Here is my hot take: Not everything needs an aesthetically pleasing, “Cold” edit that goes “Hard ASF🔥🔥”.
Recently, as ironic as it is, I found myself judgmentally scrolling through my fyp, thinking how insanely ridiculous and irrelevant the genre of short-form content truly is. However, there was one recurring theme of reels that kept popping into my feed, and I noticed they always bear millions of likes, a crazy number of shares, and several bubbles of familiar profiles floating in the bottom corner.
The last few years have been quite outstanding when it comes to cinema, and a lot of films with stunning, surreal visuals, twisted storylines and immaculate direction have been taking the spotlight. From movies like Dennis Villeneuve’s “Dune”, to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”, the film industry has been pumping out movies on a different level, and as great as they are as films, it seems that their fan following never fails to betray their work of art.
In a testament to this, my FYP has been filled with viral reels of overedited clips layered with pop culture songs taken out of context and finally hammered with irrelevant words of huge attention-seeking fonts to finally evolve into what one calls a “tuff edit” in today’s world. Frankly, I see the appeal; these edits are quite a vibe, they look and feel theatrical, and the overediting does make you feel like this identifies as a “Likeable Reel”.
However, as appealing as they look, to me, they are plain disappointing.
The greatest injustice you could do to a work of art as good as these films that run for hours and evoke such powerful identities of atmosphere and world-building is to completely erase any originality that the artists have worked tirelessly to achieve, and to finally erase any meaning and uniqueness and reduce it to a generic, overloaded 30-second clip that could even be weaponised into an epilepsy attack.
To me, a world and its characters are to be experienced and appreciated the way they were intended to be, either by their authors who tenaciously imagine a world built upon pages and bound in spines or by directors who view the story through the lens of their cameras as they build a palpable, fictitious world, designed to be watched on an aspect ratio greater than 9:16.
With that, I would like to assert that the greatest betrayal of an artist’s work may come from its fanatics themselves, and in a world full of mindless content, I don’t believe we need more 30-second edits of an already heavily edited 2-hour epic.