What JPEGMAFIA teaches me about editing

Hey, I wanted to add further links to support Sunday’s video drop, and give another specific way I view Peggy and what his work tells me about my own practice.

Listen to the JPEGMAFIA video on the bus without draining your data (mp3 below)

As a video editor I’ve always found Peggy’s work to be a really interesting example of someone who’s developed a unique relationship with their software, and who shows us how that relationship can come to shape the work.

What I personally love about editing is the huge palate of creative tools the software offers, and the sense of freedom you have to build in different ways when you start to learn them. I started video editing as a teenager, making skate parts for my friends, and my skills developed as I imagined certain things I wanted to do, then opened up the software to figure out how.

I’m the kind of learner who works with trial and error, and banging my head against a problem in order to figure a way to do it. This is usually not the quickest way to solve problems, or the most linear, but the range of tools creative software offers now allows for that kind of process to work I think, because there’s usually multiple ways you can envision to solve any one problem.

The particular ways you solve problems and build that relationship with the tools, can start to inform your style, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed about my own learning journey with this stuff, and what I hear deeply in JPEGMAFIA’s work. The guy has obviously spent so much time building a specific way he uses his tools, and at mastery level now, he’s able to manipulate the sound in a way that’s so uniquely his own because of it.

To be honest I kept Sunday’s video short because I’ve been trying to make time to build my own music project and make the video about that too. The video and a little of that music will be out in a couple of weeks, so keep an eye for that in the inbox if you’re interested. But yeah, I wanted to make a full Peggy link drop here for those who might be interested.

Cheers for checking this out,

Will