5 Surprising Truths About Storytelling I Learned From a 40-Hour Film Editing Masterclass

Written by Mathieu Seguin

We were editing our first Scriptfest Season 1 film Wherever the Wind Blows. We shot this on a Sony A7S III with an anamorphic adapter (1.33x squeeze) to get that cinematic 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Crucially, we shot everything at 60 frames per second, giving us hyper-real movement and the ability to manipulate time in the edit without losing quality.

The 5-Day Climb

Day 1: Sanding the Wood

Monday was the "technical grind." Editing is like woodworking; before you can carve the details, you need to sand the wood smooth. We spent the day ingesting footage, organizing our bins (numbered folders are life-savers!), and creating our "Selects" timeline. We filtered the gold from the garbage, ensuring we only moved forward with usable material. We also applied pixel aspect ratio corrections to "de-squeeze" our anamorphic footage so everyone didn’t look stretched. It wasn't glamorous, but it was the foundation.

Day 2: The Skeleton & The Assembly

On Tuesday, we started building the structure. We pieced together the arrival of JC and the resurrection ritual. We played with "hinge shots"—using a shot at a 90-degree angle to bridge two shots that would otherwise break the 180-degree rule. We also realized how powerful 60fps can be; we used optical flow and AI speed warping to make high-speed hand movements feel like standard 24fps motion blur when needed, or slow them down to emphasize a moment.

Day 3: The Reality Check

Wednesday was the turning point. We had a watchable film... or so I thought. We brought in local filmmaking legend Frank Racicot to critique the cut. His feedback was a punch in the gut in the best way possible. He told me, "I didn't know the boy was dead".

As the director, I assumed everyone knew. But Frank pointed out that without the right visual cues, Dexter just looked like a sleeping boy. That feedback forced us to completely rethink the introduction to establish a "funeral tension" immediately rather than letting the audience guess.

Day 4: The Marathon & The "Tomato" Solution

Thursday was the technical marathon. We spent hours syncing the professional boom audio with the video clips. It was tedious work—sometimes the auto-align worked, sometimes the slates were mislabeled and we had to hunt for audio manually—but replacing the camera audio with the boom audio instantly made the project sound "like a movie".

We also wrestled with the "Tomato Story." There’s a long monologue by the grandmother about a gardener and his tomatoes. It drags the pacing down, but James (one of our participants) argued it provides necessary contrast to the chaos. So, I created a "tomatoes select" timeline to try and save it with a montage of footage from my own mother's garden.

Day 5: The Final Polish & Special Guests

Note: This section summarizes the events of the final day based on user input.

Friday was the home stretch. We took all the technical work from the previous four days—the synced audio, the stabilized shots, the restructured narrative—and focused on the final polish.

We invited some heavy hitters from the local film community to review our near-finished cut. Matt Poitras, a local filmmaker and director of the feature film The Bruce Peninsula, dropped by. Matt has an incredible eye for feature-length storytelling, and he gave us valuable notes on the flow and pacing of the final act.

Then, we had Jake Savard, a talented local filmmaker and animator, and Sara Gratton, a local stunt coordinator, join the session. Their perspectives were crucial—Jake’s animation background brings a specific eye for visual rhythm, while Sara’s stunt coordination background helped us look at the physicality of the characters, especially Dexter’s "feral" movements. Their notes were really great and helped us tighten up the physical comedy and the visual effects planning for the ending.

By 6:00 PM Friday, we didn't just have a timeline; we had a film.

Lessons from the Trenches

1. The 90-Degree Axial Cut I touched on a technique inspired by Kurosawa: the 90-degree axial cut. If you are ever unsure where to place a camera or how to cut a scene, moving the camera exactly 90 degrees from your previous shot is almost always seamless. It keeps the geography clear while giving the eye something totally new. It allows the audience's brain to orbit around the subject without getting confused.

2. The Curse of Knowledge: Stay Open to Feedback The most valuable lesson came from Frank Raso’s feedback on Day 3. As the director and editor, I was too close to the material. I knew Dexter was dead; I wrote the script! But Frank Racitot, local filmmaker, watched the cut on Thursday and said, "I didn't know he was dead. I thought he was sleeping".

This taught me that we must remain open to new ideas because we lose our objectivity. It’s easy to assume the audience knows what we know, but often they don't. That simple insight forced us to restructure the entire opening to establish the context of a funeral immediately. If we hadn't been open to that "obvious" note, the emotional weight of the resurrection scene would have been lost.

3. Discipline is Freedom We logged on at 10:00 AM and didn't stop until 6:00 PM every day. It’s a mental game. But by committing to this schedule, we’ve done in five days what I couldn't do in two years. We proved that if you want to be a filmmaker, you just have to do the work. "Ease is the greatest threat to progress".

The Finish Line

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper, is resurrected by the living persons... which are killed on film but placed in a certain order and projected on screen come to life again like flowers in water".

We have resurrected Wherever the Wind Blows. It is no longer just footage on a drive; it is a story about life, death, and not messing with nature. Thank you to Rushi, James, Gagandeep, Larry, and our guests Frank, Matt, Jake, and Sara for joining me on this ride.

Now, don't you want to edit your film?