composer or purchasing from their composers, so that the person who’s editing this gets the full experience of editing a project,
Zack Arnold: So it seems like the way that this works, I’m not going on to Shutterstock or Getty Images or whatever and getting 50 shots of random people. I’m actually going to learn how to tell a story from scratch, which to me is kind of the same as the way things work, like if I were just breaking into the industry and I just come out of college, the process for me would either have been well, I have to be an assistant somewhere, and then I have to find time on the nights and weekends to kind of recut the stuff that’s already being done at that place, like that’s how I worked my way up, was I was at a trailer company, and I would just take the movies and I would cut my own mini trailers, mini TV spots, show it to people, and they’d be like, oh, that’s good, but I couldn’t use any of it, the other option would be I need to find a director somewhere, and I need to cut his short. I need to work with somebody and fulfill their vision, and then maybe, maybe when I’m done, this is work that I can use to put on a demo reel. So to me, this is solving a giant catch 22 that we’ve had on our industry for as long as I’ve been around. So talk a little bit about this catch 22 with trying to find work for a demo reel, but needing a demo reel to find work.
Misha Tenenbaum: Absolutely, so let’s just start. Let’s start with that basic problem, but then I also want to circle back to this isn’t the only instance that edit stock is important. I also have a lot of reality TV show editors who want to get into scripted, or comedy editors who want to get into drama, or drama editors who want to get into action. You don’t have to be new to use edit stock. You can use it to explore something that otherwise would be an enormous risk in your career, like, for example, a producer might not want to hire you right away, and you might be even scared to edit a music video for the first time, or an action scene for the first time, but you just download one project from Edit Stock, build that confidence, get that practice, get that feedback, and you can use it a lot of points in your life, but okay, the chicken egg problem, there’s primarily two places that editors get their projects to put on their. Real, you know, in order to get a job in the first place, either they go the assistant route, which gives you access to unedited footage, like all the trailers that you’re talking about, you couldn’t have cut that if you didn’t have access to dailies, so you’re very lucky and also worked very hard to give yourself the opportunity to get the job, but you know, not everybody gets that, and I like that. With Edit Stock, it’s not required that you get a job to give you access to the dailies, plus you only had access to the dailies to the shows you worked on, so you could really only cut your trailers from the movies that you were given, which, you know, is important to do too. The other place that people get their demo reel footage, at least at first, and it’s so funny how well this worked out for you, but also how rare it works out for most people. You go basically onto Craigslist and you edit a project for free, or you edit a project really cheap, and I’m not opposed to that process. I think that that can be good and useful, as long as I mostly tell people not to work for free. Make sure you’re not taken advantage of. Make sure that the project is of good quality, that it gets you where you want to be. But realistically, most first projects that people edit are shot poorly or have massive problems with audio or have some sort of just huge crippling problem with them, and the project might drag on for a year or two before you finally get out of it what you want, and one of the things I really love about edit stock projects is you’re going to get terrific quality projects just to begin with, so for example, one of our projects, Anesthesia, it aired at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. You know, the chances that you’re going to find a film of that quality on Craigslist is near impossible. I know that that worked out for you, Zack, in a totally crazy way, that the style of the show you got worked perfectly for Burn Notice.
Zack Arnold: Well, yeah, I mean, I’m clearly I’m the poster child for rags to riches, from Craigslist and Facebook to working in a list TV, but I’m the first to tell people this story is most likely never going to happen to anybody, so you need to, you need to count on other things happening as well. So, yes, I agree with you completely,
Misha Tenenbaum: And, and at some point, yes, and at some point, when you leave edit stock, you’re going to need to do those kind of projects, probably, anyway. You know, I mean, there’s really no avoiding that. In order for someone to really trust you, you need to have worked with them before, and if you have no history, you know, you need some proof you’re going to do justice to their, you know, passion project that they’ve spent a lot of money on, but anyway, I think that edit stock really is a huge step in confidence building, not just in yourself, but in your potential employer.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. We’re, and I’m glad you brought that up, because I don’t want people to get the impression, and you clearly don’t want people to get the impression that, oh, well, if you have raw footage, you can cut a bunch of scenes, put it on your reel, and you’re good to go. You just bypass that whole step that people have gone through for the last 75 years. You’re still gonna have to do the crummy projects, the low-budget projects, because you also have to build a network of contacts, which is something I’ve talked about ad nauseum on other shows, but I believe that people have to know you exist, and you have to do really good work, and you can’t have one without the other. So, your edit stock scenes can be amazing if people don’t know that you exist. None of it matters. So, you’re still going to go through that process. So, I’m glad that you brought that up.
