Edit With Your Ears Before Your Eyes

Over the last few months I've been making comedy skits. It's a new form of storytelling I want to make my own, because few things are more powerful than a laugh. More on that in a future post... For now what matters is that I'm learning it the hard way. No classes, no mentors. Just having fun making things and paying attention to what works and what doesn't. (The second one takes far longer to figure out.)

The particular type of skit I make is one where I play every character myself. Different costumes, different camera angles, only one of me on screen at a time. Which means the biggest challenge is making the viewer feel like a fly on the wall, listening to a real conversation that really happened. The moment it feels stitched together, the spell breaks.

I thought I was getting pretty good at hiding the stitches.

Then I had lunch with Ed.

The Chili's Verdict

Ed is a phenomenal trombonist with an amazing ear, an amazing eye, and a consumption of content that would make Niagara Falls raise an eyebrow. I had just finished editing two sales skits I was genuinely proud of: When You Learn to Sell, Not Tell and When You Need an Excuse to Play Golf. The big upgrade in this batch was music. I wanted it playing a front-and-center role, carrying emotional weight that would take eons to say in words. So a music guy's opinion was exactly what I wanted.

We ordered burgers off the Triple Play menu. Then I handed Ed my phone and got to enjoy that very special experience of nervously watching someone you respect watch your work. (Off topic but, Chili's somehow became one of the best fast food deals in America? A good burger, fries, soup, AND a drink for less than McDonald's. Sad, but true.)

Ed didn't dislike the skits. But he also didn't fall in love with them.

So I pulled up videos from two folks I use as my guiding posts: ZachTheBold and ProZD. We watched some together, and then Ed came out with a banger:

"Yours are good. The editing's fine... But I can hear the cuts."

You can hear the cuts..? I had worked so hard to hide them! When one character talks I'm already blending in footage from the other angles so it never feels like ping-pong. What do you mean you can hear them?

He turned the phone back toward me and played some ProZD again. "Listen. It sounds like there's one single audio track. Like all these characters were actually in the room together and someone just recorded it. The video cuts... but the audio never does. Yours? I can hear you cut from this guy... over to that guy."

He was completely right. And I was flabbergasted, because I had never once thought about it.

Eyes Forgive. Ears Don't.

Here is why I think nobody ever told me this before.

Our eyes are forgiving. You see a slightly clumsy cut once and some part of you shrugs, "sure, they moved the camera," and forgives it. You understand why it looks that way, so you let it pass.

Your ears make no such deal. A real conversation has a rhythm: the breath before an interruption, the exact beat where someone would actually jump in. When the audio breaks that rhythm, your ear catches the lie instantly. But unless your ear is trained (mine wasn't), you can't name what's wrong. You just walk away going, "I mean... it was good? I don't know, man."

Which is a terrible feeling.

Editing Blind

The next skit in my queue was my first theological one, When Praying Feels Like the DMV. After I got the rough cuts in, I tried something completely different.

I closed my eyes.

Literally. I listened to one line, then the next, and slid the audio clips back and forth in the timeline until the conversation sounded the way it would if I really were that fly on the wall. There. THAT'S when he would come in. Nudge. Listen again. Nudge.

Only once the whole thing sounded like one continuous conversation did I open my eyes and decide, in my DaVinci Resolve timeline, when each character should start and end their part on screen. Instead of editing how I wanted it to look and dragging the sound along behind, the visuals now had one job: back up the sound.

And wow. Nothing felt off. Nothing felt stitched. It is easily my best-edited video to date, and it came from the single best piece of advice I've gotten since I started making these.

Ears First

So here is the principle, and it applies any time you're merging multiple voices or takes into one scene, comedy or not:

Edit the audio until it sounds like everyone was actually in the room together. Then, and only then, let the video follow.

Your viewers will probably never be able to tell you why one skit feels handmade and another feels real. But their ears already know.

Edit with your ears.