Speaker 1: I Cut my hair first time or I think second time in the four years I've been running this YouTube channel, but we're not here to talk about my hair I want to tell you about one thing I've discovered recently in my filmmaking that has completely changed the game for me I'm kind of almost embarrassed. I didn't know this tip earlier so essentially when you're making a film any scene that you're doing is either expressing emotion or or plot. And if you have too many scenes in a row of emotion or too many scenes of plot in a row, your film can begin to get boring and the audience can disconnect. How do you know if you're doing this? And when you're in the editing software, you don't always know, you're just watching your film back. But what I did is I actually just went out and I began writing down each one of my scene, the title for each scene, dividing it up and color coordinating it. If I look back at it and see that there's too many of the same colors in a row, too many emotions or too much plot, I can begin to see where I have an issue in my edit really quickly, rather than just swimming in all of the footage of my film. So I'm gonna show you quickly just how we did this recently for our film. And you can apply this to commercials, short films, or in the case of what we're talking about, a feature film. My favorite software to do this in is Milanote. I used to do this in Sticky Notes in our office, but what I love about Milanote is I can work with my editor who's on the other side of the country, Eva, and Eva helped cut my latest feature film called Okay. It's a film about a really gifted group of musical individuals who are all on the autism spectrum and it's about them writing their first album. And with just a few days left in that edit, we began realizing that we had some big problems. The film, when we play the 90 minutes through, we're kind of losing our attention and we weren't sure what was happening. It wasn't until, I'm just gonna zoom out here, that we began color-cording on these scenes here. And this is my entire film right here, you can see. We began seeing that in some cases, earlier on in our edits, we just had too many scenes in a row of emotions. So people didn't know what was happening in the film. We knew people were sad or happy, but we didn't know what the film was moving towards. So when you make your film, there's two journeys. Your characters are going on. One is the physical journey. This is them moving towards their goal, what they want. In the case of our film, Okay, they wanted to write an album. Then what's really important is their emotional journey. What's happening on the inside of their mind and their heart. And at some points in our edit, we had too much of the emotional journey and we forgot about the plot, them writing the album. And I began to notice this when I looked at our edit and saw too many of the same colors in a row. And this is when we realized we needed to change some things. Eva Dubovoy, our editor on this, she's amazing, but we only had a few days left in the edits. We were kind of getting stressed and we're tired of just looking at our Adobe Premiere timeline. So coming out to a different piece of software like Milanote was so great. And what's awesome with this, too, is I can work on this on the plane. I can go to a coffee shop. Or in the case of here, you can see her up here. There's Iba Dubuvoi. She can join this project, and we can actually be working at it simultaneously. So what we originally did is we just wrote down all the scenes, and then I actually got a bit more detailed. Rather than just doing one emotion, I divided up the two emotions here. I did uplifting, positive, community, sad, challenge, conflict. And then I gave orange here. This was really important. This is about the album writing, the plot progression. And when I was looking at early edits of the film, you can even see in our final edit, there's times where we go whole chunks without talking too much about the plot. And if you don't return back to the plot, people forget what's happening in their film. Where's this film going? Why do I need to care about these people? Remember, you don't have a film unless you have characters who want something. They need to be moving towards that journey. And I find getting into Milanote and breaking up my film, I can begin to see if I've actually been accomplishing that. And Milanote's super easy to use. I can just double-click it here and say, plot point dash positive, enter. And then I can just right-click it and add a color. Green, green feels positive. Or if it was negative, I could just right-click it again and give it a red marker here. And move this around, click and drag. I can connect with lines. It's super easy and very visually driven to work with. I even use this really early on in the film with my producers to show them sort of event spaces that we wanted to film in, the vibe I was looking for, how we're gonna do our interviews, what A camera should look like and what B camera should look like. I really like this for references because I can just invite my team in here to add to it or to see the notes. Here's my DP, I went through all of his films and I pulled out all my favorite references for him and lined it up here on Milanote. And so he could add to it and show me things he likes. It's a great collaboration tool. Why I really enjoy using this is, I don't feel like I'm an exceptional storyteller, but I do feel like I know how to break down complex things into simpler problems. And really, the problem you're just looking at at this point is, do we have a variety of colors throughout the film? Are we moving towards a goal? Just basically grade one. Do I have a lot of green in a row? Then I should probably add a yellow scene in there, something to do with plot. And it helps you get out of that editing software, like I was saying earlier, when you're swimming in confusion. As I always say in my filmmaking, it's okay to be stressed, but it's not okay to be confused. And I find Milanote has helped me to get out of that confusion in the edit. And doing this really paid off. Our film, Okay, went to Hot Docs a few weeks after we made these last changes. We ended up getting second place in the Audience Award, which we got first. But nonetheless, we even got chosen out of all the films in the festival to be toured across Canada as a special presentation. And I can directly relate it to the last few changes that Eve and I were doing. It felt like it took the film from good to great, and I'm really proud of what we created. This is my favorite project I've made to date, and I can't wait to release it to the world. we're still doing the festival circuit with her right now. And if you want to check out the trailer for the film, I put a link below. And I find this is really important for your films is breaking down things into simpler approaches so that you're not always guessing. And we're doing a new short documentary about a pair of tornado hunters that actually my editor Lewis is working on. Say hi, Lewis. So outgoing. And before Lewis starts cutting, I'll actually send him some notes. It's great so that an editor isn't just guessing what I'm looking for. So I can easily just do that in Milanote. You can see I have the project up there, but I'll just start a new one here. This is the tornado. Quack. Documentary. Music. Oh, that's so cool, it added a tornado. Didn't know it was gonna do that. And so inside here, I can run over to music bed and begin showing Louis some of the slacks so that I'm not just texting him random stuff or putting it all in one email that he'll lose. Yeah, that's the vibe. So I can just click on this song here, let me grab the link, come over here, paste it in Milanote. And when I drag it over, it instantly populates it here. And I can even change the image here, it auto-populates it, but I can go replace image. Why I like doing this is then I can quickly show Louis kind of the vibe that I'm looking for so the scenes about chasing and I'll make this group this into a column and I'll call this chasing scenes. What I love about this is I'm just grabbing screen grabs, throwing them in Milano and I feel like I'm getting to edit the project without having to interfere with Lewis's timeline. He can kind of get an idea of what I'm going for. Hi, just a quick reminder, we have the FX3 giveaway still going on. The link is in the description below. Also too, I don't send telegrams to anyone telling them they won. so watch out for the spammers, but let's get back to this video. So I'm actually really excited about that Tornado project. It follows Ricky Forbes and Chris Chittick, who are professional storm and tornado chasers. We saw some crazy stuff already for that. We'll be finishing that off soon. Don't quite know when we're releasing it. How's the edit going, Louis? We're working on it. So there you go, guys. Go check out Millinote. I have a link below. I'm using it in all my projects, and I genuinely love talking about pieces of software that actually help me. Like I mentioned earlier, it was kind of a weird moment for me where I realized how simple you can make filmmaking sometimes and how complex I believe that it has to be when really it can just be as simple as, do we have the right colors in a row? As always, thank you for watching this one. And if you wanna know more about documentaries and kind of how to move them around and what we do in our edits, we'll be releasing our documentary course in just over two months. So I'll put a link below and you can join up on that wait list if you haven't heard of the art of documentary. Go check that out, go check out Milanote and I will see you in the next one. Say goodbye, Louis. Oh,