Video editing workshop: Sell your soul to views in 50 seconds

Creating short fake news videos can be hard as it requires skills, intelligence, imagination, and… experience in editing.
Well, not only fake news but all kinds of videos, especially those made to be posted on social media. The first sentence was only a hook, and it was our first task to practice creating and editing online videos, the workshop we’ve done recently (29 February) with filmmaker Tariq Keblawi, in Achrafieh. In our instructor’s words, we learned “how to sell our soul for views”. The workshop was fun and very instructive.

In a very competitive field such as journalism, video and audio skills become crucial to enhance a journalist’s career. The first part of our workshop was theoretical; we learned editing’s components: video, sound effects/dialogue, time and length, pacing, music, text and graphics, story and then we discussed how and when to cut, how to think like an editor and what makes a good one. We finally watched several videos to try to make sense of all the related information.

The second part of the workshop was practical. Tariq taught us step by step how to use Movie Premiere to create our own videos ready to be uploaded on social media platforms. He had already prepared files containing music and footages related to 4 topics: depression, corona, Lebanese banking crisis, and global warming. We chose an issue and started editing following these steps: looking through the materials, thinking of a narrative, creating an outline, gathering and arranging the assets, creating our texts, and editing the whole thing. Lastly, we watched each other’s final videos. Check them out and see what lies might convince you more, but always remember that “the true problem is not cheating with the facts, the way we select some facts, can make us report a lie” (Zizek).