Misha Tenenbaum: Yeah, just one more thing I want to bring up, because I get this comment once in a while, but it annoys me every time. There’s no, there’s never a time this doesn’t annoy me. People ask me, but is it, you know, ethical? Is it acceptable to use an edit stock project on your demo reel at all? Because, you know, you weren’t the official editor of the project. And the answer to that question is absolutely, it’s ethical. The directors of these projects sign a contract that specifically says editors can use this on their demo reel. I mean, they know full well, and you know, as an editor, it’s not like when you’re a writer and you start with a blank sheet, you need something, and you know that kind of mentality of you didn’t really edit this because you like didn’t shoot it or something, or you weren’t hired for the project, totally skips over all of the work that it takes to do the editing, which is the thing you’re getting hired for, you know. We don’t work in a vacuum, you need some material to start with. And I see no difference morally between starting with an edit stock project and starting with clips you pull off a YouTube, and you know, re-editing a movie trailer or re-editing a movie into a trailer, I see absolutely no difference.
Zack Arnold: I see a tremendous difference, and that’s what you’re doing with edit stock, is legal.
Misha Tenenbaum: Oh yeah, if
Zack Arnold: You’re pulling stuff off of YouTube, you’re taking people’s work where they didn’t authorize you to re-edit it and use it on a demo reel, so it’s actually a much better option. And you can’t find raw footage on YouTube, so there’s to me, there’s a tremendous difference where there’s. A lot of benefit to edit stock over YouTube, but that was what I used to recommend to people. They would email me, and they’d say, “Hey, I want to break into the trailer world, but I don’t really know where to start, and I say, “Just start ripping trailers off of YouTube, look at them, and then just take the movie itself, get the DVD, and rip it into a QuickTime file and cut your own version of a trailer. And I know several people that were assistants that did that and got editing jobs because they showed a spec trailer to somebody like, wow, you can actually cut, this is awesome, and I think the other parallel that you made that was fantastic is the idea of writing, because you’re right, if you want to sell that you can be a good writer, all you need is a piece of paper, you don’t even need a computer, I mean, clearly you should probably submit a manuscript and final draft, but technically you just need a yellow legal pad and a pencil to prove that you can write. As an editor, you need material, but if you’re going out with spec scripts of Breaking Bad or some other popular TV show, you’re using somebody else’s intellectual property, repurposing the ideas and selling your ability to write characters and tell a story, and the industry has done that ethically for decades, exactly. So, I think that that’s a really, really, really good point to bring up. And I’m also glad you brought up the idea that this isn’t just for young up-and-comers that need to break in, that this can be used by seasoned professionals that are trying to make the transition, because everybody in this business is pigeonholed almost immediately, you get your first break and it’s like, oh, you’re the action guy that does burn notice, and you do action scenes where there are a bunch of boxes of pictures on the screen, yes, that’s the only skill you have, we want to hire you to do that, and I think that it’s a tremendous service to have material where you can branch out, so that having been said, I want to go back to this idea of the catch 22 Now, with the idea that it’s not just about somebody young breaking in, it’s about anybody that requires the demo reel to exhibit their editorial skills to either break into or transition into a different area of the industry. So, what is this catch 22 The catch 22 of the demo reel is you need a job to get the footage for your demo reel, and you need your demo reel to get a job to get the footage for your demo reel. It’s this vicious cycle, and it can take years to build it from a small snowflake into a snowball, where you know you need to work a year on a project to get very, you know, elementary shot footage that starts your reel to get you the intermediate job that takes a year to get you
Misha Tenenbaum: The footage to get your great footage. It’s such a long, slow, and yeah, it really is a catch 22
Zack Arnold: And I think that’s why your service is so tremendously helpful, and the only thing that I wish you, the service that you don’t have, that I wish you did, and if you could really work on this, I would appreciate it, is you need a time machine, so I can have this 15 years ago, because I was banging my head against the wall, I’m like, I know I can cut, I know that I’m good at this, but all I have is this crap that I worked on in college, so I said, all right, I’m gonna have to put this stuff together that I did in college in the best way possible to exhibit my skills and hope that somebody has the mentality of thinking, well, I can see you didn’t have much to work with, but you did great work with what you had, which is the ideal mindset of, oh, that’s considering what you had, that’s great work. The problem is, most of the people hiring you, they’re not thinking that way, they’re looking at a piece of paper, they’re looking at your credits, they’ve never even watched your work, and you’re being judged in 30 seconds based on a one page resume, which is why it took me years and years to break into TV, even though you know, according to the internet, it was an overnight success, and I went from Craigslist to burn notice, but those, that was like a five to seven year process of absolute torture, because of this catch 22 Yeah, I just want to make sure people know that there is now another solution that is ethical, that is legal, like that’s one of the reasons I wanted to bring Edit Stock to the show, and why I pursued you to be a sponsor, because I really think this is an important service. So now I want to go on just a tiny bit of a tangent. Now that we understand what Edit Stock can do to help you build a demo reel, I think that you are an excellent person to talk to about solving this problem that everybody has, which is what is a demo reel nowadays, and what am I supposed to put on it, and how am I supposed to structure it, because when I was breaking in, I had a three minute VHS tape, and for the younger listeners, I’ll put a link in the show notes to what a VHS tape is, and I’m now only half kidding. When I said that a few years ago, I was kidding. Now I’m only half kidding, because it’s getting to the point where that is almost a real thing. But anyway,
Misha Tenenbaum: I’m going to answer that question in one second. I just want to add one more thing about the chicken egg problem.
