Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.
I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as part of the Corpus Christi (“Body of Christ”) festival in the medieval city of York, England.
I’m teaching myself the open source kdenlive editing program, and it’s been a journey.
At the moment I took this screenshot, all the cameras were in a neutral position. The widest view (top left) is from a webcam up on a pole, and the next widest is a 4k camera that doesn’t have optical zoom. I just aimed those cameras front and center and forgot about them.
During each play, I tried to follow the action, zooming and reframing on the fly. But I had no idea when characters would enter from the right, or the left, or up the flight of stairs behind the stage, or make entrance from behind my cameras, or when a “plant” would just stand up in the middle of the audience and start speechifying. In one of my early videos I didn’t notice that one of the spectators had bumped my “good” camera, so it was uselessly recording the ground while I changed batteries and SD cards and did troubleshooting. Sometimes I had to settle for a “least bad” shot that was really bad. Sigh. A lot of the editing process involves finding a decent wide-angle shot that covered the action, while I was madly reframing on the leads.
When I started the video editing a few weeks ago, it took me 2-3 days of focused work to create each ~25m video, but now, if I don’t run into any glitches, I’m closing in on 2 per day. In between I am running errands, power-walking at the mall, and having an enjoyable summer.
As I’ve finished each video, I’ve been posting it to a draft area, and I’m getting feedback on errors (like when, instead of showing a singing angel, I accidentally showed a long reaction shot of shepherds listening).
OK, break’s over… back to work!
I’ll never check my email in time, but I’m J Robinson Wheeler, silver age IF author who was a film editor at the same time. Do you need last-minute help? I would actually try to help.
From Jrw,
What a kind offer! Of course I recognize the name. I’ll be honest, I think at this point I’ve got a system down and I just need to put in the 4-5 hours to edit each video… maybe with further practice I’ll be able to shave off some more time.