Back in May, I entered a video editing competition run by an organisation called Exposure. They had teamed up with a Vancouver-based band called Dear Rouge and shot a music video for them. Instead of hiring an editor, they put the footage up on Dropbox and ran a competition to see who could produce the best edit.
I have always enjoyed editing but I don’t do it nearly as often as I would like. One of the main excuses I make is that I don’t have enough decent footage to work with. This competition took away that excuse, so I felt that I had to enter. I decided to use it as an exercise in editing and never really thought about winning.
I cut and graded the video in Premier Pro. This was my entry:
There were more than 40 finished edits submitted by the deadline, but they then had to narrow the entries down to a final five.
Once the entry period had closed, there were two weeks of public voting on the competition website and Vimeo. I pushed my entry pretty hard across my social network sites, but I didn’t get close to the three videos with the most votes. These top three automatically went through to the final.
The other two videos to make it through to the final five were wildcard picks by the band. This is how I ended up in the final – the band chose my edit as one of their favourites.
The final was a big event. The Exposure guys booked a club in downtown Vancouver and organised a panel of judges from the music and video industry. All five videos were shown in front of the whole crowd and the judges. And at the end of it all, mine was announced as the winner!
My prize included $5000 worth of equipment rental from William F. White and a four-hour sound mix at DBC Sound. I am going to work with the Exposure guys to plan a short film to make the most of the prize.
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