Zack Arnold: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Go ahead.
Misha Tenenbaum: This will be the last thing, and I’ll move on. But it makes an enormous difference, you know. Before edit stock, it makes an enormous difference if you’re an editor coming out of USC or an editor who never went to college, because when you go to USC, you have ad. Access to terrific students who are making, you know, already professional quality short films, and if you didn’t go to college, or if you went to a school that maybe doesn’t have access to that kind of gear or those kind of resources, you’re at such an enormous disadvantage that you know maybe the kids at USC start with a snowball, and maybe that, maybe the kids who just don’t have access to that start with snowflakes, you know, and it makes that road longer, and it’s not fair, because it’s not necessarily that they’re less talented or less willing to work hard, it’s just the situation that they’re in.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that’s an excellent point, and having taught several semesters at USC, I was astounded at the resources that are provided to students that were in the filmmaking program. I was so jealous, and I went to the University of Michigan, so I went to a great film program, one of the top in the country. But then I came to USC, and I’m like, “Oh my god, you guys have the keys to the castle. Like, this is amazing. The resources you have, and you’re so right that even if you didn’t go to college, you can cut footage from a film that’s screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, like, to me, that’s just astounding. Like, the fact that you’ve solved this gap is just, is so cool to me. Thank you. But I’m gonna stop gushing about how much I love this service, and now we really want to kind of get into the nitty gritty of what is a demo reel in 2016 because this has evolved so rapidly over the last five to 10 years, so like, how do I actually put together a demo reel and sell myself nowadays?
Misha Tenenbaum: In my opinion, a demo reel nowadays is actually a demo portfolio website. It is a series of whole videos that are separately laid out with clear titles over each section, so for example, you might write sample of Misha’s action editing, and then show an action scene, or sample of Misha’s drama editing and show dialog scene with some drama in it. You’re going to be able to cut to the chase a lot quicker. Your employer, potential employer, is going to be able to just click on exactly the thing that they’re interested in seeing. Plus, a website also gives you the opportunity to have your resume already laid out in a PDF that’s either downloadable or viewable, right there. You can have links to the movies, you can have links to your IMDB site. Everything is the web, and it’s so much easier to promote yourself with a demo website than it is to do a demo YouTube page. Think about you, do a demo YouTube page, you might have a commercial at the beginning or end of your demo reel, you know that’s going to turn someone off immediately.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not agree with that more. I think this is becoming more and more common knowledge, where five years ago the question was still, how do I put together the best montage at the beginning of my reel, and this always makes my skin crawl, because I’m thinking, if you’re a director of photography, if you’re a director, if you’re a production designer, in two or three minutes in a montage, you can very clearly give a person the sense of what you bring to a project, your perspective, your taste, if you’re an editor and you put together a two to three minute montage, editing random clips from your projects. The only thing that you’ve proved is you can cut a two to three minute reel with random clips. That’s it. Exactly. It’s very different for editors than it is for other professions.
Misha Tenenbaum: That’s exactly right. What you’re showing them is that you can cut a music montage. It’s like you see the shots go by and maybe people’s mouths are moving or whatever. Essentially, when you make a demo reel that is a montage, essentially what you’re saying is look at the production value of the projects I worked on. You’re essentially showing them someone trusted me with a big project because look at how nice the production is laid
Misha Tenenbaum: Out.
