Anne Coates died today. If you haven't heard of her, you've probably seen her work.
That moment in Lawrence of Arabia when the match cuts to the desert. Or the haunting sequences in the Elephant Man.
More recently the bar scene in 'Out of Sight' that made a genuine star out of George Clooney.
She's one of the finest film editors ever. And although most of us will never have the need to cut the work of David Lean or Steven Soderbergh, everyone's an editor these days.
I wrote earlier this week about a YouTube - Instagram influencer who visited our offices last week.
It was amazing to see how she captured scenes in our meeting rooms and then on a tour of Berlin. And how quickly she turned around a high-energy video that captured the spirit of the day.
I'm a convert. So now I've got one of our team on the case posting video clips on Instagram Stories and stitching together sequences for our YouTube channel.
This isn't Hollywood. Or Cannes for that matter. But the essential skills are the same. The ability to see a story, real drama in an innocuous series of clips.
And then to order and time individual snippets in an order that creates narrative out of nothing. My team still has got a long way to go, but the results are already impressive.
Having spouted off about how video and photography are the essential creative skills for content marketing, I'd now like to add in editing.
There are some great free tools in the article attached to this post. So there are no excuses not to practice your video making skills. So let's cut to the chase. Get editing. And good luck.
There's a good chance you already have video editing software installed on your computer. For Windows, that's Windows Movie Maker, and for Macs, it's iMovie. But depending on the purpose your video is serving -- and the content channel to which you're distributing it -- you may find that these options aren't packed with enough features. The good news: There are several free and inexpensive video editing apps and tools you can download that run the gamut from super simple to Hollywood-level powerful.