I learned from a good friend that whenever there is a decision to make, an action to take, there are always three options. I tend to live in a world of either/or. If someone makes an offer, I can say yes or no. If someone shares a fact with me, it is true or false. We are either running behind schedule for the filming day or ahead of schedule. You get the idea.
This week, I was working on organizing a pre-edit for a fellow editor. As I synced the footage with the sound mixer’s clean audio, there was a particular section where the controlled microphone audio turned into the camera mic’s muddy audio. No separate recording, nothing to sync with. In an either/or mindset, I would stop there—or continue on with the camera audio anyway.
If I continue on without syncing the audio, I could create even more of a headache for the fellow editor, who now has to manually sync many clips rather than the whole take. If I stop, I put them further behind by not making any progress.
There are, of course, other options. I could contact the editor and ask about where the audio files might be and try to track them down. This is a good option if they are available, but maybe not if they’re extremely busy and counting on me to make progress without them. I could hunt the audio down myself, but that might create more communication problems with the client. I could also continue on with everything else, but leave those takes mostly intact. That way they’re in the right place in the edit, but still easy to sync whenever the audio becomes available.
The world is almost always nuanced, frustratingly so. It can make everything seem less intelligible, when all I want is clarity. That’s the beauty of three options.
As my friend put it, “There are always at least three options, and the third option often unlocks many more options.” When I can take a moment and think about a problem on set or an editing problem in this way, it encourages me to expand what’s possible. I can break out of routine habits of seeing and explore the depth of what is in front of me.