Misha Tenenbaum: You’re not showing them look at how good an editor
Misha Tenenbaum: I am.
Zack Arnold: I love that. That is the perfect way to put it. You’re basically showing, look, other people trusted me to work on something at this budget level, which is the exact wrong idea to give. However, it feeds into the mentality of the producer or the director. It’s the same as looking at the one sheet resume and looking at the credits. They’re like, oh yeah, well, that’s low budget. Yeah, I don’t recognize that actor. Yeah, okay. So, this person hasn’t worked on much, which has nothing to do with your skill set, and that was what I always focused on, was trying to sell my skill set. Here’s what I can do with nothing. Imagine what I can do if you give me something. And the web has completely changed the way that you can exhibit that. To give an example of how it’s changed so much when I was a trailer editor, and this was probably 10 years ago now. One of the tasks that I was given was helping to find new freelance editors, so I was given three grocery bags full of VHS tapes and DVDs, and my boss said, “I want you to take the week, and I want you to watch the reels, and I want you to use your best judgment to pick out the five or 10 people that I should interview to help us build up our staff, and after going to the bathroom and crying for half an hour, and then banging my head against the wall and thinking I have to watch demo reels for a week straight, I did it, and I learned so much about the ways that you can portray yourself in a positive way and in a negative way, and the other thing I learned. Is that you’ve got 30 to 60 seconds to grab somebody, because if I have three bags of reels, I’m not gonna watch every single reel, especially if they’re like 15 to 20 minutes long, which some of them were at that time.
Misha Tenenbaum: Yeah, it’s impossible, that’s it. It’s over. Give it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and because things have changed so much with the web, a lot of people think, well, I can just throw everything at the wall on this web page and I’m fine, but you need to have the mentality that you would have 15 years ago, sending a VHS tape, which is I have 30 to 60 seconds to get their attention. What’s the first sentence they should read on the site? What’s the first video that says the most about my talent and abilities? Then, once you’ve got them and they say, “Huh, all right, this guy’s a prospect, then you start to gently navigate them through your website to tell them more about who you are and the perspective that you bring, but don’t think because it’s a website everybody’s going to click every link because nobody’s going to look at everything on your website unless you convince them it’s worth their time,
Misha Tenenbaum: Right? They’re going to look at the one thing that interests them, and because of that, to add to what you’re saying, if they see a video that, before they click on it, it shows a 10 minute duration, you may not even get 30 seconds, because they’ll probably just skip it. You know, I don’t watch people’s, but if I see 10 minutes, I’m not going to click on it, you know. If you’re showing an entire short film, I can kind of understand if you have five or six minutes, but really, when I say show a scene or a couple scenes of action, I mean show them the two minute section from the film, and also I like to say, like, we don’t do okay work, so I don’t want to see okay work. Don’t show something on your demo reel because it’s okay and you want to round it out. I’d rather you show one thing that’s amazing, or two things that’s amazing, than two things that are amazing and one thing that’s okay. Don’t show them anything, okay? It’s got to be great.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not agree with that more. And that’s a hard thing to do when you’re starting out. It’s much easier once you have a larger portfolio of work, where, like, I was creating demo reels, probably every six months or so, for over 10 years, and finally, about two years ago, once I got Empire, I was like, all right, I don’t have to do demo reels anymore, I don’t really need a demo website, because I finally crossed that threshold of, you know, what, somebody can look at a one-page resume, and I finally convinced them that I had the skills to do this at a high level, but it took me over a decade to do that, where even when I’d done four years of Burn Notice and another ABC series, people still needed to see a reel. Yeah, so I went through these constant iterations over and over, and I got to the point where I just kept dropping things because I didn’t want to show everything I’d done. It’s not about look at all the stuff I’ve edited, it’s here are the two or three things I really want you to see, and if you like it, now you can go down the rabbit hole and say, all right, let me just see the comedy scenes that he’s done, let me just see the action scenes. Yeah, so I think in for me it’s easy because I’m in scripted television and features, so I have a very limited amount of things that I need to sell, but if you have a larger skill set, you do trailers, you do commercials, you do corporate videos, you do music videos. Then you don’t need to break it down by genre, you break it down by type. The idea is that everybody’s going to pigeonhole you, but you want to direct them to the correct pigeonhole that you want to be in at the current time. I’m not saying you have to be pigeonholed for your career, but if you’re going to somebody and you’re saying, well, I just want to cut anything, you’re never going to get an interview, and they’re not going to listen, but if you’re up for a music video job where they primarily do R and B music videos, and you have a project like that, that’s the thing that you need to direct them towards immediately, like, oh yeah, this guy can do this, even if it’s not the pigeonhole you want to be in, it’s the pigeon hole you want to be in for that two weeks for that job, right?
