Subconscious Video Editing

Sometimes I'm editing videos even when I'm not editing videos. My subconscious is at work.

In the average night we have 4 to 6 dreams, and rarely do we remember any of them when we wake up. Sometimes I have vague recollections of dreams about video editing. It's probably more or less a product of the fact that I'm almost always editing videos when I'm awake, and so my brain is just used to it.

But the strange part is that sometimes I have dreams about videos that I have yet to complete. The only parts of these dreams that I can really remember is me sitting at a computer looking at a screen. I'm not doing anything super-exciting, so my conscious brain says, "Don't bother storing this boring thing in your memory."

However, there have been times when I'm editing a video that I've had on my mind for a long time, when a creative moment comes and I add a certain thing into a certain place in the video where my brain tells me that I've done this before. It's like my brain already came up with some of the edit but I have sit down and work at it before I remember. Sometimes it doesn't feel like I'm creating so much as I'm remembering how to put together a video I've already watched. This only seems to happen with videos that I have on my mind for a long time. If it's on a quick deadline, my subconscious brain doesn't have the time to think about how to edit it, and I have to come up with editing ideas

Unfortunately, I haven't found this "super-cool secret subconscious brain power" to necessarily make me faster and more efficient because remembering something I've forgotten is equally as time consuming as figuring out something I don't know. But it's still really interesting, and it's either a sign that I'm living my dream...literally, or that I'm completely insane. Or both.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have a similar thing happen when I work on a long project (such as a feature film or a web series) as a cinematographer and then end up working on the edit as well. I'm seeing, and cutting in my head a bit, while shooting over a few months; then when I sit down to edit, it just flows very effortlessly. I find way before I sit down to edit I have tons of dreams about the footage basically playing out in front of me as if I'm in the movie. It's kind of cool how we store and process the visual information we take in. Especially us that work creatively in a visual medium, because we're basically manipulating the way our brains see the world around us.