by: Advika Anand, Nelson Kramer
Graphics Editor, Editor in Chief
As film has evolved over the years, humans have seen black-and-white movies, big-budget blockbusters, romance novels, and even low-quality music videos. However, there is one more type of media that is more significant than all of these combined. This piece of media is able to perfectly encapsulate all feelings, whether heartbroken, affectionate, or loathing. This entertainment is…you guessed it, the edit!
Edits have been on the precipice of becoming a mainstream source of media for years, but some people are still stuck in the past. Why read from the New York Times about what some urban snob thinks of my favorite BL hockey romance when I could get it straight from the dark and sketchy corners of the internet? I hear our older population complain, “We used to spend our energy doing great things. We harnessed electricity, we went to the moon!” But honestly, some washed-up geezer isn’t going to tell me the facts when I can trust a 16-year-old perfecting their artistic craft.
Edits have advanced a long way since their origins in the 2010s, and with these advancements have come more extensive creative liberties for editors to take the lead in their message. I would say that the greatest cultural reset in the edit community came from the Timothée Chalamet edit featuring the song Playdate by Melanie Martinez way back in 2020. This edit offered a whole new style of editing and showed the world just how advanced edits can be by using velocity instead of transitions. To this day, it remains my Roman Empire. That edit basically got me through COVID. It changed the trajectory of editing, and I’ve rewatched it an unhealthy number of times, but I don’t think I can disclose that number in print.
Honestly, I think edits are a more polished product than some movie trailers are at times. Hear me out: edits are able to quickly move through and combine the most important parts of a movie through rapid shots, while trailers have unnecessary, redundant dialogue and often spoil the movie. It’s not just my short attention span, I swear; movie trailers have gotten worse, and edits just keep getting more advanced. Sometimes, I even look up edits for a movie before I watch it just to check out the vibes the movie will bring. It is very important, however, not to get spoilers whilst enjoying edits. This has happened to me far too many times when I get excited about the first season of a show, look up edits, and find one that reveals the whole plot and the character that dies tragically halfway through the show.
In the new world of global politics and diplomacy taking place directly through social media platforms like Instagram and X, edit makers have more power than ever. Edits of TV shows, movies, or inspirational speeches can affect someone’s psyche so significantly that their entire mood for the day changes. Edits give power back to the people, just like journalism used to.