Writing as a Video Workflow

A Newsletter Post

Binning Documents

I have a ton of writing on the queue, and it’s quite difficult to prioritize. I would like to write newsletters, essays, short fiction, poetry, and of course short and feature length films. And more.

Since the goal in the long run are the motion pictures, I have to monitor the other topics to make sure I don’t get so lost in writing tangential things that I don’t push forward my cinema work.

Early on as I started thinking through the concepts I have in my head, I started ‘binning’ them. Binning, in video editing, is when you create pools of media so you can find specific content you’re looking for later. They used to be literal bins, like trash cans, in editing suites where editors would dangle long strips of celluloid. Now they’re just folders:

Of course I’m unlikely to write content to fill every one of those bins, but just creating them helped me feel like when I have anything to write, it has a place it belongs. The Writing bin on the sidebar enables me to get right to the project I want to work on at any given point, and moving the projects through the Drafts bins toward Final, or Published, or Filmed and later Distributed (for the film bins) does the work for me of checking in on where I really am in the process with each project.

Adobe Premiere as a Writing Program?

On Tuesday I was hacking away at a feature script I’ve been writing since late March entitled The Puppeteer & the Apprentice. I have an idea for a montage over a piece of music I like, but I was very concerned the imagery wouldn’t match up to the music the way I imagined. Your brain stretches and bends — edits — imagery and music you remember on different timelines than physical world ones. I know this well as a video editor.

Thus I was trying to write the montage while listening to the track over and over again, and found it a painful and clunky experience. I had to keep backtracking on the music and then typing half a sentence, then backtracking again and typing another half, then moving on to the next section… the result being I couldn’t, literally, get into the rhythm of the song in a way that allowed the montage to flow the manner I wanted.

At a loss, I dragged the track into Premiere and marked up the beats from the music, and then used caption layers to pace out the shots I imagined in my head: