Finishing the one you keep putting off
Okay. Last lesson in the module, and I want to talk about something that isn't a technique. It's the project sitting in the back of your mind that you signed up for this class to finally deal with, and that you still haven't touched.
You know the one. Maybe it's the box of tapes. Maybe it's a folder of photos you've been meaning to turn into something for a parent's birthday, and the birthday has come and gone twice now. If you've got footage of your own kids and you haven't looked at it in years, that's this too.
I'll go first. I've got a box of my own kids' baby videos I still haven't touched. Three years now. I teach this stuff for a living, basically, and I still haven't done it. So I'm not saying this from some place where I've got it figured out and you don't. I'm saying it because I know exactly how it feels to have all the skills and none of the motion.
Here's what I've noticed, both in myself and watching people in this room: the project you're avoiding is almost never too hard. It's too big. You're picturing the finished thing — the whole life, the whole story, forty years of a marriage — and that's not a project, that's a mountain, and nobody starts hiking a mountain by staring at the summit.
So the first practical thing I want you to do this week, if you've got one of these stalled projects, is shrink it. Don't make "the video about grandma." Make "the video about grandma's kitchen." Three minutes. One room, one memory, one story somebody tells. That's finishable in an afternoon. And once you've finished one small thing, the big pile doesn't feel like a mountain anymore. It feels like a bunch of small things you haven't gotten to yet, which is a completely different feeling to work from.
Second thing, and this is where I want to tell you about Chad.
Chad came to me wanting help fixing his daughter's dance recital footage. Shaky camera work, bad lighting, the usual. We sat down to edit it and I asked him where the original files were, just so I could pull the good version instead of whatever compressed copy he'd texted himself. Long pause. Turns out he didn't have an original anywhere except that one phone, and that phone had crashed and been replaced twice since. Everything he had was a copy of a copy of a copy, and some of it was already gone for good.
So we didn't edit that day. I spent the whole session teaching him how to back things up. Two copies, different places — the phone isn't a backup, it's the only copy until you move it somewhere else. He was annoyed. He'd come in for editing help and gotten a lecture on file management instead. But he stopped losing videos after that, and I'd rather he be annoyed with me for an hour than lose another recital.
I bring this up because it's the same root problem as the stalled project. Chad's footage wasn't unfinished because editing is hard. It was unfinished because the foundation under it was shaky, and until that got fixed, nothing else mattered. Back up first, edit second — I've said it before in this class and I'll say it again here, because it's the one thing I actually repeat. If your stalled project has been stalled partly because you're scared of losing the originals while you mess with them, fix that fear first. Copy everything to two places. Then you can experiment on the timeline without the stakes being "if I mess this up, grandma's tapes are gone."
Third thing. Give yourself a deadline that isn't "someday." Someday never comes due. Pick an actual date — a birthday, a holiday, a family reunion up the canyon, whatever's coming up on the calendar in the next couple months — and decide the small, shrunk-down version of your project is what gets shown that day. A real date does something a vague intention never will. It makes you finish.
And when you sit down to actually work on it, don't reopen the whole sprawling folder of everything. Pull just the clips and photos for your small piece. Set a timer if you need to — even twenty minutes counts. You laid clips in order, you cut it down, you added a clean title, you picked music you're allowed to use, you left the old footage looking like old footage. You already know how to do every step. The only thing standing between you and finished is starting.
One more thing I'll say plainly: some of these stalled projects involve people who've passed away, and sitting down with that footage can hit you harder than you expect. That's normal. If you need to do it in short sessions instead of one long sitting, do it that way. There's no rule that says you have to get through it in one go.
Before next time
Pick the one stalled project sitting in the back of your mind, shrink it down to something three minutes long, and put a real date on your calendar when it's due. That's the whole assignment.