Quit Throwing the Good Stuff Away

As legend has it, Walt Disney wander his studio long after everyone else had gone home. The reason? To take a look at the work of his animators... even to the point of going through their waste paper baskets.

There is a story where an animator came to work in the morning to find a crumbled sheet that had been rescued from the trash with this message from the boss scrawled on it: "Quit throwing the good stuff away!"

Sometimes, we too take heed of Disney's advice.

Some of our current film projects are documentaries. Editing documentaries are a little different than doing feature films. With a documentary, you're usually not working with a hard and fast script. And when you're filming, you never know exactly quite what you're going to get.

So, in the editing room, that means there's a lot of footage to wade through. Some of it is great. Some is good. And then there's the footage doesn't seem to be very useful to the project at hand. The trick is to figure which footage is gold, and which is not.

Sometimes, you go back and discover the good stuff has been "thrown away"...

Luckily, since all the editing these days takes place on computer, it's not like the trash gets emptied out until the project is completed.

Sometimes you know the footage exists; but the key is to find it again!