Misha Tenenbaum: I would say get as exact as you can, so if you want to get hired for a RNB music video, and you show them a country music video, but you think to yourself, well, it’s a music video, here’s something that I did that’s like, that’s okay, that can work, but if you can show them an R and B music video and they want to hire you for an RNB music video, that’s what you show them, and I think that again, it’s like sometimes it’s worth going to edit stock just to, just to find the exact thing that you want, you know. I recognize you can’t, you don’t always know what you want until you hear about the job, and when you hear about the job, you need to apply in the next 10 minutes, but if you have the time, get as close to the bullseye as you can.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s kind of where I wanted to segue back to, and why I wanted to talk about that is, you now have the ability, to a certain extent, I mean, you don’t have access to all the dailies for every project ever made, yet maybe you will in 20 years, but at least right now I might be saying, well, I have this really great female music star in the indie music space, and I need a music video fast, and then they go on your site, and you’re like, oh, he doesn’t have that. Maybe you do. Actually, I could be wrong, but I tried to pick something pretty obscure. So, do you have raw footage for a punk rock music video with a female artist?
Misha Tenenbaum: No.
Zack Arnold: Okay, so good. It was a good example. So, that’s not always going to happen, but at least the option is out there, where you don’t have to start illegally stringing things from YouTube. Tube just to prove that you have the skills to tell a story through editing, so that I think is one of the main points that I wanted to bring up, is that you can kind of find things that are going to get you closer to building the work that you need to impress somebody. Yeah, so the next area I wanted to go to, to kind of dovetail off this idea of demo reels a little bit, now that we’ve talked about, here’s kind of the bare bones of how you want to sell yourself, and this will be little tangential to edit stock itself, but I know that this is something you’re familiar with now. What are some of the tools that I actually am going to need if I don’t know anything about building a portfolio website, because five years ago this was a huge undertaking, but now pretty much anybody can do this in an afternoon. It’s really not hard, it’s drag and drop. So I have some ideas, but I wanted to get some of your ideas, because frankly, the Edit Stock website itself is gorgeous. So you obviously know something about web design as well as editing.
Misha Tenenbaum: Thank you. That is not the first iteration of Edit Stocks website. I put a lot of time and care into it, and we’re always evolving. I think it’s important to think of even your own portfolio site as an always evolving thing. Pretty obvious tool to start with is something like Squarespace, where you can just choose from a templated portfolio website. That is a terrific place to start, and you know you don’t have to veer too far from the template to make something great and personal and unique to you. I definitely would use Vimeo over YouTube for your portfolio stuff. If you get a pro account for Vimeo, you can even choose to turn off certain text or even the play buttons that are over the screen. If you’re really into it, you can even create your own custom play buttons and just copy just the stream from Vimeo, the video stream, which is kind of cool. Put it into your own player. One website I like to check a lot, and his website changes. Zachary, do you know Rob Ash from Conan O’Brien show?
Zack Arnold: Yes, I don’t know him personally. I’m certainly aware of him. Yes,
Misha Tenenbaum: He was one of my teachers at Video Symphony, and then he, you know, he and I are friends. Actually, there was like a very brief moment where I got to edit two episodes of the Conan O’Brien show, which was super fun. Rob changes his website every month, I mean entirely, just totally recreates it. He has a terrific artistic sense, for he’s actually a graphics artist on Conan Two, where he designs like the opening titles, which is something he, you know, he came into this from an editor’s standpoint, but then really wanted to and grew into and earned the graphics role too. So his website’s always changing, it’s a terrific idea for it gives you lots of ideas for how to be new and hip and modern.
