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by curiousgal 1678 days ago
Once I started noticing jumpcuts it ruined every single YouTube video with a person talking into the camera. The worst offender being Phillip DeFranco.
2 comments

Interesting take. I saw Phillip DeFranco as more of a pioneer of that style. He really leaned into the cuts. At the time it was something no one else was doing so it was very noticeable, and he had a very crisp cadence with them where the jarring cuts were part of the presentation. It was clear his process was: Write a script, mark cuts everywhere it could make sense, go through the script repeating every phrase until you're happy with the sound, and when editing, always make the cuts where they're marked, even if it could be skipped.

The result feels something like pixel art: Clearly not the closest possible imitation of conversational speaking, but something else. A style in its own right with different considerations.

Now that it's par for the course to have jump cuts, I see them used more sloppily everywhere, where it's clear the narrator decided where to do the cuts after the fact. Cutting off the beginning or end of a phoneme, missing or repeating bits of a thought because they they liked one phrasing in recording but opted for another one in post, misordered cuts where something which moved in the background moves back to its old place, etc. Phillip's style looked lazy but it can't really be imitated with actual laziness.

These days I look back and really cringe at the substance of his show. But I still see the style as professional.

I find talking into a camera really tough. If you're doing it by yourself you almost need to imagine you're talking to a person. I even know of people who put cutouts or pictures of someone by the camera so they can talk to a person.

I haven't had a lot of luck using teleprompters but maybe I just haven't hit of the right setup.

Something else someone told me recently was to try to work in short segments that you redo until you get right and then do a cut to the next segment somewhere that it's natural.