This One Editing Technique Can Drastically Improve Your Videos

This technique needs no plugins, no effects, and no extra footage. It's about a hundred years old, it's called the Kuleshov Effect, and honestly, a story is truly created in the editing room. You could have the prettiest shots in the world, but without the right sequencing it just becomes a b-roll montage.

The experiment behind it

The Kuleshov Effect is the idea that viewers pull more meaning from two shots next to each other than from either shot on its own. Kuleshov showed a film with the exact same neutral-faced shot of a man cut against three different things: a bowl of soup, a coffin with a little girl, and a woman. The audience raved about the acting, swearing they saw hunger, then grief, then desire. Except it was the same face every single time. The story came entirely from what he placed right after that close-up.

How a mentor of mine uses it

I was introduced to this by my friend and mentor Brandon Li, who uses it all the time in his travel films. There's a scene of a Chinese chess match: an older man, another guy in a coat, a piece slammed down, one man laughing like he made a killer move, and the old man looking defeated. Except that scene never actually happened. Those two men weren't even playing each other, the person who makes the move is wearing a dark blue shirt that neither of them has on. Brandon grabbed a bunch of shots of different games and chose specific moments, a character, an assisting shot, and a reaction, to build a story about South Korea's competitive society. The laughing guy was probably laughing at something else, and the old man probably always makes that face.

It works for your videos too

You might be thinking you just make home videos or YouTube videos, and this works for those just as well. Filming your family on a trip? Take a shot of your loved one smiling, or even a neutral face, then cut to whatever you want the viewer to think they're looking at, even if you shot it on a totally different day. In a video I made for a buddy's family, the baby didn't care about the trees at all and was just staring at the cameraman's hand waving off to the side, but placed right, it tells the story you want.

Gear upgrades make your videos look better. This makes them mean more, and that's the difference your audience actually feels. Try it in your next video and see what happens.