Zack Arnold: I love that. And to go back to the tools for a second, that was exactly where I was going to start for new people that really have no basic knowledge of how to build a website or a portfolio page. That was where I was three or four years ago when I realized, you know what, I have to stop mailing out DVDs, and I need to figure out a way to do this on the web. I started with Wix, which is the competition to Squarespace. I’m actually not a huge fan of Wix. If you want to be able to kind of go down the design rabbit hole and do a lot, Squarespace is a little bit more user-friendly, but Wix is good too. But you nailed it on the head when you said Vimeo Pro, do not use YouTube, because you’re most likely you’re going to have issues where there could be advertising, the players messier, the embedding is messier. Vimeo Pro is exactly how I used to do it, where I just built the portfolio page in Wix, and as much as it embarrasses me, I’m actually going to provide a link in the show notes for my Wix demo reel site. I haven’t touched it in like two years, but I want you to see the most current iteration of my demo reel website that I was using up until two years ago. So, I, it’s cringe, I cringe just thinking about it, but I think it’s going to be helpful for people to see that. But it was just Wix, and it was streaming videos through short clips that I was hosting on Vimeo Pro. So, I think that that’s an excellent place to start, and then, if you really want to go a little bit deeper into web design, have more power, have more options, the next step would be WordPress, and WordPress has kind of gotten to the point where you really don’t need to know much of anything about the internet either, and you can kind of drag and drop and build a WordPress site in under a day if you have just a little bit of basic knowledge, most of which you can just get from lynda.com like that’s where I started. So, like you said, you’ve gone through many iterations of your site. When I look at the first version of the Fitness and Post site, it’s just, oh my god, it’s so embarrassingly bad. But that’s how you learn, you iterate, you make mistakes, you see how people respond to it, and then you continue to move forwards, which is so hard to do if you have a DVD demo reel, because you have to go back in, reorder the menus, re-author it, maybe mail it out again. But with the web, you can say, oh, you know what, everybody tells me that this is not the best piece on my website, I should move this other one. I can do that in 20 minutes
Misha Tenenbaum: Exactly. And edit stock has grown to the point now where I have. Web developers and a separate web graphics artist, and the big difference is I’m trying to add some functionality, like so, for example, Edit Stock has a sound effects library where we’ve actually recorded all the sounds, we own them completely, and we give them away to everyone who has an account, which is free, so and we actually just last week recorded a bunch of gunshot sounds, which are impossible to get, and those all be free on edit stock soon enough. It’s gotten to the point where you know I can’t design the functionality for that. It’s just too much for me, like I literally don’t know how to do it, but I think with something with a service like, you know, Wix, most of them at this point are drag and drop in the browser. There’s not even a back end and a front end. You literally are designing in the front end of the website what it’s going to look like when you hit save. That’s just what it looks like now. And it does all the coding for you. It just updates in the background.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, you can know zero about coding, zero about DNS, or rerouting IP addresses. All of it is done. Where you have a little pretty picture that says video, you drag it to where you want your video, then a pop-up says enter the URL of your video, you copy paste, you hit enter, and guess what, your video is on a website. Done, exactly like that’s all it takes. So, if you’re thinking, well, the barrier of entry, like I just don’t have time to learn web design, that’s broken. That barrier is gone, so if you’re still in the world of DVD demo reels, the best place and the easiest place to get it is going to be on the web, because you can iterate very quickly and people can see it instantly.
Misha Tenenbaum: Yeah, and kind of to echo something you said earlier, if you look at your own resume or your own portfolio and you don’t think that a mass market in the United States would be able to recognize the titles on that resume, which is 99% of people. Then you need a demo reel. It’s expected from an employer anymore.
Zack Arnold: Yeah,
Misha Tenenbaum: It’s not really a choice like it used to. Maybe 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, it was a, you know, not everyone had a demo reel, but now it’s just impossible without one.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. If you don’t have a reel, you should not even be looking for work. You’re not ready to put yourself out there yet. It’s just a prerequisite to getting out into the world and starting or advancing or transitioning in your career. So, it’s not one of those. Would be nice if I had the time to do it. If you want to move forwards, you have to have a demo reel, and it really needs to be, in my opinion, website-based, and I think you agree as well. So, that having been said, the next area I want to go is something that you and I talked a little bit about offline before we started, and that’s this concept that there’s this idea that Malcolm Gladwell has talked about in the book, The Outliers, and if you haven’t read The Outliers, you need to read it. It’s an amazing book about how certain people rose to become who they are, like, for example, Bill Gates, and it has a lot to do with circumstance, not some magical thing that happened in the world, and he’s the smartest guy in the universe, like there are all these factors that scientifically you can dig down deeper into, and say, “Oh, now this makes a little bit more sense why both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made the rise that they did, and there’s a concept they talk about, which is the 10,000 hours rule, and you brought up this great kind of analogy to how the 10,000 hours rule works in the world of editing, so let’s talk about that a little bit, and how we can actually practice to become better at what we do.
