you know we've all heard the phrase you are what you eat and of course most of the time it's in reference to health or dieting but this phrase is also so true when it comes to growing in your creative taste as an editor you know i remember when i first started drinking wine for the first time sure i could taste the difference between like a red and a white this is a white but you know it took a minute to feel the difference between a merlot and a cabernet and even longer before i could maybe
you know begin commenting on the tasting notes of each bottle all these details that really helped me start refining what specifically i liked to drink you know coming back to us as editors and ultimately filmmakers there are two practical things that you can do for yourself to help grow your taste and the first is pretty obvious it's to watch a lot of content the good the bad the ugly all of it because i believe that maturity and taste comes from experiencing enough of something to start telling the difference in the details and understanding not just
this is good or this is bad these muffins taste bad but getting familiar enough with the subtleties of something to be able to describe exactly why what made that video good or bad what specifically was it that hooked me was it a mystery that wasn't revealed till later was it you know a music choice or a lack of music choice you know i think about no country for old men and something that blew my mind was realizing that that movie had no music at all and how that affected the entire motion of that film and
realizing that i could use that same technique in my own work to invoke a certain type of tension or suspense and so when you start diving into all these little details about what you do and don't like you get this sort of wealth of knowledge that you can take and decide things that you might want to try in your next projects now as you sort of you know amass this sort of catalog of videos that you've watched and experienced and taken sort of mental notes on you'll naturally begin creating sort of a mental list or
a gallery of videos and images uh that stand out to you as your favorites vimeo for me is a place where i go and i watch videos and i don't just watch them but i you know like them so that i have this library later on to reference this whole catalog of ideas that i might want to pull from same thing even with instagram the bookmark feature i use that constantly and if i go back to my instagram at any point you know i can see hundreds if not thousands by this point um you know
of videos or images or design cues that i want to experiment with so whenever i get to these dry spots you know i can sort of revert back to this sort of catalog of good taste right that i've built over the years i'm including a full page of some of my favorite videos and edits that have impacted me over the past few years so feel free to reference it for yourself but remember you are what you eat and what you consume is what you will create so consume well one more pro tip when it comes
to gathering a great catalog of inspiration if you are inspired by someone never stop with the person that you're inspired by find out who inspires your inspiration for example i think about solomon lichthelm who is an amazing filmmaker i've been inspired by his videos since he you know started his career and but when i started diving into what inspired him and even you know going to the people that he followed and sort of getting a better understanding of what was giving him his source of inspiration that's where i feel like things started to really make
sense about how he was remixing those ingredients to create things for himself but then it helped me understand that i could remix those same ingredients through my filter and do something completely different and if i took my inspiration and things that were unique to me and the things that i like that's where things really begin to compound in a really amazing way so you know for me i love you know sci-fi i love blade runner i love you know anything sort of spacey synth-based music i love all of that stuff and so when i you
know i could look as basic as you know tron legacy which was a movie that changed my life when i was a kid or i could dive even deeper and realize that tron pulls a lot from stanley kubrick and 2001 a space odyssey and you know and then if i wanted to go even further i'd be curious to find out what stanley kubrick is inspired by if you go down that that rabbit hole and find the sort of key ingredients that make up the things that inspire you you can begin sort of creating your own
dishes in a much more interesting way kind of went off on a tangent here but i hope this all makes sense consume well create well and happy editing
