Inside Feed Dump

I truly love doing Feed Dump. Not only does it inspire a variety of ridiculous jokes — “are you guys free to Dump with me?”, “I’ll dump a feed today!”, “Woah, that Dump got out of hand…”, etc, etc — it’s a fun show to both be in and edit. Since this Loading Time does a pretty good job of covering the physical dumping (he he), I’m devoting this week’s column to the art of digital dumping, aka, actually editing the episode.

In order to help Graham out with his workload I try to edit Feed Dump as often as I can. After importing all the footage I watch it (usually about 40 minutes worth), chopping out the good bits and assembling a rough cut as I go. At this point I go back again and make a proper cut by looking at the waveforms of the footage to see exactly where lines begin and end to remove any unnecessary dead air. Editing like this makes the show feel really snappy and quick, and usually shortens my rough cut by a good 30 to 40 seconds.

At this point if the episode is still running long (i.e. anything over 6 and a half minutes) I bring in Graham and get him to watch it with me. This helps us identify stuff that can either be isolated and put up as an episode of Feed Dump rejected (which is only ever rejected for time), and any bits that don’t quite work, which get left on the proverbial cutting room floor. After the episode is looking good it gets kicked over to Graham, who renders the title cards in Adobe After Effects, then outputs a final product and sends it off to The Escapist. Voila, a Feed Dump is born.

And now, the weekly Loading Time trivia dump!

• I’ve never hosted a Feed Dump with James. Our schedules haven’t lined up in over a year. That is crazy.
• The wearing of hats in Feed Dump has inspired the incredible “Hat Market” inside joke. Created by LRR forum member JackSlack, the weekly hat reports contain charts, graphs and honestly, probably have more thought than we put into the episodes of Feed Dump that inspire it. I’ve worn hats several times while filming just to screw with the hat market. If you’re interested, check it out here.
• The weekly “making up a different word that sounds like news, but isn’t” wasn’t intended to be a running joke. Graham said “nudes” as a joke in the first episode and then realized he had to roll with it. Looking back, this may not have been well thought out.