The Perfectionist's Downfall

By Anne McCarthy

The biggest thing I learned about myself through this project is that I am a perfectionist, which compromises my ability to feel satisfied with the end result no matter how much work I put into it.

My role was editing the video, which became frustrating quickly. Every clip I watched, I analyzed to get the right timing and body movements, but it became more difficult to decide which clip to use because they were not perfect in my eyes. Something that I was not anticipating being a challenge, and something that I have never personally edited, was trying to match the lip syncing to the audio. It was more challenging, too, because the audio we used on set was the original, not the audio by Avery and Sarah.

The fast pace and short clips used by the original editor was a HUGE challenge that I have never faced in editing, which made it even more upsetting when clips began to glitch because going back and re-doing this project would have been hours and hours and hours of more work.

The skill behind the original video is beyond words for me, but what I realized is that no matter how much time I put into the editing, I see all the mistakes, all the imperfections, and it is incredibly difficult for me to have pride in this or be satisfied with the work I did even though I know some things are out of my control like if we cannot reshoot, timing isn’t perfect, or clips in the video were glitching. The glitching is something that has never happened to me in all times of editing, and that is the most aggravating part of this is that this imperfection is completely out of my hands.

This experience gives me a whole new respect and outlook on K-pop music videos because of how time consuming a 3-4 minute video can be, especially one where each clip is around 1 second, and they may have limited clips to work with or if something goes wrong its time and effort.