Editing: ‘Real World’ Style

Written by Joey

Photography introduced me to the 'new media' evolution. I currently do community management at Meraki in San Francisco, but this blog is about journalism, some UX design, and the occasional rant. more →

@joeybaker | joey@byjoeybaker.com

Sharing

My semester is coming to an end in London and I’ve just completed a video class that I really enjoyed. It was really my first experience playing with video equipment that ranks at the ‘prosumer’ level. Lessons learn’d a’plenty, but to the point of this post:A project that I did for this class was something of an experiment for me. I took footage of a few nights spent in my flat in London – which I share with 10 other people. We had joked for a while that we lived in a MTV Real World atmosphere. Reviewing the footage, I couldn’t have summarized it better.No doubt we act and behave a lot like the characters in the Real World, but when I was editing the footage, I got a real sense of how MTV is able to edit their footage to do all the things that they are accused of doing – enhancing conflict, portraying characters in a certain light, changing the timeline, etc…And that’s sort of the rub – reality TV is shot in a journalistic style. It appears to be capturing a slice of the lives of a cast of people. That, is the problem though – they are a cast, and it is a show – not a journalistic report. There is no greater moral oversight to how the show is shot and edited.I noticed that in editing, it was more fun to pick and choose clips, change the order of events (slightly) and so forth – it made my finished result more entertaining to watch. However, i certainly couldn’t have presented it as a journalistic work.