Misha Tenenbaum: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to start with this, because I had this problem when I was a student, and continuing on for the first couple of years, years of my career, which is that I would show a cut of a movie to someone, to a group of people, say 20 people, and they would love it, and I would think I was the best editor in the world, and really talented, and then I would show the same movie to a group of people, the same number of people, and they would hate it, and I would think to myself, I’m never going to achieve anything in this career, I’m not talented at all, and that could be the same movie, the same cut, just a different group of people, the most important thing to know is that talent, whether you think you have it or not, is almost irrelevant. The most important thing is hard work and practice, being open-minded to learning a different skill, or taking feedback. Feedback is an enormous learning tool for editors, not just from other editors, but also from teachers, that’s the thing, they offer you a shortcut to figuring out a good idea, you know, like what if every single editor ever had to figure out on their own, which is kind of how I guess it’s kind of how editing works, you know, that a wide shot you should use it when someone enters or leaves a room, for example, right, like if you edit it in a vacuum, it might take you years to figure that out, but a teacher, or someone you know, some, if you listen to some feedback, you might learn that instantly in just a second. So, you need.. so, anyway, there’s a lot of rules. There’s maybe a couple 1000 rules, or at least a couple 100 common things that editors need to know. And you discover that through those 10,000 hours of work, but what you don’t want to do is do your 10,000 hours of work in a vacuum, in a bubble, without getting any kind of feedback, or without showing anyone that work. It really needs to be more deliberate, more intentional. You need to take the work that you made, think about it critically, show it to someone, have them critically evaluate it, and then you need to try to make changes, and you need to challenge yourself to do the things that are really hard, like, for example, a really great music edit, I think, a sloppy way to do it is just cut the track in half, throw a dissolve on it, and you’re done. But you know, a more seasoned editor is going to really cut to a beat and really going to put their important emotional moments on crescendos, and really, you know, this is stuff I’ve talked about before on my blog. It’s just like experience and practice that that leads you to making those kind of decisions. I know I kind of went all over the place with this, but
Zack Arnold: I don’t feel like you went all over the place at all. I think that’s very concise and clear, and this idea that you can’t just put stuff together, count the hours, like let’s say that you’re using a time tracking tool. Well, I’ve been tracking all my editing practice for 10,000 hours. I’m an expert. Has anybody ever watched your work? Nope. Huh. All right, let’s take a look at it. Yeah, so this is all kind of equally bad over the entire 10,000 hours because you didn’t have collaboration and you didn’t have feedback, and that’s actually something that’s interesting to bring up because we have a very unique type of industry where we are completely solitary creatures. When we get on a job, we sit by ourselves, either at a workstation or in our own office, with the door shut, with the lights off, with headphones on, doing our work in a vacuum. That’s exactly what it feels like, but you’re not going to improve and make those 10,000 hours count unless you’re constantly working it and workshopping with other people that can give you feedback to learn, so we’ve talked about this idea of how you want to get the these 10,000 hours, this Malcolm Gladwell idea from The Outliers. However, you’ve mentioned to me that there are certain patterns that you see in people’s work, so talk to me a little bit about how those patterns kind of coincide with this idea of the 10,000 hours and what you can do about
Misha Tenenbaum: It. Right, so one of the services that I offer on Edit Stock is that I give feedback to people on their cuts, and an unexpected outcome of this has been that I’ve watched a lot of cuts by a lot of different people of the same exact movie or the same scene, and I’ve realized that, similar to climbing up a rock wall, there are certain cruxes to the scene, to every scene, that are common problems or common solutions to these problems, like, you know, just let me give you, like, a very common one, a very obvious one, I have this one scene where there’s like a prison scene, and a guy takes a pill, and then you know the next day is like talking to his daughter, you know, through the prison phone wall. It’s so common for people to dip to black between those scenes, but actually the director shot something intentionally that matches up that you know to help that transition scene transition, but for some reason new editors always want to dip to black first. It’s easy, is probably the reason it’s the easiest solution, and you know you’ve seen dip to black in trailers, you know it takes someone pointing out to you that hey, on a TV show most of the time we’re cutting between scenes, we’re not dipping to black, you got to dig deeper than that to see some of the ways currently we have on edit stock for people to think critically. They can either upload their cut to the site and get feedback from a professional editor who will point stuff like that out to them, or we have a feedback blog where they can look up the project that they’re currently editing, and watch five different cuts of that same project, and that’s obviously watching other cuts is free. And in fact, when you submit your cut to feedback, sometimes I ask the people if it’s okay for me to show their cuts, because I think that they came up with some interesting solution to those crux problems, and I’ll even write about what it is that makes that cut so unique. In the future, we’re going to create projects or products that even more specifically break down the typical editing problems creatively that people run into, and I can’t get too deep into it right now, but let’s just say that in the future, when you learn how to edit, it won’t just be that you get a bunch of daily shoved on you, you edit those, and then get feedback later when you’re done. It’s going to be even more specific, even smaller, broken down, incremental lessons that teach a person exactly those you know, few to. Techniques that editors largely pick up on their own or pick up once they’ve been working for several years from each other.
