Editing has its ups and downs, that’s just the nature of the business, and anyone with significant experience under their belt will be able to rattle off a laundry list of difficult and frustrating projects that they’ve worked on but would rather just forget about entirely. I’ve had my own fair share of videos like that, but this documentary - edited for my good friend Joseph Pisenti (creator of the popular YouTube channel Real Life Lore) - was the complete polar opposite working experience. In the fall of 2020, Joe headed out to the Salton Sea community in southern California to start work on a special film that would tell the sad story of how the once thriving resort town fell into ruin. When he returned to Texas, he had about six hours of raw footage that we needed to sculpt into a thirty-five minute documentary, and it made for a curious edit because although Joe’s narration was locked, the actual script when it came to the footage was much looser. It was very much a story that would really need to be found within the edit - in other words, a puzzle that didn’t have a strict guide. However, this is actually one of my favorite ways to cut.

Sticking to rigorous pre-planning has its benefits within an edit, especially when working on a short post-production timeline, but given the right amount of time, I’ve always cherished the opportunity to do any sort of experimenting - going off on weird tangents with individual sequences and trying odd ideas just for the fun of it. These are the times when editing can really prove itself to be the transformative tool that it is. Over a four-week edit, Joe and I really played around with the narrative presented here, giving it more of a dramatic edge than what was initially scripted, and I think it payed off and helped grant the video a real dynamic quality that works well. Ghost Towns: The Lake with 100 Million Skeletons can be found exclusively on the educational streaming service Nebula.