Role: editor.
Working at B&S since: February 2018.
What is your favorite YouTube channel? Kurzgesagt. As they say themselves: ‘We try to explain our universe and existence one video at a time’.
What does your life as an editor look like?
“My role starts when the sketches have been made and the film is being recorded. The illustrator sits at the whiteboard with the camera hanging above it, I watch along on the laptop. It is nice if someone can watch in real time what the drawings look like on the screen and can help think about how they can best be constructed.
With animating, for example, it can be handy to make a certain drawing first. Suppose you want a person to have a ball in his hand and throw it. Then it is better if the artist draws the figure and the ball separately from each other. This way I can edit the ball in the hands of the person, but also let it fly away. In the meantime, I also keep an eye on whether it’s lunchtime already. As a illustrator you can lose yourself completely in your work and not notice your rumbling stomach.’
Since corona we also make digital videos, does that make your work very different?
‘Yes, the draftsman then sends a Photoshop file with all the sketches, which I assemble myself. It is therefore not live recorded and you do not see a hand drawing in the video. I first call the illustrator: what ideas did you have for this? Are there possibilities to incorporate some nice animations into it? So you no longer have to go to the office to film. Less fun together, though.
With videos that are actually drawn on a whiteboard, you sometimes have up to eight hours of material. Then you first spend a long time removing everything that does not belong in the film, such as parts that have been drawn incorrectly. When I work with digital drawings, they are already perfect and I no longer have to clean up, I can immediately start playing with the structure of the drawings and animations.’
Was this something you were already working on before B&S?
‘I used to make stop-motion films with Lego blocks. I came across Bord&Stift through our illustrator Theo. I was only 20 years old and thought the idea of making money doing something I really liked was pretty crazy. Not many people that age do that. At Bord&Stift you don’t have to be able to do something perfectly, you can learn it. Moreover, the workplace is super cozy, which was an extra gift.’
What do you like about your job?
‘Videos in which a world is built, such as a neighborhood in a city, are the most fun to work on. Or videos for, for example, the NS, which can be quite detailed and technical. And sustainability is a topic I am interested in.”
That’s something you also do outside of B&S, isn’t it?
‘Yes, I’m studying Sustainable business and innovation; how you can make companies and organizations more sustainable through innovation. I am currently working on my master’s thesis. I also have a YouTube channel, for which I make videos about sustainability topics, such as deforestation of the Amazon. There are quite a few educational videos about space or history, but there are fewer attractive informative videos about sustainability. It does me good when I see that a video has been viewed 20,000 times.’
Read also the interview with Merel:
‘Beautiful things are created in freedom and trust’
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