Zack Arnold: To me, that service is absolutely invaluable. And once again, build the time machine functionality into your website, because I want that. 15 years ago, because I was desperate for that, I would bang on every editor’s door that I knew, whether it was people that I was working with, or not, and say, ‘Please look at this, please look at this, please tell me how I can be better. It was not, ‘Look at how great I am. It was, ‘Tell me how to make this better. I want to learn, I want to be great at what I do. I want to really learn this craft. And now you’re providing a service to be able to do that, where it’s welcomed, and it’s part of the process. That’s right. So, to me, that’s really, really cool. So, I want to be respectful of your time, and I want to let you go, but before we do so, I want to let my listeners know that if they go to Fitness and Post com slash edit stock, they’re going to have a bit of a special surprise waiting for them. So, what is that surprise?
Misha Tenenbaum: We’re giving all the listeners of your show 15% discount to anything they want to buy from our individual store, they just need to type in the code fit fit fit on checkout, and that’s it. We love Fitness and Post. I mean, we – I’ve listened to it since literally episode one.
Zack Arnold: Wow, so you’re the guy. It was you and my mom. I’m pretty sure I had two listeners, so I was like, “Who’s the other listener? Oh, it’s Misha.
Misha Tenenbaum: Yeah, I want to leave one other piece of advice for newer editors that I think took me a long time to appreciate or realize, I guess all along the way in your career you’re looking, you should be in part looking for mentorship, and obviously, Zack, that what made me think of talking about this right now is listening to you talk about banging on each door and asking the editors for, you know, to let you sit in, or, or for some feedback, or to let just, whatever, any kind of help they could give you. I think that getting a job and progressing in your career is both your responsibility and your employer’s responsibility, but mostly your responsibility to make sure that you are with an employer or with an editor, if you’re an assistant that is going to give you that help or contribute in that way. So it’s partially your responsibility to go put in the extra work and put in those extra hours and cut something on your own to prove you can do it, and it’s part your editor or your company’s responsibility to give you the opportunities to grow towards the direction you want, but your company needs to be pointed that way, and that responsibility lies on you to tell them that you want that shot, and if they don’t provide that shot for you, it’s also up to you to find a place that does give you that opportunity, or that at least wants that for you, you know. So I’m just trying to lay out this is my advice for people who are trying to figure out which job to take next. Take the one that’s going to lead you to where you want to go, you know. Chase credits, not dollars. I heard someone say recently,
Zack Arnold: There’s no way that I could wrap up the show any better than that, that is my whole philosophy, and the ideals that I try to share with people all the time. And just to reiterate something that I’d said in a previous episode, which kind of goes along with what you just mentioned, is that people will treat you the way that you allow them to treat you. So, if you decide to take a job where an editor is going to treat you like a doormat, and you’re just going to be their keyboard monkey, and your employer doesn’t care at all about your career direction or your growth. That’s partly on you, because you made the conscious choice to take that job, and sometimes you just need a paycheck. I get that we have rent to pay, we have food to buy, sometimes you just need the money to survive, but if you’re beyond the point of basic survival needs, it is partly on you to make sure that you have chosen and pursued the right opportunities with people that are going to allow your growth, so I love that you said that.
Misha Tenenbaum: Yeah, exactly.
Zack Arnold: That having been said, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on, and I would love to be able to do this again and riff in the future, because I think we barely scratched the surface for the kinds of topics that we’re talking about.
Misha Tenenbaum: Well, I would, I mean more than happy to be back, and I’m sure we’ll be back as a sponsor at some point.
Zack Arnold: Well, I’m very glad to hear that. So, on that note, have a fantastic day of me, show
Misha Tenenbaum: Thanks, Zack.
Episode Credits
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Jakin Rintelman, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.
The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.