“AHHHH, just finish it!” the producer screamed into the ear of the tireless editor. He slowly nodded his head and began the excruciating work of editing that lasted 40 hours. Such is the life of the undignified editor, whose arduous task is to make four and a half hours of raw film into a thirty-five minute motion picture.

“The most interesting thing in the world to me is editing,” Nick Jones, ’02, the editor of the senior movie said. “I love starting out with the raw film and seeing the metamorphosis of it into a finished movie product.”

Contrary to non-editor belief, editing is not all fun and editing as many technical and filming problems presented themselves.

“This job would have been a lot less work but the school’s computer kept freezing up every time we would do anything,” Michael Abajian, ’02, said. “That made the editing job three times longer.”

“We lost some clips and I had to find a way to produce a good final product without those clips,” Jones said.

Lack of organization also added to the editing woes.

“We had a time when we thought we taped over a very important scene and everyone blamed it on me and Abajian,” Chris Burford, ’04, said. “About an hour before we were going to film it again, we found it and saved ourselves three hours.”

Every class relies on the computers provided by the campus to produce their movies.
The generating of the movies is headed up by computer wizard and Night of the Stars maharishi, Christopher Schultz.

“I am so glad that my wife is a patient women,” Schultz said. “She allows me to stay up all night and be away from her for hours on in. But thankfully, she let’s me work with and help the students in their editing because I am the editing sage.”

One of the annual events that editors participate in is the overnight stay in the campus computer room where they edit from nine thirty at night to around six in the morning.

“We stay up all night working on our movies,” Burford said. “Every class is there except the juniors because they had their own editing system this year.”

One of the many qualities that an editor must have is the ability to go without sleep, as many editors stayed up till four in the morning and around eleven-thirty at night on average during editing season.

Editing season began in January and ended just days before Night of the Stars.

“Editing was really easy for me because our movie was like five minutes long,” Katie Ettner, ’05, said. “At overnight editing party I just stood and watched the other movies.”
The hard work an editing paid off in the end as the movies were a success and Jones walked away with the best editing award.

“I was really excited when I heard that I won best editing,” Jones said. “It gave me a lot of confidence for my future career in editing when I go to study it full time at Azusa Pacific.”

For more information on editing and Night of the Stars videos, please contact event architect Schultz at 297-9464, extention 124.