One cloudy afternoon, three youths gathered to make a home movie. Sounds easy enough, right? A camera, a couple of friends and a blockbuster epic that only young producers can create will commence. The home movie was about zombies, and the shoot location was a shed, where my brother, John Taylor, and my friend, Patrick Brown, and I meet. After careful pre-planning, I was filming as much as I could when all of a sudden, my battery died. (This is not even the bad part of my story.) I was mad, because that was the only battery I had for the camera, so we had to stop shooting for the day and place the props for the movie back in the shed. I placed the camera on the ground near the shed. Well, Patrick didn't pay attention to where I had placed it, and he stepped on my camera and tripped over it. Although he was lying on the ground, I only had eyes for the camera. I lunged for it and checked it over, and at first, nothing looked bad, and I was relieved . But, then I saw that the record button broke off the camera. That upset me greatly, but I was still able to pop the button back in and use it. Now I have a new camera, and I am way more protective with it. For me, my brother John and my friend Patrick, though, that day will forever be known as "The Maryland Video Camera Massacre."
Josh Taylor

I was recently in Shanghai, China, and a friend told me about a Chinese production company looking for a foreign editor. They had a client that wanted a two-and-a-half-minute promo piece that had a western feel. They liked my two-minute demo reel, especially the way I edited the material to the song, and they gave me the job. I spent many more hours than I expected getting the piece to a rough cut, and one of the bosses, after many, many other content changes, told me that it was a bit slow, that it needed some "spice." She finally communicated that she wanted a larger variety of transitions. I teach editing, and I implore my students to use tricky transitions only if it fits the mood of the piece, if it moves the story forward by adding value to the overall message of the story. Granted, the short work was a montage music video-like piece, but I tried to explain that gratuitously adding random transitions would make it look "cheesy." I tried to illustrate this by randomly dropping in the most gruesome transition I could think of, the star wipe (which I have seen used well consequently). She loved it, excitedly exclaiming, "Yes, more like that." I'm glad my name is not attached to this piece that I was somewhat proud of at my first rough cut. The client got what she wanted, but it wasn't a "western" montage.
Morgan Paar, Videomaker Contributing Editor, Timeline

Some 15 years ago, I ran the camcorder at a family wedding. We bought a cheapo wireless mic kit from a neighborhood electronics store a couple of days before, along with batteries and cables. Luckily (and fortuitously, as it turned out), the kit included an earbud for monitoring. We didn't think to test the new mic beforehand, so when we got there, we were disappointed to hear no audio from the camcorder's headphone jack whenever we attached the new mic. The resulting wedding had pretty decent video, but the audio was incredibly poor. Needless to say, this is one production that I didn't put on my demo reel, but, at the time, everyone was reasonably happy with it.
Charlie Fulton, Videomaker Associate Editor