Michelle MacLaren Quotes

I love being in the editing room and playing with tempo and with the rhythm of shots.

When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

For me, shooting, editing, and scoring rely on rhythm.

I used to hate, with a capitol H, making videos. It was nothing but a chore. It was something you had to do to have your music accepted in the visual medium.

I've also directed, shot, and edited several music videos.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

The one place I've seen something really come together is in editing. Sometimes you can save pieces in a way that you're really shocked.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

When you're editing the film, you use a temp track. So you're putting music in there for a rough cut to keep track of what's going on. It can be a hindrance if wrong, it can be an enormous asset if you get it right.

As much as I love creating entertaining visuals, I love toying with the pace of a movie and trying to perfect that. It's imperative to the impact: faster cuts, cuts at the right moments that meld with the tenor of a scene. Creating and maintaining that feeling.

The process of filmmaking is very musical, you get into the rhythm and the rhythmics of how someone is, especially with Woody Allen who is very much into body language and body movement.

In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

I direct a lot of TV commercials and music videos.

It's hard work to make a four-minute program look effortless and elegant.

If you put music into your Vine, and it's really jumpy, just do it over again.

It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.

I don't like fast cuts. I'd rather shoot something that dances to the music.

Basically, great directors know how to combine music with the scenes that they are working on.

It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't.

In making YouTube videos, you can't just be an actor, you have to also know the shots and how to write.

I always see the filming as basically going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients and that's about as far from having a dinner as you can possibly be. Then editing is the cooking, the preparation of the meal and if you don't edit it you've just got a pile of raw meat.

I've always been a relaxed person on set, but I think the main thing is I think about it from an editing point of view way more than I did before.

I was fascinated by the effects that could be achieved by editing. The cutting room became a magic workshop for me.