In FRONT of a camera

I got interviewed today for a short film that the USC School is doing for potential freshman and found myself answering a number of questions about what an editor does and what collaboration is like.

Since I spent last week at the UFVA Conference talking mostly about collaboration, it was fairly easy to get up on my high horse and proclaim that collaboration is the best thing since sliced bread and all of the students need to learn it before the train runs off the rails and the ship runs aground.

I got to thinking afterwards, as I was driving home, that collaboration is one of the most difficult skills to learn.  It’s all well and good to say that we need to collaborate, but there are times when you want to throttle the other person and collaboration be damned. However, like anything that’s worthwhile, I’ve always found that if you stick with it, you come out the other end feeling way better. Some of the most difficult collaborative experiences for me have come when I wasn’t being particularly collaborative. That’s not to say that it is always the editor’s responsibility to collaborate — in fact, I feel that it is the leader/s who have that greatest responsibility.

Still, my experiences tend to show me that it is way easier to derail collaboration than it is to make it work. And, like difficult sessions in therapy, that’s when things are getting more productive.