How To Edit A Documentary Like Johnny Harris

when it comes to documentaries on youtube there's a few that i quite find as captivating as those from johnny harris it seems like he's developed his own unique style that's reminiscent enough of traditional documentaries to feel familiar but unique enough in order to stand out from the crowd and today i'm going to show you how to get that same effect in your own video editing is the process of arranging the shots of a film it is general general but i got to be honest my original idea with this video was to do a deep dive

into the writing pacing and editing of what makes a johnny harris video itself but what i think might be a better use of your time is to just pull three tricks that johnny uses pretty consistently in his videos and show how you can immediately apply them to yours i've been reading through a lot of our comments recently and a lot of you seem to be wanting to level up your video editing game in 2022 as one of your big resolutions so without getting too much into the weeds i'm just gonna give you some really quick

gems that you can use to level up your video editing game so let's start out with the first one make still photos not boring documentaries can be really tough to edit because they come with their own set of unique challenges and one of those challenges is that at some point in time you're gonna need to throw up a still photo and that's boring now back in the day there's a documentarian who noticed just how boring it was to see a bunch of still photos one after another and decided to push in and reframe those photos

in real time during his documentaries to give some sort of life and energy this guy's name was ken burns and the effect that you're seeing now is literally named after him even in final cut pro this effect uses his name but if you ask me as revolutionary and important as this video effect was it's gotten kind of boring just because of how accessible it is it's time for version 2.0 and i think what johnny harris does in his videos is a really great compromise between taking it to the next level but not requiring too much

work and this is what it looks like super simple but super impactful and here's how you do it take your photo in premiere pro and then keyframe it in the final properly framed position about seven or eight frames from the very start then go back to the first frame and move it down a little bit it doesn't need to be a lot a good trick is to also increase the scale of your image so that even when it's shifted down it still fills the whole frame but it doesn't have to now this is what we

have already more interesting than just being static but here's where you really take it up a notch right click on the last keyframe and add an easy ease in and then click this little marker here so that you can drop down the graph view and pull this side out here so you get a really natural ramp down and this gives a really slow finish to the movement now we're also going to level this up even more by adding a gaussian blur searching your effects for gaussian blur and keyframe it to start blurry for me that's

about 30 and then end with no blur around the same time as your final keyframe here but the whole idea is that this gives the impression like it's coming up into view through a lens and makes it feel a little bit more tangible and real with very little work but to really finish it off you're going to want to also add in a ticking sound effect bonus points if you use the sound of an authentic old camera or projector to sell the idea that not only is this image moving in the real world as if

it's being shown to you but also the idea that what you're seeing is in the context of someone giving you a presentation which is essentially the idea of what a documentary is at its core number two match cut on text now the first tip was really simple and useful but if you're looking for an effect that's gonna make your friends jaws drop and have them call you up out of the blue and say whoa that was so cool how'd you do that i wish i could be like you you know smart and awesome if that's

the response that you're after then the second tip is probably what you're looking for basically this effect can be used when you're trying to convey a particular word or phrase and drive it home into the mind of your audience well it's actually a surprisingly easy effect that just takes a little bit of time to create the structure for basically you're creating a scenario where you have multiple pages of text visible in rapid succession but the same word or phrase is visible in the center the whole time all you're going to do is find a bunch

of examples of a single word or phrase on a page in the context of an entire paragraph or larger document this could be screenshots from something you found online official documents photos you've taken of pages in real life or you could even just cheat this by writing it all out yourself on a word or google doc and taking a screenshot just make sure the examples you have mix up where the word is actually located on the pages for example some closer to the center some more in the upper left or even ending a sentence just

so you get the context of this truly being found all over the place once you've got your examples line them up so that the central word or phrase you want to focus on is in the center of frame you can turn on safe margins so that you can easily see where exactly the center of frame is but it's way easier if you go show rulers and then click and drag from the edge of these rulers here and you'll get these lines that you can actually drop onto those exact center markers and now you can scope

out exactly where the center frame is now line up each of those examples to be in the same position for me for example i want the middle of the u to be in the center do this for every example and then the result is that you have chaos happening around the world that you want to focus on but a clear and consistent word that makes your brain go oh pattern focus on that a trick is to start out with the first few being about 8 frames in length and then slowly getting faster towards the end

building up speed and generating excitement and the cherry on top is the sound design where you can add little subtle ticks where your shot changes and now you have something like this but wait that doesn't look as nice as what i showed you at the beginning well what our first example had that this one doesn't is actually our third tip texture but what exactly does that mean well johnny style is absolutely influenced by old school photojournalism and one of the things that's really central to the core of that style is that everything is analog it's

in the real world it's tactile it has texture the way you do that is by taking these digital representations and making them feel tangible we already covered this a little bit with the first tip but you can see other examples of this in his work with things like lens flares accompanying transitions whenever a map or an image appears there's not just a plain color surface there's always texture associated with it maybe it's the bumpy old wrinkled paper of a map or the wood grain of a table or even the sound of a staticy voiceover that

lets you know it's an old school recording the bottom line of whether it's visual auditory or tactile it's the idea of infusing physicality into your work and at motion array we have a lot of options available for you to download texture assets that are both still frame and moving light leaks to replicate that old school feeling during a transition or lo-fi audio imperfections that give an old-timey feel to your recordings and applying them is super easy the most you'll have to do is place your texture on top of your footage and then select a blend

mode like multiply or screen which is exactly what i did here for our match cut text on the page but i also added some extra custom texture i nested everything that i did and i duplicated that layer then i added a camera blur and created a circular mask and then inverted it so that the edges of the frame would start to get blurred out giving it a more 3d realistic feel and doing that with the texture nested inside makes it so that the texture actually reacts to the blurring making it feel even more realistic and

like you can actually reach out and touch it guys that's just been three quick tips to help you get a little bit closer to that johnny harris style of filmmaking now look i want to make it clear that i don't think that you can actually replicate a creator style just by taking a couple little tricks here and there but i hope that this process can show you that one of the best ways to grow as a video editor is to take an existing creator style find one or two elements that you want to try to

replicate and then try to reverse engineer it for yourself some of these effects you'll find that you really resonate with and others you don't take the ones that you like and start to try to incorporate them into your own videos and slowly you'll start to see them morph and change until you see your own personal style developing but guys let me know if you found this video helpful by smashing that like button and let me know in the comments if there's another creator whose style you'd want me to look at in the future guys that's

it for me thank you so much for watching and i can't wait to see you in the next video [Music]